A CRISIS OF LEADERSHIP? ADRIAN MORGAN, EDITOR FAMILY SECURITY MATTERS
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.7055/pub_detail.asp
A CRISIS OF LEADERSHIP?
On Friday, in the State Dining Room at the White House, President Barack Obama hosted an iftar dinner for Muslim guests. The tradition of holding iftar dinners at the White House – where a meal is eaten after the dawn to dusk fast that Muslims make during Ramadan – began under the Clintons. The person who initiated these meals in 1996 and advised Hillary Clinton on subsequent White House iftar dinners was Abdurahman Alamoudi, who would later be jailed for 23 years after he admitted terrorism charges. This year’s White House iftar dinner, held on Friday 13, could prove to be extremely unlucky for the president.
Two days before the meal, the president gave a Ramadan speech in which his chosen words were inaccurate. He stated that: “Islam has always been in America.†As discussed here on FSM, there is no factual evidence to support such a claim.
On Friday evening, President Obama addressed guests that included Keith Ellison, John Conyers and also, as Frank Gaffney reported, the White House Muslim adviser and sharia-supporting Dalia Mogahed, as well as Ingrid Mattson who is head of Muslim Brotherhood front group ISNA, and Salam Al-Marayati who is president of the Muslim Public Affairs Council, which also began as an American branch of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood.
The full text of the iftar dinner address by President Obama can be found here. Comments made within this speech have shocked and outraged Americans. These comments showed that he was supportive of the “right†of Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf to build a mosque near the site of Ground Zero. In his preprandial address to around 120 guests, Obama said:
“Recently, attention has been focused on the construction of mosques in certain communities – particularly New York. Now, we must all recognize and respect the sensitivities surrounding the development of Lower Manhattan. The 9/11 attacks were a deeply traumatic event for our country. And the pain and the experience of suffering by those who lost loved ones is just unimaginable. So I understand the emotions that this issue engenders. And Ground Zero is, indeed, hallowed ground.
But let me be clear. As a citizen, and as President, I believe that Muslims have the same right to practice their religion as everyone else in this country. (Applause.) And that includes the right to build a place of worship and a community center on private property in Lower Manhattan, in accordance with local laws and ordinances. This is America. And our commitment to religious freedom must be unshakeable. The principle that people of all faiths are welcome in this country and that they will not be treated differently by their government is essential to who we are. The writ of the Founders must endure.â€
The contentious issues of Rauf’s intentions to build a mosque are nothing to do with whether or not Muslims have any “right†to build a mosque. The problematic issue is one of where such a mosque is built. Imam Rauf and his wife Daisy Khan have shown no respect or consideration for the victims of 9/11. Khan told relatives of 9/11 victims that a mosque at Ground Zero would provide “much needed party space and much needed venue space.†After 9/11, Rauf himself had said of 9/11 that
“United States policies were an accessory to the crime that happened…. Because we have been accessory to a lot of innocent lives dying in the world. In fact, in the most direct sense, Osama bin Laden is made in the USA.â€
On Tuesday August 10 Philip J. Crowley, the State Department Press Secretary, had confirmed during a question and answer session that Rauf had been funded to go abroad to act as an emissary of the United States:
“Imam Feisal will be traveling to Qatar, Bahrain, and the UAE on a U.S. Government-sponsored trip to the Middle East. He will discuss Muslim life in America and religious tolerance. This is part of a program – and yesterday, I actually was in error. I attributed it to our ECA Bureau, Education and Cultural Affairs. It’s actually our International Information Programs – IIP, our office that handles this particular program.
We have about 1,200 of these kinds of programs every year, sending experts on all fields overseas. Last year, we had 52 trips that were specifically focused on religious – promoting religious tolerance. We will expect to have roughly the same number of programs this year. For Imam Feisal, this will be his third trip under this program. In 2007, he visited Bahrain, Morocco, the UAE and Qatar. And earlier this year in January, he also visited Egypt. So we have a long-term relationship with him. His work on tolerance and religious diversity is well-known and he brings a moderate perspective to foreign audiences on what it’s like to be a practicing Muslim in the United States. And our discussions with him about taking this trip preceded the current debate in New York over the center.â€
The comments by the president on Friday were seen by many people as condoning the construction of the mosque. By pretending that the construction of the mosque near Ground Zero was something he supported on grounds of “religious freedom†seemed disingenuous. In 2003 there were 90 mosques in New York City, serving the religious needs of 600,000 to 800,000 Muslims. There are now around 100 mosques. The political dimensions of Imam Rauf’s mission to build a mosque on the disused Burlington Coat Factory site (a building damaged by fuselage from one of the planes that flew into the WTC) worry many people.
