FSM Exclusive: Ground Zero Mosque Imam’s Radical Connections

Added Clues Suggest MB ties to the Would-be Ground Zero Mosque Chief

by Alyssa A. Lappen
Family Security Matters | Jul. 16, 2010

Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf and his wife Daisy Khan pretend they’re “moderate Muslims.” Yet another crack has appeared in their crumbling facade, however. The New York City office of their American Society for Muslim Advancement (ASMA), at 475 Riverside Drive, has for many years sat in the very building, on the very floor, immediately adjacent to the suite housing the New York City chapter office of the Council of American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the U.S. representative of Hamas.

In 2007, the U.S. Department of Justice declared CAIR an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation terror-funding case. In October 2008, the FBI’s Oklahoma office canceled plans to appear at a Muslim “outreach” event due to CAIR’s participation. In Jan. 2009, FBI offices nationwide were reported to have also severed ties with CAIR. In a Feb. 2009 letter to U.S. Rep. Sue Myrick (R-NC), the FBI confirmed the reports.

Meanwhile on Nov. 24, 2008, HLF and five of its officers were convicted of materially supporting the designated foreign terrorist group, Hamas. Federal prosecutors successfully opposed a petition by CAIR, the Islamic Association of North America (ISNA) and the North American Islamic Trust (NAIT) to expunge their names from the list of alleged HLF coconspirators. A federal judge denied their motion in 2009. Thus CAIR, ISNA and NAIT remain unindicted terror-funding coconspirators.

By itself, sitting on the same floor, in the next suite to CAIR might not establish ASMA’s tight connections to CAIR or the Saudi-based Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), built on Muslim Brotherhood principles. But sharing office buildings, floors and suites is common amongst Islamic terror-funding and supporting organizations. In the most famous example, in the May 2002 federal raid on the Herndon,Va. Safa companies and SAAR Foundation offices at 555 Grove Street, U.S. Treasury Department Operation Green Quest found over a dozen interlinked terror-funding Muslim charities and companies, all subsequently shuttered. They carted off truckloads of evidence. [1]

Rauf, more importantly embraces high-placed members of CAIR NY, whom he includes in the ASMA Muslim Leaders of Tomorrow (MLT) subsidiary. Rauf’s Cordoba Initiative website also openly promotes Muslim Brotherhood and CAIR efforts and radical ideology. In January, Cordoba posted a news clip from the Muslim Brotherhood website Islam Online, protesting British boxing rules prohibiting players with beards. Cordoba likewise features a duplicitous CAIR press release, seeking funds to “rebuild churches in Malaysia” that were “firebombed by extremists.” It’s highly unlikely, however, that an organization charged with terror financing will actually send money raised to Malay Christians whose churches its radical Muslim Brotherhood pals have destroyed.

Then there are Rauf’s MLT appointees. Brooklyn-based Faiza N. Ali, for example, a self-described “community organizer” and “social justice activist,” serves as Community Affairs Director for CAIR NY, which Rauf and MLT let her deceptively describe as “America’s largest Muslim civil rights advocacy group.” Ali also helps lead several other Muslim Brotherhood groups, including the Muslim American Civil Liberties Coalition (MACLC), an offshoot of the MB’s Muslim Consultative Network. Ali’s MLT profile boasts as well that she wrote MACLC’s “Countert-ERROR-ism” (sic) critique of the New York City Police Department’s well-researched and reported 2008 white paper, “Radicalization in the West: the Homegrown Threat.” With a Pace University bachelor’s degree in political science, Ali also led CAIR-NY’s “campaign” to support her dissimulating piece of nonsense.

Rauf hosts other hotshot MB leaders in his MLT subsidiary too, including Dhaba “Debbie” Almontasser, who like Ali worked with the NY chapter of CAIR, Hamas’ U.S. arm, to counter-attack the New York City Police Department. She organized an online discussion group to obtain “input” for CAIR’s “Community Statement.”

Other U.S.-based MLT radicals include Jihad F. Saleh, a top congressional aid to U.S. Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-NY), helping fulfill the legislative goals established by CAIR founder and former chairman Omar Ahmad, who wanted increased Muslim “influence with Congress,” by using Muslims on Capitol Hill “to pressure Congress and the decision makers in America” to shift U.S. foreign policy. (P. David Gaubitz and Paul Sperry, The Muslim Mafia, p. 183) Saleh is not just a Congressional staff point man, though. He has been working closely with national CAIR official and convert Corey Saylor to increase the Muslim Congressional presence through the CAIR-backed Congressional Muslim Staffers Association.

