Wrong on Rauf

by Andy McCarthy
National Review Online
January 19, 2011

https://www.legal-project.org/1080/wrong-on-rauf

Excerpt:

Imam Feisal Rauf, the cleric behind the provocative Ground Zero Mosque (GZM) project, as one critic put it, "is no moderate. He presents himself as a peacemaking Islamic Gandhi, but he is in fact an apologist for the terrorist outfit Hamas, which he refuses even to identify as a terrorist organization."

You might be forgiven for thinking that came from Sarah Palin. If you've been reading NRO lately, you saw published here on Monday "Palin Libels Rauf," an essay by Henry Payne. Payne accuses the former Alaska governor of "libel" — his word — because she described Imam Rauf as a Hamas apologist who refused to identify that terrorist organization as a terrorist organization. But the quoted words were written by the editors of National Review. On August 4, 2010, as controversy raged over the GZM, NRO published an editorial describing Rauf as a wolf in sheep's clothing. Based on a number of disturbing facts that have not to this day been refuted, the editorial ("Not at Ground Zero") portrayed the imam as a faux moderate collaborating with Muslim Brotherhood front groups to build a huge mosque and Islamic center on what the editors described as "the gravesite of 3,000 Americans who died at the hands of Islamic radicals" — a prospect the editors quite rightly called "unseemly."

Now, I'm all for a good debate. That's what NRO is here for. But a debate is a discussion in which adversaries actually address their points of disagreement. Payne doesn't address any of the troubling matters that have been raised about Rauf, not only by NR's editors and Sarah Palin, but by many, many others. Allowed to exploit NR's megaphone, he treats our readers to a mendacious puff piece, leveling the weighty charge of libel while whitewashing the rich underlying basis for regarding Rauf as an apologist for Islamist terrorists in general, and for Hamas in particular.

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