How Cordoba House became “Ground Zero Mosque”?

The proposed Cordoba House near Ground Zero

G.K. Chesterton, English author and mystery novelist once wrote, “Journalism largely consists of saying ‘Lord Jones is dead’ to people who never knew that Lord Jones was alive! Seven decades later, Chesterton’s words still stand true. Journalism is synonymous with truth but these days media neither tells full truth nor complete lie. Media employs a pendulum that prefers to swing in the space between the full truth and the complete lie. It is in this context, we must zero on the so-called ongoing “Ground Zero Mosque” debate.    

Media barons and editors transact with their readers in the currency of words. Words can be loose as well as loaded. Loose words can convert an issue into a non-issue. Loaded words act like a burning matchstick on dry grass. Therefore, the word “Iraqi insurgent” or “enemy combatant” is example of the loose words which have been heavily used by American media in Iraq war. On the contrary, “Jihadist” or “Muslim fanatic” is the example of loaded words which have been employed by a section of American press. The word “Cordoba House” will fall in the category of loose word while “Ground Zero Mosque” consists of loaded words.  

So at what point proposed “Cordoba House” became “Ground Zero Mosque”?

Cordoba House is two long blocks away in north from the World Trade Center site. The five-storey building housed Burlington Coat Factory till September 11, 2001. The factory building was lying vacant since then until a group of Muslims led by Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf bought it in July 2009. The factory building is being used for Friday prayer.  New York Times was the first newspaper that ran a front-page feature on December 9, 2009 on the proposed Islamic centre but it never used the term “Ground Zero Mosque.” The front-page report did not attract any attention. On December 21, 2009, Daisy Khan, wife of Imam Abdul Rauf was interviewed by conservative media personality Laura Ingraham on Fox TV. The interview was cordial and Ingraham seemed to support the Cordoba Project. It was on this programme that the misnomer “Ground Zero Mosque” was used onscreen for the very first time. The term may have been used unconsciously on the programme but there was no controversy immediately after that. In fact, according to a search on Nexis newspaper archive, there was not a single news article on the mosque for next five and half months!  

On May 6, 2010, New York City community board committee unanimously voted in favour of the Cordoba House. On the same day, anti-Islam blogger Pamela Geller wrote against the Cordoba House terming it as “monster mosque”. It is precisely at this point that a proposed 13-storey proposed Islamic cultural centre, which, in addition to a prayer room, will include a basketball court, restaurant, swimming pool and 9/11 memorial, was just reduced to a “mosque”! Geller went further to plant a lie that the “mosque” was being built on the site of World Trade Center! “What better way to mark your territory than to plant a giant mosque on the still-barren land of the World Trade Center?” she wrote on her Atlas Shrugs blog. “This is Islamic domination and expansionism. The location is no accident. Just as Al-Aqsa was built on top of the Temple in Jerusalem.” 

On the same day, Rupert Murdoch owned New York Post ran a story which deliberately identified Cordoba House as “WTC Mosque.” News agency Associated Press (AP) ran a story on May 7 quoting relatives of 9/11 victims with differing opinions on the “mosque”. On the same day, Geller’s group Stop Islamization of America (SIOA), launched a campaign “Stop the 911 Mosque!” She posted the names and contact information for New York mayor and members of the community board, encouraging people to write. Uninformed, gullible Americans and anti-Muslims from all across the world wrote to the board without verifying the details that there is no mosque being built on the site of the terrorists attack! 

On May 8, 2010, Geller and Robert Spencer, a known-Muslim-hater and associate director of SIOA, announced first protest against the “911 Mosque” to be held on May 29. One May 10, New York Post columnist Andrea Peyser becomes the first journalist-victim of Geller campaign. She openly wrote against the “mosque” saying that “there are better places to put a mosque.” On May 13, she devoted an entire article to Cordoba House provocatively titled “Mosque Madness at Ground Zero”. The article played an important role in raising and shaping the debate in the sense that it was the first article to be published in a newspaper which portrayed the Cordoba project as inherently wrong and suspect. Peyser quoted Geller thus giving credence to an agony aunt! (Geller once suggested that Malcolm X was Obama’s real father!)  