Another, genuine al-Qaeda supporter Yasir Qadhi, serves as academic affairs dean at North America’s “largest and fastest growing college-level Islamic educational” organization, Al Maghrib Institute. Al Qadhi gives frequent radical lectures on the internet, appearing on pages and blogs such as Halal Tube and Mujahadeen Rider, which both frequently mark videos “private,” presumably since Westerners and non-Muslims would take great offense. Al Qadhi doesn’t even need CAIR as his radical middle man.

Several U.S. MLT appointees list no surnames or qualifications whatever. Yet another red flag.

New Yorkers and Americans who consider Rauf a not-so-secret radical are not alone. The devout Bengali Muslim dissident Salah Uddin Shoaib Choudhury agrees that efforts to build a giant mosque opposite Ground Zero are an abomination. Its construction will only delight jihadists, whom he wants to disappoint. His Weekly Blitz newspaper has published many objections to Rauf’s plan, not least of all since New Yorkers are overwhelmingly opposed, considering it as insensitive, say, as “the German government opening … a Nazi appreciation museum right outside the Auschwitz death camp.”

Choudhury has faced such fights before. Bangladesh authorities imprisoned him many times for his pro-American and pro-Israel sentiments and he still faces trial. Lately, a senior Bangladeshi intelligence official has called him repeatedly threatening “consequences if we continued to publish such [“extremely provocative anti-Islamic”] articles.” His newspaper’s required government registration could be revoked. The official merely seeks to appease “Saudis and other anti-American elements,” however, and perhaps even to renew “previous secret affiliations with jihadist groups like Hizb-ut-Tahrir.”

Choudhury will not rest, however. No one else should either.

UPDATE, 7/28/2011

SALAH UDDIN SHOAIB CHOUDHURY EXPOSED AS TOTAL FRAUD

Choudhury evidently perpetrated multiple subterfuges in the decade since 9/11. Since at least 2010, for example, the North Korean government compensated him grandly to publish dozens of “propaganda pieces in his Weekly Blitz newspaper, for dictator Kim Jung il’s House of Horrors,” according to Brenda West’s superb investigative piece today at Family Security Matters.(The above piece also initially ran at FSM, where I am a Contributing Editor.)

Previously, Choudhury had created from whole cloth several fictitious guises, under whose cover he had for years likewise supported North Korea, until dogged Bengali bloggers exposed those frauds.

Regarding Rauf, Choudhury’s observations happen to be truthful and accurate. However, that hardly dignifies this source, who has so often and so effectively duped many Western leaders and journalists, I am sorry to say, including myself. In fact, he has done great harm here too, which may after all have been his intent. For Choudhury’s position in this case provides a glaring example of the proverbial pot calling the kettle black.

Kindly read Brenda West’s impeccable report on Choudhury. I was unaware of his malevolence when writing the above piece, but a deluge of seemingly irrefutable evidence has now been presented.

Therefore, I herewith withdraw any previous statements of support I gave on Chourdhury’s behalf while he purported to be an oppressed journalist and encourage my colleagues and political leaders to do the same. Further, I commit not to cite Choudhury again.

_________________________________

[1] Douglas Farah and John Mintz, “U.S. S. Trails Va. Muslim Money, Ties; Clues Raise Questions About Terror Funding,” Washington Post, Oct. 7, 2002, http://ftrsupplemental.blogspot.com/2002/10/us-trails-va-muslim-money-ties.html (viewed 7/15/2010); Erick Stakelback, “Islamic radicals on campus,” Front Page Magazine, Apr. 23, 2003, http://97.74.65.51/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=18601; Department of Justice documents on U.S. raids on Herndon, Va., Safa and SAAR offices, orig. at DOJ, “106-page US Customs Service affidavit,” http://cryptome.org/safaaffid102003.pdf, “3-page Attachment C Safa Group businesses & corporations,” http://cryptome.org/safaattachc102003.pdf, “9-page ATTACHMENT D Safa Group officers & directors & related bus. & organizations,” http://cryptome.org/safaattachd102003.pdf, “9-page Attachment E glossary of terms, individuals, & organizations relevant to this affidavit,” http://cryptome.org/safaattache102003.pdf and http://www.nefafoundation.org/miscellaneous/FeaturedDocs/SafaAffidavit_AttachmentE.pdf; (all viewed 5/20/2010).

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FSM Exclusive: Peace, Tolerance and Religious Freedom? No Way

Ground Zero mosque wanna-be developers show their true radical colors

by Alyssa A. Lappen
Family Security Matters | Jul. 13, 2010

On October 20, 2009, American Society of Muslim Advancement (ASMA) leader Feisal Abdul Rauf and his wife Daisy Khan, both received a letter from Former Muslims United (FMU) requesting that they each sign the latter’s Freedom Pledge. Neither has yet signed.

