RUTHFULLY YOURS

NYTIMES COLUMN ON THE “MOSLEM SPIRITUAL PROJECT” AT GROUND ZERO….SEE COMMENTS ON THIS OUTRAGE

Posted By Ruth King on December 10th, 2009

WHO IS IMAM RAUF? HERE IS AN IMPORTANT ANSWER FROM AN E-PAL WHO KNOWS AND IS ULTRARELIABLE:

“Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf a “moderate” Muslims, leading an Islamic project by Ground Zero? What a dreadful joke! A real travesty!

Below are few of Imam Rauf infamous quotes. Many statements were made at the Chautauqua Institution few years ago.

· The US and the West must acknowledge the harm they have done to Muslims before terrorism can end, says an Islamic cleric invited to Sydney by Premier Bob Carr.

· Speaking from his New York mosque, Imam Feisal said the West had to understand the terrorists’ point of view.

· Much of the oppression and conflict in modern Muslim countries stems from relatively new Western ideas such as nationalism. We never had the concepts of religious nationalism and in my opinion they are evil concepts. He said.

· The Islamic method of waging war is not to kill innocent civilians. But it was Christians in World War II who bombed civilians in Dresden and Hiroshima, neither of which were military targets.

· One issue that the American Muslim community is going through is similar to what the American Jewish community experienced 70 to 100 years ago and the American Catholic community went through 100 to 150 years ago.” ”They were immigrants not accepted and considered a threat.

· Shari’a law has a set of principals of justice of rule of law of protection of the weak and of religious minorities and of freedom of religious conscience. “These are all issues that flow from fundamental texts in the Quran, the teachings of the Prophet and the writings of the most important jurist of Islamic thought”.

· With regard to the role of women and education of women in most Muslim countries women are very active and involved, Rauf said. Misogyny exists primarily in the tribal countries of the Arabian Peninsula.

· The task of shaping a state based on these two principles (Love the Lord G-d and love your neighbor) is in fact what an Islamic state is…even the American Declaration of Independence draws much from those two principles…Seven centuries before the Declaration of Independence was written Shari’a Law was intended to protect life, religion, property, family and mental well being. “This is why I assert that America is in fact a Shari’a compliant state”. He said.

Imam Rauf advocates Sharia Law in the US. In a Washington Post article about a year ago, he defended the Archbishop of Canterbury for the establishment of (family courts) Sharia.

Does Joy Levitt, the executive director of the Jewish Community Center understand the pernicious political ideology of Islam and the implication of the deceitful language of Imam Rauf to think that Rauf indeed advocates “pluralism and tolerance’ forever? What lesson did America learn if Imam Rauf is allowed to be in charge of Islamic center right at Ground Zero? How much more treacherous garbage should we bear due topolitical correctness?! ”

December 9, 2009 NY Times

Muslim Prayers Fuel Spiritual Rebuilding Project by Ground Zero
By RALPH BLUMENTHAL and SHARAF MOWJOOD

On that still-quiet Tuesday morning, the sales staff was in a basement room eating breakfast, waiting to open the doors to the first shoppers at 10 a.m.

There was no immediate sign of the fiery cataclysm that erupted overhead starting at 8:46. But out of a baby-blue sky suddenly stained with smoke, a plane’s landing-gear assembly the size of a World War II torpedo crashed through the roof and down through two empty selling floors of the Burlington Coat Factory.

The Sept. 11, 2001, attack killed 2,752 people downtown and doomed the five-story building at 45 Park Place, two blocks north of the World Trade Center. The store remained abandoned for the next eight years, one of the last undeveloped downtown properties damaged in the attack.

But for months now, out of the public eye, an iron gate rises every Friday afternoon, and with the outside rumblings of construction at ground zero as a backdrop, hundreds of Muslims crowd inside, facing Mecca in prayer and listening to their imam read in Arabic from the Koran.

The building, offering retail space for lease, has no sign that hints at its use as a Muslim prayer space, and the worshipers are out in an hour. But these modest beginnings point to a far grander vision: an Islamic cultural, educational and recreational center near the city’s most hallowed piece of land.

It would stand as one of ground zero’s more unexpected and striking neighbors. But the location was precisely a key selling point for the group of Muslims who bought the building in July.

“New York is the capital of the world, and this location close to 9/11 is iconic,” Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, 61, the cleric leading the project, a longtime critic of radical Islamists, said in a series of interviews in which he and his partners outlined their plans for the first time.

A presence so close to the World Trade Center, “where a piece of the wreckage fell,” Imam Feisal added, “sends the opposite statement to what happened on 9/11.”

“We want to push back against the extremists,” he said.

As a Sufi, the imam follows a path of Islam focused more on spiritual wisdom than strict ritual, and as a bridge builder, he is sometimes focused more on cultivating relations with those outside his faith than within it.

