Tag Archives: Ground Zero Mosque

Obama’s ‘Teachable’ Shariah Moment

On Friday night, Barack Obama gave his full-throated endorsement to a mosque and "cultural center" on private property that has been purchased in Lower Manhattan adjacent to the site where the World Trade Center’s twin towers once stood.  By Saturday, however, he wanted the American people to know that he was not commenting on "the wisdom" of putting such a mosque by that hallowed ground – just "the right" of its backers like Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf to do it, pursuant to the Constitution’s protection of religious freedom.

Unfortunately for the President – but fortunately for the country – it is too late for such ludicrous contortions and dissembling.  However much Mr. Obama and his fellow Democrats now regret his original White House statement, it has created a "teachable moment."  Not just about the Ground Zero mosque but about the larger enterprise it is intended to serve: bringing the law of Saudi Arabia and Iran, shariah, to America.

Imam Rauf makes no bones about that being his purpose.  So do some of his most prominent backers, like the Muslim Brotherhood front, the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), and the Brotherhood’s Palestinian franchise, the designated terrorist group Hamas.  In fact, according to the New York Post, on Sunday, Mahmoud al-Zahar, an Hamas co-founder and leader in Gaza, told WABC Radio host Aaron Klein: "We have to build the mosque [at Ground Zero].  We have to build everywhere. In every area we have [as] Muslim[s], we have to pray and this mosque is the only site of prayer."

Al-Zahar also enthused about shariah, calling it the "tradition of Islam" which "is controlling every source of our life as regards to marriage, divorce, our commercial relations."  He added ominously that, "Even the Islamic people or Muslims in [the United States] are living now in the tradition of Islam."

What else have we learned so far from Mr. Obama’s teachable shariah moment?  We now know that the President is willing to associate with members of the Muslim Brotherhood (MB), not just in Cairo – where he insisted they be invited to hear his famous paean to Islam last year – but in the White House.  For example, leaders of known MB front groups like Ingrid Mattson of the Islamic Society of North America and Salam al-Marayati of the Muslim Public Affairs Council were in the company at the Iftar dinner Friday when Mr. Obama fervently embraced the Ground Zero mosque.

This is an important insight since we know from uncontested evidence submitted by the government in the largest terrorism finance trial in U.S. history – the Holy Land Foundation case – that the Muslim Brotherhood’s mission in America is "destroying Western civilization from within and ‘sabotaging’ its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God’s religion is made victorious over all other religions." 

What on earth is the President of the United States doing fraternizing with, and thereby legitimating, operatives of an organization with such a seditious mission – to say nothing of endorsing their most immediate priority: the Ground Zero Mosque?

We have also learned that the Obama administration insists that Imam Rauf, another Brotherhood apparatchik, is a "moderate."  Never mind the abundant evidence to the contrary – not least his statement that he wants to bring shariah to America.  Believing him to be a good "ambassador" for the United States, the Obama-Hillary Clinton State Department has gone so far as to send Rauf on a taxpayer-funded trip to Arab capitals. While there, he will surely try to parlay the President of the United States’ explicit endorsement of his Ground Zero project and sponsorship of his travels into funding from oil-rich promoters of shariah to build his 13-story, $100 million megamosque within spitting distance of some of America’s most hallowed real estate.

There is much more yet to be learned, of course.  For example: Why is the U.S. government promoting the Brotherhood’s effort to penetrate our capital markets via "shariah-compliant finance," including its direct ownership of a huge player in that field, AIG?  Which other shariah-adherent Muslims are getting their expenses paid by the State Department as they network around the globe on behalf of their seditious agenda?  How much is this outrageous program costing, and what does Foggy Bottom have to show for it?  Why did Team Obama cosponsor a UN resolution last Fall imposing "shariah blasphemy" laws that utterly conflict with the First Amendment’s protection of free speech?

As he hosted the Ramadan fast-breaking dinner at the White House on Friday, President Obama showed his true colors on shariah.  Trying to dress up the Ground Zero mosque or any other aspect of this brutally repressive, totalitarian and inherently unconstitutional program as a matter of "religious freedom" does not pass the giggle test.  Shariah is about power, not faith, and no amount of Obama subsidies, solidarity or spin on behalf of that agenda will persuade the American people to allow the so-called "tradition of Islam" to supplant our civil liberties, form of government and way of life.

 

Frank J. Gaffney, Jr. is President of the Center for Security Policy, a columnist for the Washington Times and host of the nationally syndicated program, Secure Freedom Radio, heard in Washington weeknights at 9:00 p.m. on WTNT 570 AM.

 

Obamas Ground Zero Mosque

At a White House celebration of Ramadan tonight in the company of representatives of several of the Nation’s most prominent Muslim Brotherhood front organizations, President Obama announced his strong support for one of their most immediate objectives: the construction of a mega-mosque and "cultural center" at Ground Zero.  In so doing, he publicly embraced the greatest tar-baby of his presidency. 

