Wrong On [Imam] Rauf

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Here is a recent piece in the National Review Online by Andrew C. McCarthy who refutes that Sarah Palin did not libel the Ground Zero imam Rauf.

Excerpt:
If you’ve been reading NRO lately, you saw published here on Monday “Palin Libels Rauf,” an essay by Henry Payne. Payne accuses the former Alaska governor of “libel” — his word — because she described Imam Rauf as a Hamas apologist who refused to identify that terrorist organization as a terrorist organization. But the quoted words were written by the editors of National Review. On August 4, 2010, as controversy raged over the GZM, NRO published an editorial describing Rauf as a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Based on a number of disturbing facts that have not to this day been refuted, the editorial (“Not at Ground Zero”) portrayed the imam as a faux moderate collaborating with Muslim Brotherhood front groups to build a huge mosque and Islamic center on what the editors described as “the gravesite of 3,000 Americans who died at the hands of Islamic radicals” — a prospect the editors quite rightly called “unseemly.”
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Source: nationalreview.com/author/52265/latest

It is worth the read especially now that imam Rauf is replaced with another imam who is quite the moderate to pave the way of the Ground Zero Mosque or as some would aptly put it, Park 51.

There was a past thread last October here on Catholic Answer Forums on whether or not the controversial Ground Zero Mosque should be built. Each person gave their view, some were opposed and others were for the building.

Let us open the discussion again since a few months have passed; maybe you’ve changed your mind, or remain with the same stance, and maybe for those of you, this is just setting in:

What do you think of the Ground Zero Mosque/Park 51? Should or should it not be built? And why?
 
I still think building the mosque not only should be allowed but also accepted by the public. The attempts to associate the Imam with radical fringes are tellingly imprecise. For example, the Review piece says: “Based on a number of disturbing facts that have not to this day been refuted” could just as easily say “Based on a number of disturbing -]facts/-] accusations that have not to this day been -]refuted/-] substantiated”

The issue of Hamas to me is very much overblown. To put it in terms people might be more sympathetic to, I will offer this analogy. Say that there is a Baptist working on interfaith relations between say Catholics and Baptists. If this person were asked “Do you think that Catholics are idolaters?” he would likely avoid the question because, while he himself does not believe in transubstantiation, to answer yes could only harm his dialogue with Catholics. This is all the Imam is doing. He knows that members of Hamas committed terrorist acts, but condemning an organization outright is not conducive to constructive dialogue.

Moreover when he says things like this: “I wouldn’t say that the United States deserved what happened, but the United States policies were an accessory to the crime that happened.” I completely agree, and think it is willfully ignorant for people to deny. He is not being anti-American, he is not being radical, he is very diplomatically pointing out that the US’ policies are not always the pinnacles of justice and liberty we would like to think they are.

Lastly, the article seemed very much to want its readers to dehumanize terrorists. It is easy to do, they are our stated enemy after all. However, to deny that they are humans with complex emotions and motivations is foolish and un-Christian. The Imam is not “apologizing” for terrorists, he is pointing out what drives people to terrorism. If we are serious about stopping terrorism, this bottom up approach is something we should have been looking at all along. Moreover, the article seemed to advocate a sort of crusades mentality, a modern day “Caedite eos! Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius.” The Imam is reminding us that we can’t kill our way to a solution, we have to, at some point, address the conditions which foster terrorism.
 
Kadaveri said:
By the way the quote attributed to Hasan Nasrallah in this video is a fabrication. No one has ever provided an original source (or the original Arabic) for this quote, which if it were genuine would not be difficult to do seeing how Nasrallah’s speeches well publicised and his most famous have been published in book form.
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So you don’t believe he hates Jews?
 
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