Rauf and Khan both claim to be moderate Muslims. Yet they are determined to rip down a 150-year-old wrought iron building — less than 200 feet from Ground Zero — where a piece of jumbo jet fell through its roof on 9/11 after Saudi suicide bombers flew two loaded passenger planes into each of the World Trade Center towers. The fuselage remains in the building to date. In its place, Rauf and Khan want to build a 13-story mosque.

The Cordoba Initiative, an ASMA subsidiary, claims the building will not be a mosque but a “cultural center” open to all. However, ASMA registered itself as a “church” with the Internal Revenue Service — not a cultural institute open to all, according to Guidestar. The building will indeed be a mosque, and open to all only so as to “invite” non-Muslims to Islam. In Malaysia the title of Rauf’s 2004 book What’s Right With Islam, complete with its introduction from Muslim Brotherhood devotee Karen Armstrong, translates to “The Call from the WTC Rubble.” For decades, Rauf and Khan have operated entirely in sync with global Muslim Brotherhood “flexibility” guidelines, which in North America seek to replace the U.S. Constitution with Islamic law.

Now there is new evidence that ASMA’s purportedly “moderate” leaders do not support basic human rights for former Muslims: They failed to even acknowledge an October 20, 2009 invitation from Former Muslims United to sign its Freedom Pledge.

FMU initially sent the Freedom Pledge, fully named the “Muslim Pledge for Religious Freedom and Safety from Harm for Former Muslims,” to 59 major Muslim leaders at 24 Muslim organizations in time for them to have it on September 25, 2009 — the day on which, 220 years earlier, the U.S. Congress passed the Bill of Rights. The letters to Rauf and his wife Daisy Khan were sent in a second Oct. 20, 2009 round of invitations that went to 51 Muslim leaders at 26 more organizations, including ASMA, which houses the Cordoba Initiative.

In their request that Muslim leaders sign the Freedom Pledge, FMU executive director Nonie Darwish, and her colleagues Ibn Warraq, Mohammed Asghar, Wafa Sultan, and Amil Imani wrote

“we now pledge our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor to achieve for former Muslims their unalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. We claim these rights as the foundation for our right to freedom from Shariah. We urge you to join us.”

The 878-word Freedom Pledge itself outlines the principles of Islamic law under which apostates from Islam are subject to the death penalty. It notes that the four schools of Sunni Islam — Hanafi, Miliki, Shafi’i and Hanbali — “unanimously agree that a former Muslim male, also known as an apostate, must be executed” and that a woman, at best must be “imprisoned or beaten five times a day until she repents or dies” and at worst, like men executed outright. It then goes on to cite 1978 and 1989 religious rulings — from the Fatwa Council at Al Azhar University, the closest Muslim equivalent to the Vatican, and the Mufti of Lebanon, each, respectively consigning a renegade Muslim to death if they “do not repent.” Perhaps “a misunderstanding on his part may have taken place, and there would thus be an opportunity to rectify it,” intones the Mufti. But he must do so within three days, or die.

“Overwhelmingly, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf and his wife Daisy Khan … do not honor freedom to choose one’s beliefs as guaranteed under our [U.S.] First Amendment,” said Nonie Darwish in response to their dead silence since October 20, 2009. “That is the only conclusion we can draw” by their failure to acknowledge or sign the Freedom Pledge.

Rauf and Khan nevertheless hope to convince Americans that they think exactly the opposite. On July 6, 2010 at the Chautauqua Institute in New York state, Khan said

“The Quran speaks of humankind as one nation under God. We find that in America,…. The Quran speaks of one creator and the founding document says that everyone is endowed by the creator with inalienable rights.”

During the question and answer period that followed, an audience member asked Khan if the proposed Cordoba House mosque 200 feet from Ground Zero could be seen as a victory for Muslim radicals infiltrating America. She replied,

“It is a defeat to the extremists, … because Cordoba House will celebrate the very ideology that the extremists detest, which is the ideology of inclusiveness, pluralism, and coexistence between faiths.”

Khan referred there specifically to Quran Chapter 3, verse 109, which states,

“To God belongs all that is in the heavens and in the earth, and unto Him all matters are returned.”

However, she deceptively omits the critical following verse, 3:110, clearly stating that Muslims alone — not other human beings — are acceptable to Allah.