On “bashing” Muslims

Last week, a tectonic shift took place in the firmament of the War of Ideas.  Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich directly and forcefully took on Shariah, the totalitarian theo-political-military program of authoritative Islam that its adherents seek to impose on the entire world.  As he noted, the United States is squarely in the cross-hairs of Shariah’s devotees.

In response, the usual suspects – the multiculturally sensitive elite that reflexively excuses the Islamists joined by proponents of the latters’ stealth jihad, notably elements of the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) – have reflexively responded by accusing the Speaker of "bashing" Muslims.  It is, of course, far easier to engage in ad hominem attacks than contend with Newt’s characteristically thoughtful and informed critique.  It is also expedient to try to portray a focused challenge to the beliefs and practices of a subset of the Islamic faith as an assault on all Muslims.

In fact, it is not "bashing" all Muslims if one points out that the comprehensive doctrine to which some of them adhere is a threat to our liberties, our government and our way of life.  Objectively, that is the case; a global theocracy – the end-state commanded by Shariah – administering a severely repressive, even barbaric criminal code aimed at enforcing submission by Muslims and non-Muslims alike is incompatible with the U.S. Constitution. 

As it happens, one man who has expressly said he seeks to "bring Shariah to America" is Feisal Abdul Rauf, the imam currently promoting construction of a 13-story, $100 million mosque once dubbed "Cordoba House" in proximity to Ground Zero.  Speaker Gingrich has properly and powerfully opposed that idea:  In an op.ed. in Human Events last week, he wrote:  "It is simply grotesque to erect a mosque at the site of the most visible and powerful symbol of the horrible consequences of radical Islamist ideology…. For radical Islamists, the mosque would become an icon of triumph, encouraging them in their challenge to our civilization."

Unfortunately, the problem is not merely the location of the mosque.  Rather, it lies with those like Imam Rauf who are advancing the Muslim Brotherhood agenda that Mr. Gingrich calls "creeping Shariah" and the MB itself says is "to destroy Western civilization from within."

Rauf has myriad connections to the Muslim Brotherhood.  His father was a prominent figure in the organization back in Egypt in the 1940s.  After Gamal Nasser cracked down on the organization, the elder Rauf fled first to Kuwait, where Feisal was born, then made his way to Malaysia and ultimately America.  Once in New York, he bought up a third of a city block on the Upper East Side and built a large, Shariah adherent mosque and Islamic Center on 96th Street.  The younger Rauf serves on the board of that mosque.

Feisal Abdul Rauf also published in 2004 a book entitled What’s Right About Islam is What’s Right about America.  It is in English, but intended for Muslim audiences.  Interestingly, this book appeared under a different title in Malaysia (and in the local language, not in English).  The title has been changed, in an instructive way: A Call to Prayer from the WTC Rubble: Islamic Dawa in the Heart of America Post 9/11.  

Now, dawa is the essence of creeping Shariah.  Dawa is all about proselytizing, recruiting and indoctrinating in the ways of Shariah and the jihad it demands.  And, as the acknowledgements page of the American version indicates, "a special non-commercial edition [of the book was published] to promote a proper understanding of Islam and common ground between Islam and the West."  The organizations that made that possible were two that the U.S. government has identified as Brotherhood fronts: the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) and the International Institute for Islamic Thought (IIIT). 

As Debra Burlingame, sister of the pilot of the aircraft that was flown into the Pentagon on 9/11, observes:  "No Muslim cleric who believes in ‘religious tolerance’ and who purports to be a U.S. Constitution-embracing American, would ever, ever give his book, his work, to these two organizations for dissemination.  This would be akin to someone who makes racial equality their sole cause in life, donating their book to the KKK to recruit members."

Then, there is another book by Feisal Rauf: Islam: A Sacred Law – What Every Muslim Should Know About Shariah.  It makes clear the imam’s affinity for the Wahhabi and Salafi doctrines.  As the New York Police Department documented in a major analysis released two years ago and entitled Radicalization in the West: The Homegrown Threat, there is an ominous connection between indoctrination in Wahhabi mosques and Islamist "radicalization" here.

In short, Imam Rauf is clear, particularly with Muslim audiences, that he seeks to impose Shariah here in America.  He is no moderate.  To the contrary, he has myriad ties to the Muslim Brotherhood and its seditious, Shariah program.  As a result, it seems all-too-predictable that the megamosque he seeks to build at Ground Zero would be a beachhead for Shariah and a new, dangerous incubator of jihadism in the heart of New York.

It is not "bashing" any Muslim to point out these facts.  To the contrary, it would be the height of irresponsibility not to take note of, and act upon, them – first by stopping the Ground Zero Mosque, then by ensuring that America remains Shariah-free.