Thus within a month, Cordoba House, unnecessarily became controversial. It began with anti-Islam blogger Pamela Geller. Andrea Peyser peddled it into conservative media. Mainstream media lapped it up further. A serious newspaper like The Wall Street Journal used the erroneous term “Ground Zero Mosque” in its headline several times. Rudy Giuliani, former mayor of New York, termed the mosque as “desecration”. Politicians like Sarah Palin, Peter King,   Newt Gingrich and Tim Pawlenty followed suit. 

Today, the atmosphere has become so much charged and heated in America that according to CNN poll 7 in 10 Americans say that they are against the Cordoba Project. By joining the words “Mosque” and “Ground Zero”, peddlers of hate have succeeded in creating fear in American hearts. To many Americans, “mosque” is still a dangerous place. “Ground Zero” is another dangerous word. Two meanings from the American Heritage dictionary would suffice. Ground Zero means;  a) Area where an atomic bomb is detonated, b) A center of explosive change. 

It is also true that many Americans including Mayor Bloomberg of New York have spoken in favour of Cordoba House. But men like Bloomberg seem to be in minority. There is another mosque in Manhattan, near WTC and Pentagon, another terrorist attack site, has a prayer room. Why have not Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer spoken against these two “mosques” in the ongoing debate?

Americans aren’t dumb but an average American is more ignorant than an Indian. According to a recent poll one in five Americans believes Barack Obama is a Muslim, even though he isn’t! A quarter of those who believe he is a Muslim also claimed he talks about his faith too much! Where are they getting their information? Sixty per cent said they learned it from the media!

America needs to have a mass public awareness campaign against the likes of Gellers and Spencers and misleading media. Barack Hussein Obama must make a distinction between “full truth” and “complete lie.”

Till then Pamela Geller will laugh that her wildest dream has crossed the Atlantic.

The Sunday Inquilab, August 29, 2010

Source: http://mubasshir.blogspot.com/2010/08/how-cordoba-house-became-ground-zero.html

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How Cordoba House became “Ground Zero Mosque”?

The proposed Cordoba House near Ground Zero

G.K. Chesterton, English author and mystery novelist once wrote, “Journalism largely consists of saying ‘Lord Jones is dead’ to people who never knew that Lord Jones was alive! Seven decades later, Chesterton’s words still stand true. Journalism is synonymous with truth but these days media neither tells full truth nor complete lie. Media employs a pendulum that prefers to swing in the space between the full truth and the complete lie. It is in this context, we must zero on the so-called ongoing “Ground Zero Mosque” debate.    

Media barons and editors transact with their readers in the currency of words. Words can be loose as well as loaded. Loose words can convert an issue into a non-issue. Loaded words act like a burning matchstick on dry grass. Therefore, the word “Iraqi insurgent” or “enemy combatant” is example of the loose words which have been heavily used by American media in Iraq war. On the contrary, “Jihadist” or “Muslim fanatic” is the example of loaded words which have been employed by a section of American press. The word “Cordoba House” will fall in the category of loose word while “Ground Zero Mosque” consists of loaded words.  

So at what point proposed “Cordoba House” became “Ground Zero Mosque”?

Cordoba House is two long blocks away in north from the World Trade Center site. The five-storey building housed Burlington Coat Factory till September 11, 2001. The factory building was lying vacant since then until a group of Muslims led by Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf bought it in July 2009. The factory building is being used for Friday prayer.  New York Times was the first newspaper that ran a front-page feature on December 9, 2009 on the proposed Islamic centre but it never used the term “Ground Zero Mosque.” The front-page report did not attract any attention. On December 21, 2009, Daisy Khan, wife of Imam Abdul Rauf was interviewed by conservative media personality Laura Ingraham on Fox TV. The interview was cordial and Ingraham seemed to support the Cordoba Project. It was on this programme that the misnomer “Ground Zero Mosque” was used onscreen for the very first time. The term may have been used unconsciously on the programme but there was no controversy immediately after that. In fact, according to a search on Nexis newspaper archive, there was not a single news article on the mosque for next five and half months!  

On May 6, 2010, New York City community board committee unanimously voted in favour of the Cordoba House. On the same day, anti-Islam blogger Pamela Geller wrote against the Cordoba House terming it as “monster mosque”. It is precisely at this point that a proposed 13-storey proposed Islamic cultural centre, which, in addition to a prayer room, will include a basketball court, restaurant, swimming pool and 9/11 memorial, was just reduced to a “mosque”! Geller went further to plant a lie that the “mosque” was being built on the site of World Trade Center! “What better way to mark your territory than to plant a giant mosque on the still-barren land of the World Trade Center?” she wrote on her Atlas Shrugs blog. “This is Islamic domination and expansionism. The location is no accident. Just as Al-Aqsa was built on top of the Temple in Jerusalem.” 