CNN produced a poll two days before Obama’s iftar dinner speech, in which it was claimed that almost 70 percent of Americans oppose the construction of the Ground Zero Mosque, and 29 percent favor it. The full results of the poll can be viewed here (pdf document).
The day before the CNN poll was released, a Marist poll showed that New York’s formerly popular mayor Michael Bloomberg, who has been a strong advocate for the Park51 mosque, had his approval ratings drop to below 50 percent for the first time. The same poll showed that of New Yorkers, 53 percent opposed the construction of the mosque, 34 percent approved and 13 percent were unsure.
Debra Burlingame, co-founder of 9/11 Families for a Safe and Strong America has condemned the Iftar Dinner speech. She wrote that
Barack Obama has abandoned America at the place where America’s heart was broken nine years ago, and where her true values were on display for all to see. Since that dark day, Americans have been asked to bear the burden of defending those values, again and again and again. Now this president declares that the victims of 9/11 and their families must bear another burden. We must stand silent at the last place in America where 9/11 is still remembered with reverence or risk being called religious bigots.
We are stunned by the president’s willingness to disregard what Americans should be proud of: our enduring generosity to others on 9/11–a day when human decency triumphed over human depravity. On that day, when 3,000 of our fellow human beings were killed in barbaric act of raw religious intolerance unlike this country had ever seen, Americans did not turn outward with hatred or violence, we turned to each other, armed with nothing more than American flags and countless acts of kindness. In a breathtakingly inappropriate setting, the president has chosen to declare our memories of 9/11 obsolete and the sanctity of Ground Zero finished. No one who has lived this history and felt the sting of our country’s loss that day can truly believe that putting our families through more wrenching heartache can be an act of peace.
On Saturday Sarah Palin, who had previously condemned the choice of location for the “Park51 Mosque†used her Facebook page to ask some direct questions of the president:
Mr. President, should they or should they not build a mosque steps away from where radical Islamists killed 3000 people? Please tell us your position. We all know that they have the right to do it, but should they? And, no, this is not above your pay grade. If those who wish to build this Ground Zero mosque are sincerely interested in encouraging positive “cross-cultural engagement” and dialogue to show a moderate and tolerant face of Islam, then why haven’t they recognized that the decision to build a mosque at this particular location is doing just the opposite? Mr. President, why aren’t you encouraging the mosque developers to accept Governor Paterson’s generous offer of assistance in finding a new location for the mosque on state land if they move it away from Ground Zero? Why haven’t they jumped at this offer? Why are they apparently so set on building a mosque steps from what you have described, in agreement with me, as “hallowed ground”? I believe these are legitimate questions to ask.
Less than 24 hours after the message first went online, 16,900 people confirmed that they “liked†the statement.
The omens were already there for all to see, including the president and his speech-writers, and they indicated that any open support of the mosque would not be a wise political move. But in his iftar dinner speech, President Obama once again seemed to care more that he should appear in a positive light in Muslim nations. The speech was translated into three languages – Arabic and Persian, and also Russian (pdf documents). Muslim “advocacy†organizations in America may have been impressed, and perhaps many Muslims too, by the apparent endorsement by the president for the construction of a mosque near Ground Zero.
However, by invoking the Founding Fathers to declare the “right†of the backers of the mosque to construct a religious building, whose proposed imam is already in receipt of U.S. government funding, the president came close to denigrating another of the Founding Fathers’ rules: the “Establishment Clause†in the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights.