 

Frank J. Gaffney, Jr. is President of the Center for Security Policy, a columnist for the Washington Times and host of the nationally syndicated program, Secure Freedom Radio, heard in Washington weeknights at 9:00 p.m. on WTNT 570 AM.

A shrine to Shariah?

The supremacist program authoritative Islam calls Shariah is big on symbols.  Arguably, none is more effective than its practice of building mosques on its conquests’ most sacred sites.

In Jerusalem, triumphant Muslims built the Al-Aqsa mosque on top of the Jews’ revered Temple Mount.  They transformed what had been for a thousand years the largest cathedral in Christendom, Constantinople’s magnificent St. Sophia basilica, into a sprawling mosque complex.  And the Moorish Ummayad dynasty in Spain, made the city of Cordoba its capital, and installed an immense mosque on the site of an ancient Christian church there.

Now, an imam in New York, who has suddenly come into $100 million from undisclosed sources, wants to build a 13-story Islamic Cultural Center adjacent to the site  of Shariah’s greatest triumph to date in America: Ground Zero, the place where the World Trade Center’s twin towers proudly stood until they were destroyed by Shariah-adherent jihadists on September 11, 2001.  It is not a coincidence that the imam, Feisal Abdul Rauf, has called his project "the Cordoba House."

Such a mosque on 9/11’s hallowed ground would not only constitute a durable, symbolic taunt by our enemies about their bloody victory.  In accordance with Shariah, once ground has been taken for Islam, it can never revert to the non-Muslim Dar al-Harb, literally the House of War.

In other words, the Ground Zero mosque is designed to be a permanent, in-our-face beachhead for Shariah, a platform for inspiring the triumphalist ambitions of the faithful and eroding resistence to their demands for separate and (for the moment, at least) equal treatment in America.

So why, one might ask, have Mayor Michael Bloomberg, various other elected officials and clergy and community leaders expressed support for the Cordoba House?

In part, it is a function of local considerations:  Who wouldn’t welcome the prospect of an infusion of $100 million into the still-suffering economy of lower Manhattan?  What is more, if the mosque serves as a magnet for new Muslim residents, depressed housing prices could rebound.

The larger problem is that too few of our leaders understand the nature of Shariah and its implications.  Even when an imam like Rauf explicitly says he favors bringing Shariah to America, officials at every level of government seem untroubled by the fact that such an agenda necessarily is anti-constitutional and incompatible with our freedoms.

To be sure, Imam Rauf is a skilled practitioner of the Shariah tradition of taqqiya deception for the faith.  It turns out, he was to the manner born: As ace researcher Alyssa Lappen has documented, Rauf has family and other longstanding ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. 

So, in a page taken straight out of the Brotherhood taqqiya playbook, the imam and his wife and collaborator on the Cordoba House project, Daisy Khan, have been much in evidence of late, professing their commitment to interfaith dialogue and the dedication of their new facility to serving the non-Muslim as well as Muslim communities. 

As it happens, similar assurances about mosque complexes built elsewhere by other Shariah adherents have amounted to the old "bait-and-switch" scam.  A group called Americans for Peace and Tolerance (APT) has monitored, for example, the Islamic Society of Boston’s Saudi-funded, city-enabled mega-mosque in Roxbury, Massachusetts.  Despite professions of tolerance, the mosque has ties to Hamas and other terrorists. According to APT, the mosque’s imam, "Abdullah Faarooq, has told his followers to ‘pick up the gun and the sword’ and supported local terror suspects Aafia Siddiqui and Tarek Mehanna."

In the United Kingdom, the North London Central Mosque (a.k.a. the Finsbury Park Mosque) has been embraced by the British government and is considered an archetype for its effort to counter radicalization by working with the Muslim Brotherhood’s "non-violent" Islamists. Yet, this mosque hosted one of America’s most wanted terrorists: Anwar al-Alwaki.  According to National Public Radio, among those who attended his sermons there was the Nigerian panty-bomber, Umar Farouk Abulmutallab.

We have reason to fear that the United States government is poised to follow Britain’s disastrous course – further compounding the muddle-headed thinking among leaders across the country about Shariah and the threat it poses. John Brennan, President Obama’s Homeland Security and Counterterrorism Advisor has repeatedly signaled that he wants to reach out to "moderate" jihadists of the Taliban and Hezbollah.  President Obama has said he intends to provide more than $400 million for Hamas-run Gaza.