On the same day, Rupert Murdoch owned New York Post ran a story which deliberately identified Cordoba House as “WTC Mosque.” News agency Associated Press (AP) ran a story on May 7 quoting relatives of 9/11 victims with differing opinions on the “mosque”. On the same day, Geller’s group Stop Islamization of America (SIOA), launched a campaign “Stop the 911 Mosque!” She posted the names and contact information for New York mayor and members of the community board, encouraging people to write. Uninformed, gullible Americans and anti-Muslims from all across the world wrote to the board without verifying the details that there is no mosque being built on the site of the terrorists attack! 

On May 8, 2010, Geller and Robert Spencer, a known-Muslim-hater and associate director of SIOA, announced first protest against the “911 Mosque” to be held on May 29. One May 10, New York Post columnist Andrea Peyser becomes the first journalist-victim of Geller campaign. She openly wrote against the “mosque” saying that “there are better places to put a mosque.” On May 13, she devoted an entire article to Cordoba House provocatively titled “Mosque Madness at Ground Zero”. The article played an important role in raising and shaping the debate in the sense that it was the first article to be published in a newspaper which portrayed the Cordoba project as inherently wrong and suspect. Peyser quoted Geller thus giving credence to an agony aunt! (Geller once suggested that Malcolm X was Obama’s real father!)  

Thus within a month, Cordoba House, unnecessarily became controversial. It began with anti-Islam blogger Pamela Geller. Andrea Peyser peddled it into conservative media. Mainstream media lapped it up further. A serious newspaper like The Wall Street Journal used the erroneous term “Ground Zero Mosque” in its headline several times. Rudy Giuliani, former mayor of New York, termed the mosque as “desecration”. Politicians like Sarah Palin, Peter King,   Newt Gingrich and Tim Pawlenty followed suit. 

Today, the atmosphere has become so much charged and heated in America that according to CNN poll 7 in 10 Americans say that they are against the Cordoba Project. By joining the words “Mosque” and “Ground Zero”, peddlers of hate have succeeded in creating fear in American hearts. To many Americans, “mosque” is still a dangerous place. “Ground Zero” is another dangerous word. Two meanings from the American Heritage dictionary would suffice. Ground Zero means;  a) Area where an atomic bomb is detonated, b) A center of explosive change. 

It is also true that many Americans including Mayor Bloomberg of New York have spoken in favour of Cordoba House. But men like Bloomberg seem to be in minority. There is another mosque in Manhattan, near WTC and Pentagon, another terrorist attack site, has a prayer room. Why have not Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer spoken against these two “mosques” in the ongoing debate?

Americans aren’t dumb but an average American is more ignorant than an Indian. According to a recent poll one in five Americans believes Barack Obama is a Muslim, even though he isn’t! A quarter of those who believe he is a Muslim also claimed he talks about his faith too much! Where are they getting their information? Sixty per cent said they learned it from the media!

America needs to have a mass public awareness campaign against the likes of Gellers and Spencers and misleading media. Barack Hussein Obama must make a distinction between “full truth” and “complete lie.”

Till then Pamela Geller will laugh that her wildest dream has crossed the Atlantic.

The Sunday Inquilab, August 29, 2010

Source: http://mubasshir.blogspot.com/2010/08/how-cordoba-house-became-ground-zero.html

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Fisking the GZM Imam

You know, I will tell you the truth.  The shocking clips…  maybe I have been around too many liberals, but they are not very shocking.  His anti-americanism is actually kind of tired and stale.  It just strikes me as moronic conversion of the left and the islamofascist right, that speaks in quiet tones, but nonetheless is singing My Sharia More.  But I thought I would do something different and fisk his stupid talk, as kindly provided by Pamela Geller.  So here goes.

Now first there is a bunch of introductory crap.  I half expected him to make a crappy opening joke.  Okay.  And early on he gives this bit:

The Jewish prophets, Jesus Christ and John the Baptist and Mary are in fact religious personalities and prophets of the Islamic faith as well.  What divides us is less theology, to my mind, than history.

