Showing posts with label Daisy Khan. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Daisy Khan. Show all posts

Thursday, September 16, 2010

Pamela Geller goes after "lowlife" GZ mosque promoter

Look what's crawling out from under the Rauf. Without his Albright résumé and subdued dhimmedia running interference, it is plain as day that this hustler, the renowned "moderate" Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf of the Park 51 Ground Zero mega-mosque initiative, is a lowlife. He has been exposed as a rat and vermin slumlord whose tenants live without basic services like hot water. He scammed New Jersey politicians and got taxpayer dollars for rehabilitation of his infested, dilapidated buildings in Union City and Palisades Park, but still his victimized tenants live in squalor. So where's the money?

The New Jersey Record reported that Rauf was sued for mortgage fraud in 2008 and settled the suit in June of that year. The suit reveals that Rauf owns two apartment buildings, one of which has been vacant since a fire broke out there -- a year after Rauf ignored citations for twelve different fire code violations.

That's not all. It has also recently come to light that Rauf and his wife, Daisy "the Con" Khan, listed their apartment as a mosque in order to conduct what amounts to tax fraud. Rauf was able to obtain tax-exempt status for his Muslim organization by deceiving the Internal Revenue Service: he told them that five hundred Muslims met regularly for worship at a "mosque" that was actually a tiny one-bedroom apartment (also listed as Daisy's residence). Rauf sought "church status" -- an official IRS term for a house of worship of any religion (though stealth Rauf, I am sure, is working the feds to change that term) -- for his organization, the American Society for Muslim Advancement (ASMA), and the clueless feds granted the request.

Gaining "church status" means much more than just that your organization doesn't have to pay taxes. It also means that you have very little accountability about how you spend your money.

Is New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg still kissing the backside of this "bridge-builder"?

And that's not all that's unsavory about the money that's pouring into the building of the mega-mosque and the people connected with this scheme. Rauf's thug developer in the project to build an Islamic supremacist mega-mosque on Ground Zero, Sharif El-Gamal, has a rap sheet a mile long. He recently wrote that "when you beat up someone physically you get exercise & stress relief," and it seems clear that he spoke from experience. And his financier, Hisham Elzanaty, was a large funder of Hamas (exposed in the Holy Land Foundation jihad terror funding trial) while defrauding Medicare out of hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Tell me again: where is this thug getting 125 million dollars? El-Gamal is now being evicted for non-payment of rent for his SoHo office.

Saturday, August 28, 2010

If you're outspokenly critical of America, the White House may send you as an ambassador on a tour of the Middle East

Among the prime planners of a $100 million Islamic center and mosque near Ground Zero, it's not just Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf who is visiting the Middle East this summer at U.S. taxpayer expense. The State Department is also about to send Rauf's wife and Cordoba Initiative fellow director, Daisy Khan, on her own taxpayer-funded "public diplomacy" trip to the United Arab Emirates. Khan is scheduled to visit the UAE from Aug. 29 to Sept. 2, overlapping there with Rauf, for whom it will be the final leg of a three-country trip including Bahrain and Qatar.

The U.S. Embassy in the UAE capital of Abu Dhabi has posted on its website an announcement of the impending visit by this husband-wife team. Rauf and Khan will be there, the announcement says, "to engage foreign audiences and build people-to-people ties" and to "discuss their experiences as Muslims living and working in the United States."

What might their discussions entail? Rauf, since his Cordoba Initiative's Ground Zero mosque project triggered a national uproar, has spent the summer as an enigma. Before embarking on his State-sponsored tour, he walled himself off for weeks in Malaysia, where he has longstanding ties and keeps an office. His Cordoba website now features a note that Rauf could not be available (apparently not even by phone) to explain himself to the people of New York because "he travels the world in his life-long endeavor to bring the message of moderation, peace and understanding to both Western and Islamic countries."

In Rauf's absence, Daisy Khan has been speaking prolifically from New York about the Cordoba House mega-mosque project (which the developer recently re-dubbed Park 51, and the Cordoba House is now describing as a "community center"). Her message, like the name of the project, has been morphing at speed. When Rauf and Khan won approval for their 15-story mosque-topped Cordoba House from a Manhattan community board this spring, they advertised their project as all about doing their part for harmony and healing near the site of the Sept. 11 attacks.

When it turned out that a majority of New Yorkers, and Americans generally, think this project is more like rubbing salt in a wound, Khan shifted focus. She's now talking about the Cordoba project as a test of American religious tolerance. If a majority of Americans--cognizant that the Sept. 11 attacks were carried out by Muslims, in the name of Islam--think it's inappropriate to stage that test near the edge of Ground Zero, Khan's retort is that they must be bigots. In an interview last week with the Washington Post's Sally Quinn, she lamented: "When will Muslims be accepted as plain old Americans?"

On Sunday, interviewed on ABC TV's This Week by Christiane Amanpour, Khan ratcheted up her complaints. Amanpour asked, "Is America Islamophobic?"

Khan replied, "It's not even Islamophobia, it's beyond Islamophobia. It's hate of Muslims."

Wednesday, August 25, 2010

Critics argue Imam Rauf supports suicide bombers, Iranian repression, radical clerics and adoption of sharia law by the west

Almost as controversial as the proposed Park51 Islamic community center two blocks north of Ground Zero is the man behind the project, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf. Opponents of the "Ground Zero mosque" are building a case that Rauf is a "cynically brilliant" Islamic extremist in sheep's clothing, while supporters call him and fellow Park51 organizers "the kind of Muslim leaders right-wing commentators fantasize about: modernists and moderates who openly condemn the death cult of al Qaeda and its adherents." Who is the real Rauf? (Listen to some of Imam Rauf's controversial comments)

What's his background?

Born in Kuwait in 1948, Rauf has lived in New York since 1965, and has a physics degree from Columbia. He's been imam of Masjid al-Farah, a Sufi mosque in New York City's TriBeCa neighborhood, since 1983. Rauf has written three books on Islam and how it fits into Western society. He's married to his second wife, Daisy Khan.

Was he raised Sufi?

No. His father, Muhammad Abdul Rauf, was a more conservative Sunni Muslim who, with the support of Egypt, taught and studied at universities and mosques outside the Middle East. The elder Rauf moved his family around to England, Malaysia, and then the U.S. The exposure to different religions and Islamic traditions led Feisal to shift to the more moderate and mystical Sufi Islam.

What was Rauf best known for before the Park51 controversy?

Since the 1990s he has been heavily involved in interfaith dialogue with Christian and Jewish leaders, and has founded two nonprofits focused on building bridges between American Muslims, U.S. society, and the Muslim world: The American Society for Muslim Advancement (1997) and the Cordoba Initiative (2003). After 9/11, Rauf did sensitivity training for the FBI and has gone on four U.S.-sponsored speaking tours to the Mideast since 2007 to discuss how Islam meshes with American religious pluralism.

What's the case for him being a "stealth" extremist?

Critics say his peace-and-brotherhood talk covers up support for Palestinian suicide bombers, Iran's repressive Islamic government, radical Muslim clerics, and the imposition of Sharia law in the West. To support these charges, his detractors cite Rauf's refusal to call Hamas a terrorist group and his equating of certain U.S. actions with Islamic terrorism. The Cordoba Initiative and its Park51 project aren't about dialogue, critics say, but rather about proselytizing and spreading Islam.

Is the case persuasive?

Though a few of Rauf's speeches contain some jarring notes (see quotes below), those who have known him for a long time are surprised by the allegations. "To stereotype him as an extremist is just nuts," says the Very Rev. James P. Morton, longtime dean of the Church of St. John the Divine.