Imam Rauf: "In A True Peace, Israel Will, In Our Lifetimes, Become One More Arab Country" (Update--New Website: Fire The Imam!)

By now you have to be willfully blind not to know that the imam in charge of the project, Feisal Abdul Rauf, is the moderate Muslim we have allegedly been yearning for.
Maureen Dowd

Actually, not so much allegedly yearning as allegedly moderate.

From today's Wall Street Journal:

In a letter published on November 27, 1977, Mr. Rauf commented on Egyptian President Anwar Sadat's historic trip to Israel and encouraged his fellow Muslims to "give peace a chance." That John Lennon lyric sounds good. But he added: "For my fellow Arabs I have the following special message: Learn from the example of the Prophet Mohammed, your greatest historical personality. After a state of war with the Meccan unbelievers that lasted for many years, he acceded, in the Treaty of Hudaybiyah, to demands that his closest companions considered utterly humiliating. Yet peace turned out to be a most effective weapon against the unbelievers."


He's referring to a treaty in the year 628 that established a 10-year truce between the Prophet Muhammad and Meccan leaders and was viewed by Muslims at the time as a defeat. But Muhammad used that period to consolidate his ranks and re-arm, eventually leading to his conquest of Mecca. Imam Rauf seems to be saying that Muslims should understand Sadat's olive branch in the same way, as a short-term respite leading to ultimate conquest.

To drive that point home, he added in the same letter that "In a true peace it is impossible that a purely Jewish state of Palestine can endure. . . . In a true peace, Israel will, in our lifetimes, become one more Arab country, with a Jewish minority."

This letter was published 33 years ago--that is a long time and Rauf's views may very well have changed. We can't just arbitrarily assume that these are his views today.

But the Wall Street Journal did ask Rauf about that letter--and whether he still held by those views, and here is his response:

It is amusing that journalists are combing through letters-to-the-editor that I wrote more than 30 years ago, when I was a young man, for clues to my evolution. As I re-read those letters now, I see that they express the same concerns—a desire for peaceful solutions in Israel, and for a humane understanding of Iran—that I have maintained, and worked hard on, in the years since those letters were published.[emphasis added]

What Rauf avoids addressing is the fact that his "desire for a peaceful solution in Israel" is that there should be no Israel--that peace is actually a ruse to bring about one more Muslim country. Well, Rauf is entitled to his opinion. But the fact that he continues to sidestep questions about his motivations to build a mosque 2 blocks from Ground Zero reveals a slipperiness that only serve to justify concerns of his opponents.

UPDATE: There is a new website up, petitioning Secretary of State Clinton to Fire The Imam.

Technorati Tag: Israel and Gaza and Hamas and Operation Cast Lead.