Check out this revealing nugget at the end of Todd Gitlin's take on Cordoba Initiative leader Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf's book What’s Right with Islam is What’s Right with America (my emphasis):The book closes with an appendix containing a fatwa issued by five Muslim clerics on September 27, 2001, at the request of the most senior Muslim chaplain in the American armed forces. Ending his book with a fatwa! Yes! Cunningly, it’s a “Fatwa Permitting U. S. Muslim Military Personnel to Participate in Afghanistan War Effort.”
What’s Right with Islam, by the way, was published by HarperSanFrancisco, which last I looked is owned by Rupert Murdoch.
So not only is the second-largest shareholder of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. funding Imam Rauf's initiatives in the U.S., but Murdoch himself is responsible for publishing Rauf's theological and political writings.
The fact that conservatives haven't blasted Murdoch's links to Imam Rauf demonstrates the insincerity of their attacks on Imam Rauf and American Muslims. As Gitlin argues (and should be obvious from the book's title), Imam Rauf's book is in fact a celebration of the U.S. Constitution, an embrace of religious freedom and pluralism, and an outright rejection of radical fundamentalism.
Imam Rauf's critics -- like Rick Santorum who last night called him a jihadist -- attack him as being outside of the ideological mainstream of American political and religious thinking, but their claims are without merit. Indeed, the Bush and Obama administrations asked Imam Rauf to represent the United States to the Islamic world precisely because he believes that the United States form of government should be a model for Muslims across the world -- not the other way around.
Indeed, in many respects, Rauf's critics have more in common with the fundamentalist Muslims they claim to be fighting than they do with mainstream Americans -- including Imam Rauf. The critics are the problem. Not Imam Rauf.
Written by Jed Lewison | DailyKos.com
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