The speech on Friday was delivered by the president with force and passion – he sounded angry at the thought that people could object to the “right†of a mosque to be built anywhere in America, even in the close vicinity of what for many is seen as a sign of the intolerance of Islam. Once again, the president presented a view of Islam that any student of its history could rip apart with ease:
“Al Qaeda’s cause is not Islam – it’s a gross distortion of Islam.â€
And
“Muslim American clerics have spoken out against terror and extremism, reaffirming that Islam teaches that one must save human life, not take it.â€
Islam is a political ideology that has always used violence to achieve its ends, from the time of the prophet’s caravan raids (Sura 8 of the Koran) to when Mohammed ordered the decapitation of the entire male population of the Jewish Banu Qurayzah tribe at Medina (according to Ibn Ishaq, Sira 5), and to the conversion by the sword that is always denied by Islam’s dissemblers and apologists. Few Muslims like to admit that for two years after Mohammed’s death there was widespread apostasy among the groups of people who had become conquered by Islam. From 632 to 633 AD, the first Caliph Abu Bakr, father of Mohammed’s child-bride Aisha, engaged in what was known as the Ridda Wars (Apostasy Wars) to force those Arabic rulers who had abandoned Islam to once again submit to the religion whose name, appropriately enough, means “submission.â€
Obama is right to suggest that everyone has a right to practice their faith freely, and Muslims must have rights to be allowed to practice their religion (though not to practice sharia punishments such as flogging, decapitating and stoning). But by apparently siding with an imam who seems to have no concern for the relatives of 9/11, he made a grand political faux pas.
On Saturday, while he was in Panama City, Florida, the president had to qualify his statement, following the outcry that it had provoked. He said:
“I was not commenting and I will not comment on the wisdom of making the decision to put a mosque there. I was commenting very specifically on the right people have that dates back to our founding. That’s what our country is about.â€
He also said on Saturday that:
“I think it’s very important, as difficult as some of these issues are, that we stay focused on who we are as a people and what our values are all about.â€
Perhaps, when he has made efforts to change even NASA’s role, according to its administrator Charles Bolden, to one of providing Muslim outreach work, the president himself is the one who has not focused on “who we are as a people.†In July, Bolden said that: “perhaps foremost, he (Obama) wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science … and math and engineering.â€
With America in a financial crisis and with its borders insecure and its people anxious, it seems the president has spent time reassuring Muslim nations that America is “tolerant,†rather than reassuring American citizens that their concerns and feelings are to be taken into consideration.
What the president has effectively done by apparently back-tracking on his statements, one day after he made them, has further demonstrated a lack of purpose and will. It is a sign of weakness to make a bold statement one day and on the next day to apparently back down.
This year’s White House iftar dinner appears to have seriously damaged the president’s credibility. Iftar dinners in the White House did not originate from a person with the most noble of intentions. The man who organized the first iftar dinner – Abdurahman Alamoudi – was a Muslim Brotherhood supporter who went on to become an active terrorist. In Lafayette Park in October 2000, Alamoudi had declared that he was a supporter of Hamas and Hezbollah. When, in 1996, Alamoudi had initiated the first iftar dinner in the White House he knew exactly what he thought of America and how America should be changed.
In Illinois, in the same year that he initiated White House iftar dinners, at a speech at the Islamic Society of Palestine convention, Abdurahman Alamoudi had said:
“Muslims sooner or later will be the moral leadership of America. It depends on me and you. Either we do it now or we do it after a hundred years, but this country will become a Muslim country. And I think if we are outside this country, we can say, “Oh, Allah, destroy America.†But once we are here, our mission in this country is to change it.â€
The words of the president’s speech-writer, though designed to cause harmony, have sounded to many as if the dystopian future presented in Alamoudi’s 1996 speech is becoming a reality. The president appears (unwittingly, perhaps) to have taken sides against the families of the 9/11 victims. He additionally appears to be supporting Imam Rauf, a man who is already on the government payroll and who has previously suggested that America had been an accessory to 9/11.
In a time of economic crisis, people look to their president for leadership, for words that will inspire, give hope and, more importantly, unite the nation. Napoleon Bonaparte once suggested that “A leader is a dealer in hope.†The president’s speeches made over the last few days have only sown division and anxiety. The floundering attempts to extricate himself from this situation could be seen as the outward signs of a president in the first throes of political suicide.
The Editor, Family Security Matters.
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