Free Republic

Back in 2010, a group of Muslim investors wanted to build a mosque near Ground Zero in lower Manhattan. This sparked outrage with millions of Americans who found it to be a slap in the face to allow a mosque to be built near such hollowed ground. The man behind it all was Hashim Elzanaty who along with eight other investors purchased the location and set the plans in place. But a famous billionaire New Yorker stepped in to stop the development. He did this by offering Elzanty $6 million to purchase the property from him — a dollar amount...

Monday on “CNN Tonight,” host Don Lemon interviewed Feisal Abdul Rauf , the imam behind the so-called “Ground Zero Mosque” and chairman of the Cordoba Initiative, about GOP front-runner Donald Trump’s recently announced stance on Muslims entering the United States.

The founder of the controversial Ground Zero Mosque allegedly spent more than $3 million that had been donated to charity to fund a first-class lifestyle that involved 'lavish trips, luxury sports cars and personal real estate.' Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf was slapped with a $20 million lawsuit by, Robert Leslie Deak, a major backer to his nonprofit who alleges the wild spending in the papers filed in Manhattan Supreme Court. Rauf's charity, the Cordoba Initiative, received $3 million from the Malaysian as well as another $167,000 from private donors. That money was meant to counter anti-Islamic sentiment but instead went...

America is a seething hotbed of “Islamophobia,” filled with ignorant racist rubes who irrationally fear the benign Muslim religion, according to the Obama administration’s lead investigator into the Benghazi atrocities. So said former Ambassador Thomas R. Pickering in more polished, diplomatic language during an Oct. 23 panel discussion at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. The talk was on “what role the faith community can play in fighting Islamophobia,” a make-believe mental illness that Islamists would love to have listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Radical Islam’s stateside defenders frequently accuse anti-terrorism hawks of “McCarthyism,” hurling...

NEW YORK (AP) -- The developer of an Islamic cultural center that opened Wednesday evening near the site of the terrorist attacks that leveled the World Trade Center says the biggest error on the project was not involving the families of 9/11 victims from the start. People crowded into the center, where a small orchestra played traditional Middle Eastern instruments and a photo exhibit of New York children of different ethnicities lined the walls. The enthusiasm at the opening belied its troubled beginnings. snip He called opposition to the center - which prompted one of the most virulent national discussions...

My earlier prediction from September:Imam Rauf decided to pick a spot near Ground Zero so that there would be an outcry… and he’ll keep stringing this along until one day when he’ll do the “honorable” and “right thing”: announce that instead of an Islamic Community Center which promotes Interfaith Understanding, he’ll build an Interfaith Center devoted equally to all religions… and the crowds will cheer and people will actually be happy about an Interfaith Center… maybe for the first time ever...recent article from March 30:Two co-founders of the controversial plan to build an Islamic cultural center and mosque two blocks...

There has been a shakeup at the Cordoba Initiative/Park 51, the group behind the projected Islamic supremacist mega-mosque at Ground Zero. The deceitful pro-Sharia Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf and his wife Daisy Khan are out, and an imam from Washington, D.C., Abdullah Adhami, is in. What does this mean? First, it means that we won. We are declaring victory. It seems clear that Rauf had to go because he had become a liability to the taqiyya project of the Ground Zero mosque. And that is because of the light we shed on his true beliefs and allegiances. Rauf snagged more...

The organization planning to build an Islamic community center near the World Trade Center said the imam who has been the public face of the project, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, will be playing a reduced role in the facility. The nonprofit group Park51 announced Friday that it had named a new imam to help lead religious programing so that Rauf could focus on other initiatives. Rauf announced late this fall that he would be starting a global movement that would fight extremism and promote better relations between people of different faiths and cultures. He is set to start a national...

Judicial Watch announced today that it has filed a petition with the New York State Supreme Court to compel New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s office to comply with a Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) request regarding contacts between the Mayor’s office, Ground Zero Mosque Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, and controversial Muslim organizations. Judicial Watch is seeking the following information pursuant to its open records request filed on August 9, 2010: a. All records of communication between the Office of the Mayor and Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf concerning the Cordoba Initiative’s proposed Cordoba House project. b. All records of communication...

They're emailing each other? The New York Daily News reported Thursday that "Mayor Bloomberg's top deputies went to great lengths to help those trying to build a mosque at Ground Zero - even drafting a letter to the community board for them, newly released documents show. City Hall on Thursday released a flurry of emails between its brass and Feisal Abdul Rauf, the imam pushing to build a mosque near the sensitive site, and his supporters." It's worse than we imagined. The release of these documents, emails and various exchanges between Mayor Bloomberg's office and the radical Imam Rauf and...