Yeah, what a bunch of smiley faced bullshit.  You deny that Christ is the son of God, and that is okay, but don’t then pretend you and I have much in common in our faith.  I don’t condescend to Jews that we share much of our faith, and neither should you.

And mind you, most of the world are “not Christians” and we get along just fine.  Seriously, knock yourself out.  But don’t bullshit me.

And isn’t that itself pretty exclusionary?  What about Buddhists, where do they fit in that?  The Taoists?  The Atheists?  The pagans of the DaVinci Code variety?

He goes on:

One of the challenges in engaging in this kind of debate in the public square in the West, the United States in particular, and perhaps more so in Europe, is the Western understanding, or perhaps misunderstanding in many quarters, of the separation of Church and State and what it actually means.

Got to warn you folks, he takes a long time to say a simple thing.  So strap yourself in and maybe mainline a few coffee rounds.

From the point of view of Islamic theology, Islamic jurisprudence and Islamic history, the vast majority of Islamic history, it has been shaped or defined by a notion of multiculturalism and multireligiosity, if you might use that term. From the very beginning of Islamic history Islam created space for Christians of various persuasions, of Jews and even of Muslims of different schools of thought within the fabric of society.

Ah the great myth of tolerant Islamic history, where the fact that Islam discriminated less than most societies made them pluralistic.  Sigh.  Mind you, back then no one was tolerant.  No one.  But again, happy faced bullshit.

The fomenting by the British of Arab Nationalism,

This is going to be a running theme.  Arabs or Muslims are never bad on their own.  Its always the West that is behind it.

For those of us who remember watching Peter O'Toole in Lawrence of Arabia, that was one of the incidents of the chapters in breaking apart the Ottoman Empire by arousing or rousing the flames of Arab nationalism.

Oh, right, so what the British should have done was support the strong men in Ottoman, right?  Keep that in mind as we go forward.

It goes on quite a big, but the radical stuff is below the surface.  For instance, in response to one question about the moderates condemning terrorism, he says:

The broader community is in fact criticising and condemning actions of terrorism that are being done in the name of Islam. I just came from a conference in Jordan, Amman where there were over 170 leading Muslim scholars from almost every part of the Muslim world, including some of the most important names like Sheikh Tantawi of Egypt, Sheikh Ali Gomaa, who is the Chief Mufti of Egypt, the Chief Mufti of Jordan, the Sheikh Al-Qaradawi, who is a very very well known Islamic jurist, highly regarded all over the Muslim world. They included fatwas obtained from people like ..... Istani who could not attend but also issued a fatwa condemning acts of terrorism and stating that the attribution of infidel to others is not something that should be done and is outside of the ethics of Islam.

Well, go over the Geller’s site and take a look at these figures and see just how moderate they really are.

Then he says this:

Islamic law, the text of Islam, the Koran is quite explicit on describing Christians and Jews as people of the book, and throughout Islamic history even Islamic scholars in India have actually included Hindus as being people of the book because Hindus were not yet involved - were not part of the society, of Arabic society, at the time of the prophet.

Okay, good enough, but what if you are “none of the above?”  What about atheists, or pagans, or what have you?  Terrorism is okay, then?

Later he says this, which is getting a lot of play:

We tend to forget, in the West, that the United States has more Muslim blood on its hands than al Qaida has on its hands of innocent non Muslims.

Now let’s unpack that.  Notice the comparison, how he stacks up the scales.  First he says precisely that the United States has “Muslim blood” on its hands.  Not the blood of innocent Muslims, mind you, just plain Muslim blood.  So for instance presumably if a United States missile plaints bin Laden’s guts all over the back of a cave in Bumfuckistan, that counts.  Silly me I think there are some Muslims we should be downright happy to kill, but in his mind we should be killing no Muslims, I suppose.

And then against that, he says we should count the number of innocent non-Muslims.  Isn’t that funny?  I thought this guy specifically wanted to build that mosque in order to honor the Muslims killed on 9-11, and suddenly he doesn’t think that the Muslims murdered by al Qaeda count?