Although organizers have sought to avoid publicizing their project because they say plans are too preliminary, it has drawn early encouragement from city officials and the surrounding neighborhood.

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said through a spokesman that Imam Feisal told him of the project last September at a celebration to observe the end of Ramadan. As for whether Mr. Bloomberg supported it, the spokesman, Andrew Brent, said, “If it’s legal, the building owners have a right to do what they want.”

The mayor’s director of the Office of Immigrant Affairs, Fatima Shama, went further. “We as New York Muslims have as much of a commitment to rebuilding New York as anybody,” Ms. Shama said. Imam Feisal’s wife, Daisy Khan, serves on an advisory team for the National September 11 Memorial and Museum, and Lynn Rasic, a spokeswoman for the memorial, said, “The idea of a cultural center that strengthens ties between Muslims and people of all faiths and backgrounds is positive.”

Those who have worked with him say if anyone can pull off what many regard to be a delicate project, it would be Imam Feisal, whom they described as having built a career preaching tolerance and interfaith understanding.

“He subscribes to my credo: ‘live and let live,’ ” said Rabbi Arthur Schneier, spiritual leader of Park East Synagogue on East 67th Street.

Another supporter of Imam Feisal, Joan Brown Campbell, director of the department of religion at the Chautauqua Institution in upstate New York and former general secretary of the National Council of Churches of Christ U.S.A., acknowledged the possibility of a backlash from those opposed to a Muslim presence at ground zero.

But, she added: “Building so close is owning the tragedy. It’s a way of saying: ‘This is something done by people who call themselves Muslims. We want to be here to repair the breach, as the Bible says.’ ”

The F.B.I. said Imam Feisal had helped agents reach out to the Muslim population after Sept. 11. “We’ve had positive interactions with him in the past,” said an agency spokesman, Richard Kolk. Alice Hoagland of Las Gatos, Calif., whose son, Mark Bingham, was killed in the hijacked plane that crashed in Pennsylvania, said, “It’s quite a bold step buying a piece of land adjacent to ground zero,” but she said she considered plans for the site “a noble effort.”

On a recent Friday, worshipers in the old Burlington Coat Factory heard Imam Feisal’s call for spiritual purity during the time of the hajj, the annual pilgrimage to Mecca.

“We like Imam Feisal, the way he presents the philosophy of the true Islam that I call it,” said one of the congregants, Mohammed Abdullah, an investment banker who traveled from Washington for the service.

The location is not designated a mosque, but rather an overflow prayer space for another mosque, Al Farah at 245 West Broadway in TriBeCa, where Imam Feisal is the spiritual leader.

Built in 1923, the building at 45 Park Place was bought by Sy Syms, the discount retailer, and a partner, Irving Pomerantz, in 1968, and became one of the early Syms stores. The store closed in 1990, the partners parted ways, and the Pomerantz family then leased the building to the Burlington Coat Factory.

On Sept. 11, the store, with 80 employees, was one of 250 Burlington outlets nationwide owned by the Milstein family. That morning, recalled Stephen Milstein, the company’s former general manager and vice president, the staff was in the basement when a piece of a plane plunged through the roof, either from American Airlines Flight 11 crashing into the north tower at 8:46 a.m., or United Airlines Flight 175 crashing into the south tower at 9:03.

Kukiko Mitani, whose husband, Stephen Pomerantz, owned the building at the time, tried to sell it for years, at one time asking $18 million. But when the recession hit, she sold it in July to a real estate investment firm, Soho Properties, for $4.85 million in cash, records show. One of the investors was the Cordoba Initiative, an interfaith group founded by Imam Feisal.

“It’s really to provide a place of peace, a place of services and solutions for the community which is always looking for interfaith dialogue,” said Sharif El-Gamal, chairman and chief executive of Soho Properties.

The patched-up roof was easily visible on a recent tour of the building, along with evidence of its sudden evacuation — food bags still in a fifth-floor staff refrigerator and, most eerily, a log sheet for the testing of the emergency alarm system that shows a sign-in signature for 9/11 but no sign-out.

Records kept by the city’s Department of Buildings show anonymous complaints for illegal construction and blocked exits at the site. Inspectors tried to check but were unable to gain access, so the complaints, though still open, were listed as “resolved” under city procedures, according to an agency spokeswoman, Carly Sullivan.

But worshipers are legally occupying the location once a week under temporary permits of assembly through December, Ms. Sullivan said.

With 50,000 square feet of air rights, Imam Feisal said, the location, with enough financing, could support an ambitious project of $150 million, akin to the Chautauqua Institution, the 92 Street Y or the Jewish Community Center.

Joy Levitt, executive director of the Jewish Community Center, said the group would be proud to be a model for Imam Feisal at ground zero. “For the J.C.C. to have partners in the Muslim community that share our vision of pluralism and tolerance would be great,” she said.

Mr. El-Gamal agreed. “What happened that day,” he said, “was not Islam.”

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