SaudiKing Abdullah, in an effort to quiet Muslim criticism in the United States, is quietly looking into moving the ground zero mosque to a less controversial Manhattan location, according to news reports surfacing Sunday. New York lawyer Dudley Gaffin has contacted officials about the Saudi royal family's interest in moving the ground zero mosque to the shuttered St. Vincent’s Hospital site in the West Village, the New York Post and other news organizations reported Sunday. According to Mr. Gaffin, the king wants to save the hospital, which filed for bankruptcy earlier this year, and provide an alternative location for the...

The Two Faces of Feisal RaufWhat's wrong with What's Right With Islam. This is part two of a two-part series. You can read part one here.The problems with Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf’s book What’s Right with Islam begin with the title. As Andrew McCarthy noted on National Review Online, the book, whose full title is now What’s Right with Islam: A New Vision for Muslims and the West, was previously called What’s Right with Islam Is What’s Right with America; before that, it was published in Malaysia as A Call to Prayer from the World Trade Center Rubble: Islamic Dawa in the Heart of...

The ranking member on the House Homeland Security Committee accused the imam behind the mosque project near Ground Zero of arm-twisting and "blackmailing" to push Park51 through. "To me, it's almost as if he's blackmailing and threatening the United States that somehow if the mosque is not approved or people speak out against his mosque, you have to worry about being attacked by Islamic terrorists," Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.) said of Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf on Fox Business Network on Friday. King said that the Islamic center was being "put their to make a statement, not to build bridges, but...

Rauf on the Ropes An Islamic community center at Ground Zero seems increasingly unlikely. 13 September 2010 The white flag hasn’t reached the top of the flagpole yet, but Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf all but surrendered on Monday morning in his battle to build a Muslim interfaith community center with a prayer room two blocks from Ground Zero. At an unusual meeting Monday morning at the Council on Foreign Relations in midtown Manhattan, Rauf said that he wanted to find a “solution” to the furious imbroglio over the planned center, which opponents say is inappropriate, insensitive to the memory of...

Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer Spencer and I are speaking at Temple University next week (where the craven quislings tried to silence Geert Wilders after trying to ban him). Thought you might like a look at the open minded "Democratic Socialists" at Temple. Here is the note from the brave organizers: At a State of the Campus Address in which at least 280 leaders from all student organizations were present, the Democratic Socialists announced that they were organizing a protest against TU Purpose's Islamophobic event next week. They concluded by calling TU Purpose and me Bigots. Atlas readers heads up....

So far, the debate over the proposed Islamic center near Ground Zero has unfolded along predictable lines, with the man at the center of the project, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, drawing attacks from the right painting him as a terrorist sympathizer with ties to Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood. But meanwhile, links between the group behind the controversial mosque, the CIA and U.S. military establishment have gone unacknowledged.

Okay, okay it’s a little premature. But President Obama won the award and he hadn’t done a single thing to bring in world peace. Terry Jones went from being the most hated man alive to the one man in the country willing to stand up to Islam. After deciding to cancel, or at least postpone the burning of Qurans, perhaps he will even persuade one group of Muslims to back down from their plans to build a mosque two or three blocks from Ground Zero, the place where we lost thousands on 9/11. (Let's never forget they also attacked the...

(CNN) -- Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, the religious leader behind plans to erect an Islamic center and mosque a few blocks from New York's ground zero, said Wednesday night that moving it to another location would embolden Islamic radicals and help them incite violence against Americans. "If we move from that location, the story will be the radicals have taken over the discourse," Rauf told CNN's Soledad O'Brien on "Larry King Live." Rauf said he was speaking about "radicals" on both sides of the debate on the Islamic center. "Our national security now hinges on how we negotiate this, how...

"...Imam Rauf’s project is better known here now as the “Ground Zero mosque,” after the term for the World Trade Center site. Families of victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and conservative politicians have mounted an emotional campaign to block it, claiming that locating it only two blocks north of the site was a provocation. “We repeatedly say we are neither a mosque nor within Ground Zero, but they just shout back ‘Ground Zero mosque,’ ‘Ground Zero mosque,’” Imam Rauf, 61, told Reuters in an interview. The planned building will have a prayer room for Muslims, he said, but...

Court records from Florida to New York state reveal that Sharif and his younger brother, Samir "Sammy" El-Gamal, 35, a partner with him in his company SoHo Properties, both have a history replete with intersections with tax and debt issues, dating back to at least 1994 and continuing into this year. In one instance, Sharif told a court he didn't hit a tenant from whom his brother and he were trying to collect back rent. He said to police, the tenant's "face could have run into my hand." The New York Post reported yesterday that Sharif and SoHo Properties are...