The imam behind Cordoba House at Park51, the so-called Ground Zero mosque, has been roundly pilloried by the right for refusing to call Hamas a terrorist organization. It’s a bum rap, but see for yourself in this interview with Feisal Abdul Rauf in the December 27 issue of Newsweek.
Posts Tagged ‘Cordoba House’
Ground Zero mosque imam calls Hamas “a terrorist organization”–again
December 26, 2010Jews, Muslims, history, and the mosque “at” ground Zero
August 9, 2010
I came home from my tenth grade history class and announced, “Today we learned about the fall of Christian Constantinople to the Muslim Ottomans, and what a tragedy it was.” My father corrected me; “Not for the Jews, it wasn’t.” He went on to explain that the Ottoman Sultan, Beyazit I, in 1492 invited all the Jews of Spain, just expelled by Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand, to come live in peace in the Ottoman Empire, then the world’s most powerful. Thousands did, and lived peacefully and prosperously there for centuries, to this day.
Jews and Muslims have gotten on well for most of the time since the days of Mohammed, who honored Jews as “people of the book.” It’s easy today, looking at the enmity between Israel and some of her neighbors, to forget that Jewish culture thrived as never before or since in the “golden age of Jewish culture” in Muslim-ruled Spain, or that the Muslim Beyazit rescued the Jews of Spain and Portugal. Even the Jewish-Muslim conflict in the Middle East is over land, not religion.
So it’s nice to see so many Jews standing up for the rights of American Muslims to build Cordoba House, a community center with prayer area, 2-1/2 blocks from New York’s Ground Zero. NBC News reported, “Jewish Leaders Gather to Support Ground Zero Mosque.”
And Washington’s Jewish Week criticized the position of the Anti-Defamation League (more…)
Ethics Bob 