The State Department's top spokesman cautioned reporters
Tuesday not to take snippets of edited remarks on the Internet by the "Ground
Zero mosque" imam and use them to brand him a radical, lest they repeat the
mistakes made by the media in calling former USDA official Shirley Sherrod a
racist based on edited clips of her promoted on conservative websites.
Imam Feisal Rauf,
the spiritual leader of the proposed Park 51 community center in lower
Manhattan, is
on his State Department-sponsored trip to the Persian Gulf right now,
giving speeches in Bahrain, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates about what it's
like to be a Muslim in America.
Rauf has been traveling on behalf of the department
since 2007 on trips sponsored by both the Obama and George W. Bush administrations. He belongs to the progressive Sufi
sect of Islam and has been praised as a bridge-builder even by conservative
pro-Israel bloggers, such as the Atlantic's
Jeffrey Goldberg, who has had extensive interactions with him.
But activists who oppose the Park 51 project have
pointed to various statements by Rauf to build the case that he's dangerous radical.
For example, yesterday Pamela Geller
of the blog Atlas Shrugs posted
a clip of excerpts from a speech Rauf gave in 2005. Those excerpts include
Rauf saying:
We tend to forget, in the West, that the United States
has more Muslim blood on its hands than al Qaida has on its hands of innocent
non Muslims. You may remember that the US-led
sanctions against Iraq led to the death of
over half a million Iraqi children. This has been documented by the United
Nations. And when Madeleine Albright, who has become a friend of mine over
the last couple of years, when she was Secretary of State
and was asked whether this was worth it, said it was worth it. [emphasis Geller's]
P.J. Crowley,
the assistant secretary of state for public affairs, told reporters Tuesday
that they shouldn't be quick to take those remarks out of context.
"I would just caution any of you that choose to
write on this, that once again you have a case where a blogger has pulled out
one passage from a very lengthy speech. If you read the entire speech, you will
discover exactly why we think he is rightly participating in this national
speaking tour."
The
Cable asked Crowley directly, "Is he the Muslim Shirley
Sherrod?"
Crowley responded, "That's a good cautionary tale
for everybody."
The University of South Australia's Bob Hawke Prime
Ministerial Centre has the full
transcript and full audio
recording of Rauf's 2005 remarks. Here are some excerpts not posted by the
Atlas Shrugs blog:
On the bonds between Islam and Judeo Christianity:
We are united with
Christians and Jews in terms of our belief in one God. In the tradition of the
prophets. In our tradition of scriptures. The Jewish prophets, Jesus Christ and
John the Baptist and Mary are in fact religious personalities and prophets of
the Islamic faith as well...
From the point of view
of Islamic theology, Islamic jurisprudence and Islamic history, the vast
majority of Islamic history, it has been shaped or defined by a notion of
multiculturalism and multireligiosity, if you might use that term. From the
very beginning of Islamic history Islam created space for Christians of various
persuasions, of Jews and even of Muslims of different schools of thought within
the fabric of society.
On religious freedom:
A necessary part of
this is to embrace and to welcome and to invite the religious voices in the
public square, in the public debate, on how to build a good society. So
multiculturalism, in my judgment, involves not only differences of culture and
ethnicity but also multireligiosity, and that's where the challenge and the rub
comes in for many because there is a perception that multireligiosity must mean
the potential conflict between different religious voices in the public square.
I, for one, believe that that is not in fact the case.
On religious tolerance:
[O]ur law, our sense of
justice, our articulation of justice, must flow from these two commandments of
loving our God and loving our neighbour, and if we are not sure of how to
articulate the love of God in the public square we certainly can allow each
person and each group of each religious group to choose to love God in the
vernacular and in the liturgy that it chooses and it prefers, but it gives us a
broad basis of agreement on which we can love our fellow human beings and this,
I suggest, is the mandate that lies before us today as we embark on this 21st
Century and is the mandate and the homework assignment that lies ahead of us.
On Islam and terrorism:
The broader community
is in fact criticising and condemning actions of terrorism that are being done
in the name of Islam... What complicates the discussion, intra-Islamically, is
the fact that the West has not been cognisant and has not addressed the issues
of its own contribution to much injustice in the Arab and Muslim world. It is a
difficult subject to discuss with Western audiences but it is one that must be
pointed out and must be raised.
Acts like the London
bombing are completely against Islamic law. Suicide bombing, completely against
Islamic law, completely, 100 per cent. But the facts of the matter is that
people, I have discovered, are more motivated by emotion than by logic. If
their emotions are in one place and their logic is behind, their emotions will
drive their decisions more often than not, and therefore we need to address the
emotional state of people and the extent to which those emotions are shaped by
things that we can control and we can shape, this is how we will shape a better
future.
Rauf is in Doha, Qatar, now, where in addition to
giving a speech on Muslim life in America at a local university, he is meeting with
government officials and NGO representatives and will hand out gifts and treats
to children at the Doha Youth Center, Crowley said.
Although Rauf is getting questions about the
controversy from his interlocutors and from the press in the areas he is
visiting, don't expect him to talk about the Park 51 project, Crowley said.
"It's been suggested that through this tour he's
going to be promoting this center, that's not true, or that he's going to be
fundraising and that's not true," said Crowley. "He has chosen not to comment
on the center so we can't be accused of doing things that are not consistent to
the goals of the international program he's participating in and we respect
those decisions."
Crowley also shot down another
story in the conservative blogosphere today speculating that Rauf's wife
Daisy Kahn will join the State Department-sponsored trip. Khan has elected to
stay in the United States, he said.
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