.... That means setting aside bombast and asking the imam questions born of the highest American ideals: individual dignity and pluralism of ideas.
• Will the swimming pool at Park51 be segregated between men and women at any time of the day or night? • May women lead congregational prayers any day of the week? • Will Jews and Christians, fellow People of the Book, be able to use the prayer sanctuary for their services just as Muslims share prayer space with Christians and Jews in the Pentagon?
.... • What will be taught about homosexuals? About agnostics? About atheists? About apostasy? • Where does one sign up for advance tickets to Salman Rushdie's lecture at Park51? [The Wall Street Journal] Read more
Islamic cleric behind Ground Zero mosque says U.S. has killed more innocent civilians than Al Qaeda The Islamic cleric behind plans for a mosque at Ground Zero in New York has claimed that the U.S. is worse than Al Qaeda. Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf said that America was more culpable than the terrorist organisation because U.S.-led sanctions were responsible for the death of half a million Iraqi children.
'We tend to forget, in the West, that the United States has more Muslim blood on its hands than Al Qaeda has on its hands of innocent non-Muslims,' he said. [MailOnline] Read more
Is 'Ground Zero mosque' debate fanning the flames? Some opponents of the Cordoba House project, the Islamic cultural centre and mosque planned near to the World Trade Center site, have coined jarring juxtapositions to press their point.
"Nazis don't have the right to put up a sign next to the Holocaust museum in Washington," former US House Speaker Newt Gingrich said. "We would never accept the Japanese putting up a site next to Pearl Harbor. There is no reason for us to accept a mosque next to the World Trade Center."
Radio presenter Rush Limbaugh compared the mosque with the idea of putting a Hindu shrine at the USS Arizona memorial at Pearl Harbor, later correcting himself to make clear he meant a Shinto shrine.
Those behind the Cordoba House project, such as Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, say they want to build something which would assist inter-faith understanding. But some are worried about knock on effects of the debate over the mosque on relations. [BBC] Read more
Opposition to mosque swells: poll More and more Americans are paying attention to the Ground Zero mosque plans -- and they don't like them, a new poll shows.
About 85 percent of US voters say they are following news stories about the mosque -- a 34-point jump from a month ago, according to a Rasmussen survey released yesterday.
The increased interest coincided with opposition nationwide spiking to 62 percent, compared to 54 percent opposition in July.
"Since the July survey, the local New York City zoning debate over the planned 13-story Cordoba mosque has escalated into a national controversy," the pollsters concluded. [nypost.com] Read more
Sam Harris: Obama doesn’t realise that Islam is not like other religions .... There is no such thing as Islamophobia. Bigotry and racism exist, of course—and they are evils that all well-intentioned people must oppose. And prejudice against Muslims or Arabs, purely because of the accident of their birth, is despicable.
But like all religions, Islam is a system of ideas and practices. And it is not a form of bigotry or racism to observe that the specific tenets of the faith pose a special threat to civil society. Nor is it a sign of intolerance to notice when people are simply not being honest about what they and their co-religionists believe. [The Daily Beast] Read more
Still More About Feisal Abdul Rauf, And Misplaced Hopes And Dreams .... Writing in Slate, Christopher Hitchens made precisely the same point. “The more one reads through his statements,” Hitchens writes, “the more alarming it gets.” Like Ledeen, he quotes the same passage written by Rauf in The Huffington Post back in June 2009. Explaining the so called “rule of law” espoused by Rauf, Vilayet-i-faquih, Hitchens writes:
Vilayet-i-faquih is the special term promulgated by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to describe the idea that all of Iranian society is under the permanent stewardship (sometimes rendered as guardianship) of the mullahs. Under this dispensation, “the will of the people” is a meaningless expression, because “the people” are the wards and children of the clergy. [The Iconoclast] Read more
