Creeping Sharia
August 15, 2010
More deception and dishonesty from Imam Rauf.
Claudia Rosett, as Thomas Lifson points out at American Thinker, is watching parts of the Feisal Rauf’s Ground Zero mosque website disappear before her very eyes.
Seriously, Where Is Imam Feisal … and What’s with His Web Site?
So where right now is Rauf? Still in Malaysia? Sipping tea with who-knows-whom in the Middle East? Jetting between Southeast Asia and the Gulf at U.S. taxpayer expense?
And while he’s on these travels, what’s going on with the web site of his Cordoba Initiative? Last week, after someone in his Malaysia office referred all questions back to his office in New York, the phone number and address of his office in Malaysia quietly vanished from the Cordoba web site. Roughly around the same time, as Anne Bayefsky noticed and explained in a Pajamas Media post this week, Rauf’s Cordoba Initiative web site also erased a photo showing Rauf meeting in Malaysia a while back with an Iranian official, Mohammad Javad Larijani — who, as Bayefsky explained, “was the Iranian official who defended Iran’s abysmal human rights record before the UN Human Rights Council in February and June of this year.”
Friday evening, after Obama gave his de facto endorsement to Rauf’s Cordoba/Park 51 Ground Zero mosque and Islamic center project, I took another look at the morphing Cordoba Initiative web site, and discovered it now has a note on the main page saying “Website is currently under construction.” (Grab your screenshots now — parts of this site are already sliding down the Memory Hole).
What’s going on? Why the vanishings of the Malaysian address, the Rauf-Larijani Iranian connection photo, and the elusive Imam Feisal himself? Have either Obama or Bloomberg made even the smallest effort to inquire about what use will be made, or by whom, of these de facto endorsements they are handing out?
This prompted us to take a look at Rauf’s website and we found an interesting explanation of the “Cordoba” name already down the memory hole. From the CordobaInitiative.org website dated July, 2008:
The Cordoba Name
For hundreds of years during the middle ages, Cordoba was the capital of Muslim Spain. During much of its “golden age” from the 8th to 12th centuries, the Cordoba Caliphate witnessed a great flowering of culture, art, and philosophical inquiry amid a remarkable climate of religious tolerance. Religious freedom, while not perfect, was sufficient that many Jewish and Christian intellectuals emigrated to Cordoba, where they lived, wrote and flourished side by side with their Muslim counterparts in a strikingly pluralistic society. The Cordoba name reminds both Muslims and non-Muslims that a great Islamic civilization was once the most open and tolerant of its era.
The Cordoba Caliphate? An Islamic civilization? That’s right. As Robert Spencer at Jihad Watch pointed out, Rauf has already abandoned the Cordoba name, Ground Zero mega-mosque group ditches name redolent of Islamic supremacism:
The name “Cordoba” has been marketed to gullible Americans as being a place where Muslims, Jews, and Christians lived in harmony and peace, but actually Medieval Muslim Spain enforced the dhimma and systematically oppressed the Jews and Christians, and was the site of a Muslim pogrom against the Jews in the year 1011 — 1000 years before this mega-mosque is slated to open.
Maybe enough people caught on to the name’s bitter irony, and the deceivers decided it was best deep-sixed.
Maybe. Jihad Watch points to an article by Raymond Ibrahim for more detail:
Oddly enough, the so-called “tolerant” era of Cordoba supposedly occurred during the caliphate of ‘Abd al-Rahman III (912-961)–well over a thousand years ago. “Eight hundred years ago,” i.e., around 1200, the fanatical Almohids–ideological predecessors of al-Qaeda–were ravaging Cordoba, where “Christians and Jews were given the choice of conversion, exile, or death.” A Freudian slip on the part of the Cordoba Initiative?
At any rate, the true history of Cordoba, not to mention the whole of Andalusia, is far less inspiring than what Western academics portray: the Christian city was conquered by Muslims around 711, its inhabitants slaughtered or enslaved. The original mosque of Cordoba–the namesake of the Ground Zero mosque–was built atop, and partly from the materials of, a Christian church. Modern day Muslims are well aware of all this. Such is the true–and ominous–legacy of Cordoba….
More pointedly, throughout Islam’s history, whenever a region was conquered, one of the first signs of consolidation was/is the erection of a mosque atop the sacred sites of the vanquished: the pagan Ka’ba temple in Arabia was converted into Islam’s holiest site, the mosque of Mecca; the al-Aqsa mosque, Islam’s third holiest site, was built atop Solomon’s temple in Jerusalem; the Umayyad mosque was built atop the Church of St. John the Baptist; and the Hagia Sophia was converted into a mosque upon the conquest of Constantinople.
So, why the name change after touting it as such a model of historical tolerance? Why did Rauf flush his Cordoba explanation down the memory hole prior to announcing his plans for a mosque at Ground Zero? Then flush the name too? Screen shot here in case they flush the memory hole down the memory hole.
Claudia Rosett asks at the end of her piece:
…are there other folks the rest of us have not yet heard about, who are currently buying private property near the Twin Towers site to build yet more mosques and Islamic centers?]
Excellent question.
One Comment
Too many people know the historical meaning of "Cordoba" now as well as the endorsement from SOJOURNERS magazine, founded by Jim Wallis, Obama's spiritual advisor.