Cordoba House:

Cordoba House:

Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, Chairman of the Cordoba Initiative also known as the “9-11 Imam”, addressed a packed room at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York today.

“The events of the past weeks have really saddened me to my very core. I regret that some have misunderstood our intentions.”

Feisal added that harmful stereotypes and the heated political climate ahead of the elections have compounded the stresses surrounding the construction of PARK 51, the Muslim community center near the World Trade Center site. He offered his heartfelt sympathy and prayers to the victims of 9-11 and their families.

He also thanked President Obama and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg for speaking out against religious intolerance.

“My goal here today is to reach out to my brothers and sisters of different faiths in America… And second, to reach out to my Muslim brothers and sisters all over the world to explain and share my love of America.”

He described his arrival to the states in 1968 and identified himself as an “American” and a “New Yorker.”

“Every religion in the world has extremists…Sadly, Islam is one of them. But let me clear ladies and gentlemen, Islam categorically rejects the killing of innocent people.”

http://www.talkradionews.com/news/2010/9/13/imam-feisal-calls-on-moderates-from-all-faiths-to-combat-ext.html

Are Americans completely ignorant of history?

“Cordoba,” in Islamic symbolic terms, means Islamic rule in the West. It does not mean “coexistence,” unless coexistence is interpreted as referring to Islamic rule.

Pamela Geller at Atlas Shrugs cites the article (original in Arabic) published by Iraqi-American Khudhayr Taher on 18 May, in which Taher explains the following:

We must note that a hostile and provocative name [Cordoba] has been chosen for this mosque… Choosing the name ‘Cordoba House’ for the mosque to be constructed in New York was not coincidental or random and innocent. It bears within it significance and dreams of expansion and invasion [into the territory] of the other, [while] striving to change his religion and to subjugate him…

It used to not even be a stretch for reasonably well educated Westerners to recognize the place of Spain and Cordoba in the history of the West and Islam. Many of today’s younger adults, however, have learned nothing about the Mediterranean before 1492 except that the Muslim period in Spain was a flowering of science, art, and culture.

There was a great deal to admire in the accomplishments of the Muslim Cordobans, but they did, in fact, invade and conquer Spain, sell its inhabitants into slavery, provide a base for slaver raids into other parts of Europe, and rule by the sword in much of the caliphate.

Shelomo Alfassa: Beware the Cordoba Initiative...

[Shelomo Alfassa is the former US director of Justice for Jews from Arab Countries and a scholar of Judaic life in Islamic Spain. He lives in New York.]

The world should know that the ‘Cordoba Initiative,’ the New York City based organization desiring to construct a massive Islamic house of prayer at ‘Ground Zero,’ has posted on its website, a peculiar and disingenuous statement indicating the desire to bring back the atmosphere of, “interfaith tolerance and respect that we have longed for since Muslims, Christians and Jews lived together in harmony and prosperity eight hundred years ago.” the seat of the caliphate established in what is now modern Spain after the Islamic invasion from North Africa in the 8th century A.D.

The medieval occupation of Spain – “al-Andalus” – is considered by Islamic theorists to have been an inevitable step in the manifest destiny of Islam, and its eventual reversal through the lengthy European “Reconquista” a tragic but temporary triumph of the infidels. The great mosque at Cordoba was built on the foundation of a Christian cathedral, and when Europeans retook Cordoba in the 13th century they turned the magnificent mosque back into a cathedral.

Read more here:

http://hnn.us/roundup/entries/127499.html

The question is, who do you believe? a man making "a peculiar and disingenuous statement" or 500 years of human history?