So for instance, Touri Bolourchi was a Muslim on Flight 175.  This is how her daughter, Neda, tells us about her murder, recently:

On the morning of Tuesday, Sept. 11, 2001, I watched as terrorists slammed United Flight 175 into the South Tower of the World Trade Center, 18 minutes after their accomplices on another hijacked plane hit the North Tower. My mother was on the flight. I witnessed her murder on live television. I still cannot fully comprehend those images. In that moment, I died as well. I carry a hole in my heart that will never be filled.

By the way, Neda is one of those awful anti-Muslim bigots who opposes the GZM.

So they don’t count, in his mind, in assessing the evil of al Qaeda.

And really, leaving them out does eliminate a lot of death, because the statistical ugly reality has been for a while that al Qaeda is actually more likely to kill Muslims than anyone else.  I mean there is that.

He goes on:

You may remember that the US lead sanction against Iraq lead to the death of over half a million Iraqi children. This has been documented by the United Nations.

The documentation consisting of Iraqi telling them that this has happened, and the UN believing them with slack-jawed credulity.  Really, I have been over this before, and most sane observers admit we have no reliable information on the subject.

By the way, why was it that we did this?  Well, you see at the end of the gulf war Bush Sr. wanted to just take the guy out.  But his allies, that being the Muslim world, were kind of concerned about that kind of precedent.  But Bush Sr. also knew you couldn’t just let the guy continue on.  So this was the compromise worked out.  So if Bush Sr. got his way, the suffering of the Iraqi people would have ended about 12 years beforehand, and we might have even skipped over steps like the cruelty toward the Marsh Arabs.  That is but for the Muslim world, those sanctions he is bitching about, wouldn’t have happened.  But the U.S. is the only one he blames for it.  Starting to notice a pattern?

How many of you have seen the documentary: Fahrenheit 911?

See what I mean about him sounding like your typical liberal in many respects?  Moronic convergence.

Collateral damage is a nice thing to put on a paper but when the collateral damage is your own uncle or cousin, what passions do these arouse? How do you negotiate? How do you tell people whose homes have been destroyed, whose lives have been destroyed, that this does not justify your actions of terrorism. It's hard. Yes, it is true that it does not justify the acts of bombing innocent civilians, that does not solve the problem, but after 50 years of, in many cases, oppression, of US support of authoritarian regimes that have violated human rights in the most heinous of ways, how else do people get attention?

Got that, he is no advocate of terrorism.  Nah, perish the thought!

So I'm not - I'm just providing you with the arguments that are happening intra Islamically by those who feel the emotion of pain. Half a million Iraqi - there's a sense in the Arab and Muslim world that the European world and Western world is just - does not care about our lives or human lives.

Well, maybe its because your imams, you know like you, tell them that instead of the truth which is that we go to ridiculous lengths to protect innocent life.

But that is a funny complaint from a guy who just two seconds ago showed absolutely no concern for the innocent Muslims killed by al Qaeda, and lamented the murder of al Qaeda members by the west.

And, indeed, that might lead you to question his entire thesis.  I mean if collateral damage creates terrorism, what about intentional murder, which is practiced regularly by al Qaeda, not to mention the dictators of various Islamic countries?  Iran guns down people for no other reason than that they are asking for democracy, and in his mind this is not a source of terrorism.

But remember, he doesn’t count the murder of innocent Muslims when stacking up al Qaeda’s body count.

There's a perception in much of the Arab world and the Muslim world that the issue is about race. That the Palestinian Israeli issue is less about religion than it is about race because about 25 per cent or more of the Palestinians or the Arabs are Christian.

Now the contradiction there isn’t immediately obvious, but let me explain something to Americans.  We in America have really screwed up a word: nation.  We think of it as being almost synonymous with country.  But in much of the rest of the world, nation = race.  Nationalism = racism.  So the rise of Arab nationalism he blamed on the British before, well that is a nice word for “Arab racism.”

So in fact he is more right than he thinks.  Much of this is racism.  The dirty secret of the Palestinian-Israeli struggle is that this really isn’t much more than jew-hate.  And ever since Hitler came along, to anti-semites, “Jews” are not just a religious group, but a race.  So it is racism that motivates them—that is racism toward a group that isn’t even a race.

He goes on.  He condemns suicide bombing, but you know, by now, I am doubting his sincerity.  He seems to be talking about of both sides of his mouth.

And he goes on and on (I am really, really doing you a favor by reading this for you—you’re welcome), and repeats the lie of a Koran being flushed down a toilet in Gitmo.  Sigh. 

