Tuesday, August 24, 2010

liberals and Park 51

Two recent articles on the Park 51 fiasco and Feisal Abdul Rauf

Cordoba House Advisers Include Liberal-Zionist Rabbis

On Sunday ABC’s Christiane Amanpour interviewed Faisal Abdul Rauf’s wife, Daisy Khan, along with Rabbi Joy Levitt who heads a Jewish Community Center in New York.

Here are some of Joy Levitt's opinions:

…Join us in telling Congress and the Administration: Because we are committed to Israel’s security, we want to see a security fence that will help protect Israelis from terrorism, but not one that cuts so deeply into the West Bank that it will sacrifice security in favor of settlements, and make a contiguous Palestinian state impossible.

Moderate, rational voices often get drowned out in the crisis of the moment. On American college campuses today criticism of Israel is often barely distinguishable from anti-Semitism. But those who cast Israel as the villain and attack Zionism do the Palestinians no favors.


Here we have a liberal zionist equating anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism - and that the zionist entity should not be considered a villain. It is interesting to see how Daisy Khan and Feisal Abdul Rauf will go to any lengths to appease Zionists, and cry boatloads about "extremists" amongst Muslims. Lets be clear, the likes of Daisy Khan and Feisal Abdul Rauf speak only for their own tiny constituency (including liberal imperialists who like to bury the question of oppression under the goobly talk of new age psuedo-sufism).

The above link includes the full interview, wherein Daisy Khan expresses concerns about "extremists" - like others of her type she fails to define an "extremist." Given how her husband hob nobs with the upper elite of the United States, obviously she does not consider as extremists, those who invaded and destroyed two Muslim majority countries (just in the past decade) resulting in the deaths of upwards of a million Muslims.

Earlier Sunday evening, at sundown, reporters were allowed to watch Mr. Abdul Rauf dine at the American ambassador’s residence with a handpicked group of Bahraini youths, but diplomats tried to prevent journalists from conversing with the guests.


How Liberal Mosque Defenders Are Playing into the Hands of the Islamophobes

Time and again, the public is reminded of the fact that Park51 is not in fact a mosque but an Islamic community center that promotes interfaith dialogue.

Daisy Khan and Imam Rauf, the leading figures behind the Park51 initiative, have not only repeated this mantra, but have in fact produced it. When liberal defenders have wittingly or unwittingly referred to Park51 as a mosque, the response from folks at the Cordoba Initiative has been gratitude in the form of this corrective: Thank you for your support, but Park51 is not a mosque.

Desperate attempts to render inaudible the community center’s Islamic origins have also included several name changes. What was once referred to as Cordoba House became the Community Center at Park Place, and most recently, the amorphous namesake, Park51.

But these efforts -- to present the community center as innocuous via nomenclature -- are just part of the problem; the very same rhetoric is being materially reproduced in the architectural plans for Park51. The structure, as it is currently imagined, literally looks nothing like a mosque. What we see instead of minarets or a crescent moon, is an eyesore that screams of capitalist excess. There appears to be some Islamic influence in the geometric art that may be visible through its glass exterior, but the aesthetics of this structure overwhelmingly suggest that its design is a carefully constructed attempt at attracting as little attention as possible. The gaze of those working and visiting the area will seamlessly move from Park51 to the other glass monuments that line the financial district, and it appears that this is precisely the point.


This kind of architecture proposed by Feisal Abdul Rauf is of-course not an accident, his whole purpose is to create an American Islam (not too far of a variation from Progressive Islam). The architecture described above is representative of who and what Feisal Abdul Rauf wants to ally with in the United States: an eyesore that screams of capitalist excess

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