World

Peace Or Hate?

Will the real Imam Rauf please stand up?

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FORUM

Sue Fishkoff and Ami Eden
Jewish Telegraphic Agency

San Francisco

W

ho is Feisel Abdul Rauf?

Initially, the controversy
over building a $100 million
Muslim community center and mosque
two blocks from Ground Zero was about
location, location, location. Increasingly,
however, attention has turned to the
61-year-old Sufi imam behind the project.
Depending on who you ask, Rauf —
currently in the Middle East as part of
a U.S.-funded outreach program to the
Muslim world — is a dedicated interfaith
activist, a stealth apologist for Islamist
terrorism or something else.
Those looking to defend Rauf in Jewish
circles have a new card to play: It turns
out that the imam delivered a moving
speech at the 2003 memorial service held
in a Manhattan synagogue for Daniel
Pearl, the journalist murdered by Islamist
terrorists in Pakistan.
Invoking Pearl's final words before his
beheading, Rauf declared: "If to be a Jew
means to say with all one's heart, mind
and soul, `Sh'ma Yisrael Adonai Elohenu
Adonai Ehad — hear 0 Israel, the Lord
our God, the Lord is One, not only today I
am a Jew, I have always been one'
The speech was cited two weeks ago
by Jeffrey Goldberg on his influential
Atlantic.com blog, and then mentioned on
one of journalism's biggest stages: Frank
Rich's lengthy Sunday column in the Week
in Review section of the New York Times.
On his blog, Goldberg called Rauf "a
moderate, forward-leaning Muslim:' and
said the imam's words showed courage
because "any Muslim imam who stands
before a Jewish congregation and says 'I
am a Jew' is placing his life in danger"
Rauf's other supporters note that he
is a frequent participant in interfaith
dialogues and condemns terrorism and
fanaticism.
His critics, however, paint a different
picture, accusing Rauf of paying lip ser-
vice to such sentiments, while either fail-
ing to offer strong criticism — by name
— of foreign governments and organi-
zations engaged in terrorism, or mak-
ing common cause with anti-American
Islamists.

42 September 2 • 2010

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Abdul Rauf

The critics come armed with their
own set of quotes: Shortly after the 9-11
attacks, the imam told "60 Minutes" that
"I wouldn't say that the United States
deserved what happened; but the United
States policies were an accessory to the
crime that happened."
In a radio interview in June with
WABC's Aaron Klein, Rauf described him-
self as a "supporter of Israel: but declined
to label Hamas as a terrorist group, say-
ing,"I do not want to be placed nor will I
accept a position where I am the target of
one side or another."
And last week, his detractors were
trumpeting a 2005 speech in Adelaide,
Australia, in which he cited the impact of
U.S.-led sanctions on Iraq and asserted
that "we tend to forget, in the West, that
the United States has more Muslim blood
on its hands than Al Qaeda has on its
hands of innocent non-Muslims:'
The stakes are high in the battle to
define Rauf as an interfaith leader or ter-
rorist sympathizer, as the controversy over
the proposed Islamic center has quickly
turned him into the most famous imam
in America. How he is perceived by the
wider public could play a key role not only
in how Americans feel about the project
— polls continue to show large majori-
ties opposed – but also in influencing
U.S. attitudes toward Islam in the years to
come.
So far on his State Department-funded
trip to Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates
and Qatar, Rauf reportedly has avoided

answering questions about the controver-
sial project, stressing instead his efforts to
"Americanize" Islam and find a formula
for Muslims to stay true to their faith
while assimilating into Western societies.
The Bush administration sent him on a
similar trip.
In an interview Aug. 22 with ABC,
Rauf's wife, Daisy Khan, connected these
efforts to the drive to build the Islamic
center. She also said that her husband's
comment in 2001 about the United States
being an "accessory" to the World Trade
Center attacks in New York was a refer-
ence to support that the United States
provided to Osama bin Laden and the
Taliban in the 1980s.
Regarding Hamas, the website of Rauf's
Cordoba Initiative states: "llamas is both
a political movement and a terrorist
organization. When Hamas commits atro-
cious acts of terror, those actions should
be condemned. Imam Feisal [Rauf] has
forcefully and consistently condemned all
forms of terrorism, including those com-
mitted by Hamas, as un-Islamic."
Khan appeared on "This Week With
Christiane Amanpour" with Rabbi Joy
Levitt, the executive director of the JCC
in Manhattan. Both women said that
Levitt and the JCC have been advising
the effort to build the Islamic center.
Levitt said that the JCC had invited Khan
and her husband to speak at the JCC in
September, and called on other Jewish
and Christian community centers to do
likewise "because clearly what this whole

controversy has unleashed is a tremen-
dous amount of misinformation, lack of
knowledge about Islam that we need to
address."
Such appearances seem unlikely to
sway at least one opponent of building an
Islamic center so close to Ground Zero at
this time — Judea Pearl, Daniel's father
and a computer science professor at the
University of California, Los Angeles.
Pearl said that while he was "touched"
by Rauf's appearance and speech at his
son's memorial, "many Muslim leaders
offered their condolences at the time."
More to the point, Pearl said he is dis-
couraged that the Muslim leadership has
not followed through on what he hoped
would come from his son's death.
"At the time, I truly believed Danny's
murder would be a turning point in the
reaction of the civilized world toward
terrorism:' said Pearl, who engages
in public conversations with Akbar
Ahmed, an Islamic studies professor at
American University, on behalf of the
Daniel Pearl Dialogue for Muslim-Jewish
Understanding.
The established Muslim leadership in
the United States, Pearl said, "has had
nine years to build up trust by proac-
tively resisting anti-American ideologies
of victimhood, anger and entitlement.
Reactions to the mosque project indicate
that they were not too successful in this
endeavor."
Pearl views the controversy to be a vote
of no confidence in the organized Muslim
leadership, not specifically against Rauf.
"If I were [New York] Mayor Bloomberg,
I would reassert their right to build the
mosque, but I would expend the same
energy trying to convince them to put it
somewhere else he said. "Public reaction
tells us that it is not the right time; and
that it will create further animosity and
division in this country."
Israeli scholar Yossi Klein Halevi is
another journalist throwing his hat in the
imam's bio ring.
He met Rauf in September 2001 at
Drew University at a symposium for "At
the Entrance to the Garden of Eden:'
Halevi's chronicle of the year he spent
learning about the three Abrahamic faiths.
Rauf was, Halevi said, "one of the

Peace or Hate? on page 44