Then he spins happy feminist bullshit:

It is in fact the case that the prophet was revolutionary in his time in according women parity and equality

Um, yeah, not quite.

and he pushed the envelope as far as he could.

Um, wait, you are saying that the Prophet Mohammed couldn’t get his way?  Really?

I mean to you dear reader it might be worth pointing out a little factoid you might not know about Islam.  Have you ever heard of Mohammed’s fourth wife Aisha.  Well, he was six when he married her.  Yes, you read that right.  Six.

Now of course Mohammed would never have sex with a six year old girl.  Nah, of course not!  No, he waited.  Until she was nine.

I have talked with many, many Muslims about this.  Some have learned of this and it broke their faith.  Others tried to employ moral relativism.  You know, as if Allah’s justice isn’t supposed to be infinite.  No one has denied these facts.  None.  At most they quibble and say she might have been ten when he had sex with her.  Oh, when I point out that as a matter of anatomical reality, this had to have been excruciatingly painful to her (compare my discussion of the facts in Kennedy v. Louisiana, here), they try to deny those ugly realities.  But they never deny he had sex with her.

And, by the way, that is why I could never be a Muslim: because I could never believe that a just God would let that happen.  Either God would have picked a prophet who would leave the children alone, or He would have so terrified Mohammed he wouldn’t have dared lay a hand on her, or He would have made the man suddenly impotent or hit him in the nards with a lightning bolt. I don’t know what God would do but He would do something to prevent the chief prophet of His faith from raping a nine year old girl.

So Mohammed (pedophilia be upon him) could obtain some seriously underage sex, but he couldn’t get everything he wanted?  Give me a break.  And certainly if God gave a crap He could be sufficiently persuasive.

He goes on.  On on.  (You guys really owe me.  I am really taking one for the team.)  He does use the n-word, but it’s not clear in context he meant that in a literally racist way.  Certainly those condemning Dr. Laura right now will be sinking in their seats, though.

So the issue really, people fight over those issues and when a husband and wife fight over: should we get a yellow rug or a blue rug or, you know, any kind of a disagreement, it is really about power.

Um, wow, there is an insight into you.  So when we argue about whether you put up a mosque at ground zero, its not really about that, its about power, right?

No, its not really, but its fun to hoist him on his own petard.

So if, for example, the Department of Biology, the head of the Department believes in the theory of evolution and you do not, you will not get tenure. You will risk the danger of not getting tenure because you're a threat to the system.

OMG, run and tell Charles Johnson.  He thinks evolution deserves equal stance with creationism.  Maybe then Johnson will give a crap about this guy.  I mean I haven’t been at LGF in a long, long time, but I am going to guess based on his last trajectory that Johnson is calling everyone who opposes this a bigot and telling us how moderate this knuckle dragger is.  So let me look.  And you can look, too.

Well, lets see here, you scroll down a little and get this: “yesterday’s Bigotry Parade at the Sacred Abandoned Burlington Coat Factory featured these creative floats, clearly a labor of ‘love.’”  Sigh, hate being right.

Anyway, I just sent Johnson a happy fuck you.  Nah, won’t change how he feels about anything, but its fun to do it.

Anyway, one point to mention is that he was portayed earlier as seeking a “one nation state” in Israel, meaning no more Jews.  I am happy to say he actually here is explicitly calling for Jews and Palestianian to live in one state, in peace.  I mean, good luck with that, but its not a clear call for genocide as depicted.

Then he was asked about the idea that some terrorists are told if they die in jihad they go to heaven and get 72 virgins.  Okay now, sir, your line here is to say “ridiculous!  Yes, I know those idiots are taught that, but that is not supported in the Koran because of ______________.”  I admit, I don’t know how to fill in that blank, but I figure you will think of something.  But the key thing is to deny your faith creates this divine murder incentive.  So…  go:

In fact, just about two months ago I was interviewed by Barbara Walters, who is doing a special on heaven and she's interviewed suicide bombers who are expecting the embraces of 72 virgins in paradise, and she asked me do women get the same privilege as well, and I answered her telling her: well, the Koran says you shall have whatever your heart desires.

Ah crap.  Not quite the answer I was looking for.  Nope, not even close.  In fact you kind of implicitly verified it.