“You are the best nation ever brought forth to men, bidding to honor, and forbidding dishonor, and believing in God. Had the People of the Book believed, it were better for them; some of them are believers, but the most of them are ungodly.”

The point is reiterated, moreover, in the Tafsir (commentary) on the verse by al-Jalalayn:

“You, O community of Muhammad (s), are the best community brought forth, manifested, to men, according to God’s knowledge, enjoining decency, and forbidding indecency, and believing in God. Had the People of the Scripture believed, it, their belief, would have been better for them; some of them are believers, such as ‘Abd Allah b. Sala’m, may God be pleased with him and his companions; but most of them, the disbelievers, are wicked.”

The Quran expresses the same revulsion for non-Muslim “disbelievers” in Chapter 98, verse 6:

“The unbelievers of the People of the Book and the idolaters shall be in the Fire of Gehenna, therein dwelling forever; those are the worst of creatures.”

The al-Jalalayn Tafsir on this verse is equally adamant about the evils of unbelievers:

“Truly the disbelievers from among the People of the Scripture and the idolaters shall be in the fire of Hell, to abide therein (khÄlidÄ«na: an implied circumstantial qualifier, in other words, it will be decreed for them by God, exalted be He, to abide therein) ‘those are the worst of creatures’.”

This is not the stuff of sweetness, love and light. Rather, it reflects Rauf’s genuine feelings, as he has more than once expressed in Arabic. Clearly, Rauf himself reveres sharia law and wants to impose it. On Dec. 9, 2007, Rauf told the popular Arabic newspaper Hadi el-Islam,

“Throughout my discussions with contemporary Muslim theologians, it is clear an Islamic state can be established in more than just a single form or mold. It can be established through a kingdom or a democracy. The important issue is to establish the general fundamentals of Sharia that are required to govern.

“In the period after the Prophet, peace be upon him, new laws were permitted so long of course as these laws do not contradict the Quran or the Deeds of Muhammad… so they create institutions that assure [that there are] no conflicts with sharia.

“We recommend that in the case of a breakdown in the relationship between state and religious institutions … that the people follow the method of giving peaceful advice to governors and state institutions and use peaceful means [to convert them].

“And also [to] suggest that the rulers and political bodies consult with religious bodies and religious figures … so that [political] decisions reflect the spirit of the [sharia] law.

In March 2010, he even denounced interfaith discussions. The article in another popular Arabic journal, Rights4All, was entitled “The Most Prominent Imam in New York: ‘I Do Not Believe in Religious Dialogue’,” according to former Muslim and native Arabic speaker Walid Shoebat. In it, Rauf spoke against both “religious dialogue” and “interweaving into the mainstream society.”

“This phrase is inaccurate. Religious dialogue as customarily understood is a set of events with discussions in large hotels that result in nothing. Religions do not dialogue and dialogue is not present in the attitudes of the followers, regardless of being Muslim or Christian.”

Given these sentiments, it is no wonder whatever that neither Rauf nor his wife Daisy Khan would sign the FMU Freedom Pledge, promising to

“renounce, repudiate and oppose any physical intimidation, or worldly and corporal punishment, of apostates from Islam, in whatever way that punishment may be determined or carried out by myself or any other Muslim including the family of the apostate, community, Mosque leaders, Shariah court or judge, and Muslim government or regime.”

In fact, only two of the 111 Muslim leaders in 50 U.S. Muslim organizations to whom FMU sent the Freedom Pledge actually signed it. Those two heroes are Zuhdi Jasser (American Islamic Forum for Democracy) and Dr. Ali Alyami (Center for Democracy and Human Rights in Saudi Arabia).

The sad facts are these:

The results of the FMU Freedom Pledge — to date sent to 163 American Muslim leaders at 50 organizations — show that less than 1.3% of American Muslim leaders are actually moderate.

Neither Feisal Abdul Rauf nor Daisy Khan fall into that moderate category — despite their massive efforts to pull the wool over public and political eyes. Their silence concerning human rights for former Muslims proves it, although certainly, so do many of their other actions, not least their long history of subterfuge concerning their real intentions.

At Chautauqua on July 6, Daisy Khan should have told the truth: Yes, allowing a mosque to go up in place of an historic building at Ground Zero would be a triumph for extremist Muslims. Moreover, ASMA and the Cordoba Institute are among the heavy weight extremists leading that charge.

FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributor Alyssa A. Lappen is a U.S.-based investigative journalist focusing on the Middle East and Islam. She is a former Senior Fellow for the American Center for Democracy (2005-2008); former Senior Editor of Institutional Investor (1993-1999), Working Woman (1991-1993) and Corporate Finance (1991).