Then, Brennan gave an interview in the Washington Times last week in which he displayed anew his profound misunderstanding of the enemy and its threat doctrine.  As the Times’ Eli Lake reported: "Mr. Brennan said that he opposed granting any legitimacy to what he called al Qaeda’s ‘twisted’ interpretation of Islam. ‘Clearly, bin Laden and al Qaeda believe they are on this very holy agenda and this jihad.  However in my view, what we cannot do is to allow them to think, and the rest of the world to think, for the future terrorists of the world to believe al Qaeda is a legitimate representation of jihad and Islam.’"

Such denials of the centrality of violent jihad to authoritative Islam – and the obligation to engage in more stealthy forms of jihad to the same end, the global triumph of Islam, where violence is not practicable – is a formula for disaster.  Unchallenged, it will produce a toxic shrine at Ground Zero to the doctrine that animates al Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood alike, Shariah.

 

Frank J. Gaffney, Jr. is President of the Center for Security Policy, a columnist for the Washington Times and host of the syndicated program, Secure Freedom Radio, heard in Washington weeknights at 9:00 p.m. on WTNT 570 AM.

2010 Freedom Flame Award: The Manhattan Seven

On June 22, 2010, the Center for Security Policy awarded its annual “Freedom Flame” honor to seven individuals whose collective efforts in rallying public opposition prevented President Obama from carrying out his ill-conceived decision to have 9-11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his cohorts stand trial in New York City.

The Freedom Flame dinner, at which the Center hosted over 170 attendees at the Metropolitan Club in New York, recognized the following individuals who together made up the “Manhattan Seven”:

  • Debra Burlingame, founding Board Member, Keep America Safe; sister of Charles F. “Chic” Burlingame III, Pilot of American Airlines flight 77, flown into the Pentagon by terrorists on 9-11
  • Andrew C. McCarthy, former federal prosecutor; author of New York Times bestseller The Grand Jihad; Senior Fellow, National Review Institute
  • Aaron Harrison, Executive Director, Keep America Safe
  • Tim Brown, twenty-year veteran of the FDNY; co-founder, TheBravest.com
  • Tim Sumner, co-founder, 9/11 Families for a Safe and Strong America
  • Beth Gilinsky, founder, Jewish Action Alliance; founder, Women United
  • Amanda Bowman, CEO, The Atlantic Bridge

Liz Cheney, former Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs, founding Board Member of Keep America Safe, and daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney, gave the keynote address, during which she stated:

Not long ago, the people of this city were told that they had no choice but to watch and endure a spectacle like no other with the leading plotter of 9-11 brought to trial in lower Manhattan.  It had all been decided, we were told.  And those who dared object were dismissed as lacking faith in the American system.  But then Tim and Beth and Tim and Amanda and Andy and Debra and Aaron showed the Attorney General how things are really meant to work in a free country.  Rarely has the machinery of the federal government been more quickly reversed.  And when it was all over, New Yorkers were spared from a painful and needless ordeal.

Honoree Debra Burlingame, founding Board Member, Keep America Safe and sister of Charles F. “Chic” Burlingame III, the pilot whose plane was flown into the Pentagon on 9-11, added:

I can tell you, without exception, conservative talk show hosts, reporters, politicians… they all told me ‘Debra, this is a done deal.  We don’t think you can reverse this.’  That’s pretty stunning, looking back at it now.  They felt it was not doable.  And there’s a pattern now we’ve seen with the president and his people: they want to create this sense of inevitability and momentum so people sit down.  And we know now that that is such an illusion.

Frank J. Gaffney, Jr., President & CEO of the Center for Security Policy, commented after the Freedom Flame awards:

Most Americans were horrified by President Obama’s decision to make a mockery of 9-11 by granting those who planned that vicious attack a civilian trial just blocks from where the World Trade Center once stood.  These honorees worked tirelessly to keep that from happening, and we are deeply grateful to them for their leadership and steadfastness in the face of a White House determined to dishonor the victims of that tragedy and place New York, and the nation, at grave risk without justification.

The Center looks forward to working with the Manhattan Seven and others in confronting the next challenge from those seeking to wage – and enable – jihad against America from within New York City: the building of a mega-mosque just yards from Ground Zero.  Just as Americans did not sit quietly while President Obama sought to provide Khalid Sheikh Mohammed with the constitutional protections and propaganda benefits of a trial in Manhattan, we will not stand idly by while the forces of jihad construct a symbol of their conquest near sacred ground where 3,000 Americans were murdered.

The Center was also pleased to bestow its Terry Elkes Sacred Honor Award to Joseph W. Donner, a founding member of the Center for Security Policy and former Foreign Service Officer who has supported numerous public policy institutions and given many projects their start.

The Center has awarded its Freedom Flame honor since 1992.  Past recipients of the Freedom Flame include Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher; former Attorney General Edwin Meese III; Senator Fred Thompson; U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton; New York City Police Commissioner Ray Kelly; former CIA Director James Woolsey; and Dr. Herb London, President, The Hudson Institute; among many others.