He goes on to explain that suicide bombing, well, its all about a lack of parity:

Look, there have been people who have been encouraged to become suicide people. The kamikaze pilots in World War II, for instance. I mentioned earlier the Sri Lankan Tigers who commit suicide. Suicide is, again, suicide - people commit suicide for political purposes, for militaristic purposes, that usually happens by people when they don't have other means or they're losing the battle or they don't have parity in military hardware. It's very easy to find people who will give up their lives. I mean, it's not hard....  So there is always, at any given point in time, people who are in a sort of depression, who are upset about something in their lives, who are prepared, almost on the verge of taking their own lives. Give them a little bit of an incentive. You know, if you put an advertisement on the wall saying: if you're willing to give up your life we will give $100,000 to anyone you love or your family. There will be takers in Adelaide.

Yeah, that is not at all creepy.  And of course he said suicide bombing was 100% against koranic law.  But funny, he didn’t cite any passage.

And let’s tear this little piece of bullshit down.  Ever since 9-11 there have been some liberals who have said that the suicide bomber is the poor man’s cruise missile, and gee if it was planes v. planes, they wouldn’t do that.  Well, in both the Israeli war for independence and the six day war, it was planes v. planes, tanks v. tanks, and so on.  And yeah, no one committed suicide.  I mean the Arabs did so badly it might have looked like suicide, but it was not literal suicide.  But here is the thing: it was still terrorism.  Israelis did their best to hit military targets, but the arabs hit pretty much everything, with explicit plans to genocide the Jews in Israel.

And that is a little bit the dirty little secret of Israeli success in those wars.  I mean they sounded like those old testament battles where like 50 Jews take on 700 others, but the Jews have God on their side and commit unbelievable slaughter on their enemies—I mean crap that puts the 300 Spartans to shame.  But their victory had more to do with the fact that while the Arabs were bombing bus stations and hospitals, the Israelis were bombing air strips and fuel depots.  That combined with what I call “cornered rat syndrome”—that is when you have your back to the wall, it motivates you—and the unbelievable slaughter the Jews carried out in those 20^th century wars make a lot more sense.

And really when it comes down to it, its not the suicide that bothers me so much as the bombing part.  I could give a rat’s ass about the bombers themselves, it’s the innocents they would murder that bother me.

And that is about it.  Is it the absolute smoking gun?  Actually no, although you can see I showed some creepy undertones.  But bluntly you have to wonder.  There is a long tradition of Imams who say “peace” in English and “jihad” in Arabic, when they don’t think we are listening.  I wonder what he says when he doesn’t think we are listening?

Source: http://allergic2bull.blogspot.com/2010/08/fisking-gzm-imam.html

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The Crisis of Leadership In the White House

In this article at Family Security Matters, the Editor does a masterful job of tearing apart Barack Hussein Obama's handling of the Ground Zero mosque issue and also, Obama's overall handling of Islam.

My favorite portion of the article is the summation which states:

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.

I have a theory of why Obama has booted this whole affair so badly - it's one of passion. We have seen from the very start of the Obama Presidency, his adamant desire to reach out to the islamists in this world but the telling issue is the passion that Obama displays when he address muslims. If you look at his recorded messages to the Iranians, his speech in Cairo and even in this much smaller speech at the onset of Ramadan, you see a man inspired by islam - we have seen him go out of his way to minimize radical islamic terror and at the same time, also go out of his way to promote the advances and ideals of islam in the world's history.

What I am trying to say here is this - Barack Hussein Obama is an ADVOCATE of islam. And in my view, Obama views islam and its followers of this world as he views the blacks in the communities that he helped organize - those two groups are what drives this President's passion. And I don't think I have to highlight how dangerous an islamic advocate is sitting in our White House.

While many of us will look at Obama's support of the Ground Zero mosque with contempt and real confusion as to how he can turn his back on the victims and the victims' families...it is critical that we understand that Barack Hussein Obama doesn't see the victims and their families as you and me see them - Obama sees them as collateral damage in a movement that he supports.

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.”

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.”

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.”

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.”

And

“Muslim American clerics have spoken out against terror and extremism, reaffirming that Islam teaches that one must save human life, not take it.”

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.”

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.”

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.”

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.”

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.”

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.

Source: http://holgerawakens.blogspot.com/2010/08/crisis-of-leadership-in-white-house.html

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