Ground Zero Mosque: What's the real story?

In October 2010 one of Stratfor’s staff made this analysis of the pantomime that followed plans to build a mosque in New York, near to ‘Ground Zero’, in a building damaged by the 9/11 blast.

Park 51

Park 51 (was going to be named Cordoba House after the organisation fronting the plans) mosque and cultural centre, not yet completed but operational, won’t be at Ground Zero but close enough to polarise opinion and stir up plenty of anti-Muslim feeling.

Media at the time focussed on the building of a Mosque and the usual anti-Muslim hatred was stirred up at the time, especially by paid-haters like Glenn Beck the Fox News journalist (sic.) who specialises in media bile. And focussed on a tiny Christian Fundamentalist sect and their plans to burn copies of the Qur’an.

But is there more to this plan than meets the eye? According to an email leaked by Wikileaks today there is:

“Bush's favorite Imam, with backing from a funder with connections to the CIA, the Pentagon and the currency trading company that now sponsors rightwing firebrand Glenn Beck, proposes to build a mosque around the corner from the site of the most devastating terrorist attack ever visited on America.” 

The men at the centre of this controversy are a Mr R. Leslie Deak, a key funder of the project and Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf who will manage the project.

Leslie Deak

Deak, a 52-year-old New Yorker with an intriguing religious and political back-story: conversion from Christianity to Judaism then Islam: his father made millions in money laudering, while Deak himself has formal roles in US military intellilegence.

Deak’s father was a professional money launderer for at least one drugs cartel and one of the businesses he was part of back then is Deak may have links to Goldline which funds Glenn Beck’s radio and road shows. 

Furthermore, Leslie Deak worked as a "business consultant" to Patriot Defence Group, LLC, a super-secretive security contractor with ties to the CIA and counterterrorism forces, and in those same three years he also donated nearly $100,000 in seed money to the foundation now advocating the construction of the so-called Ground Zero Mosque.

Deak also sits on the National Defense University Foundation (NDUF)'s board of directors and donated a total of $101,247 to them. The National Defense University is a network of war and strategy colleges and research centers funded by the Pentagon, designed to train specialists in military strategy. 

So a major source of funding for the Mosque comes from a man with connections to national and international military intelligence and to the right wing media that is fuelling anti-Muslim sentiment in the USA.

Imam Rauf

Imam Rauf has previously worked on behalf of the U.S. government-which includes serving as an FBI "consultant" and being recruited as a spokesperson by longtime George W. Bush confidante Karen Hughes. And has received funding from Saudi Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal, the second-largest shareholder in News Corp., the parent company Fox News, which airs Beck's program.

So a Saudi prince, a consultant from the right of the Republican party, an military funding expert, and a right-wing media organisation help fund a Mosque near Ground Zero.

This is quite a stack of coincidences. Or, as the Stratfor agent puts it, if it is a coincidence: “we can all go back to what we were doing before-either denouncing the Park51 Mosque as an affront to Americans, or championing it as a symbol of our fundamental rights-playing our accustomed roles in a drama that seems too
perfect, somehow, to believe.” 

New Year Message from Dave Andrews

www.daveandrews.com.au

Here's an excerpt from an inspiring New Year message from Dave Andrews. Dave works and lives in Brisbane, Australia. He is part of the 'Waiters Union' there, facilitating and celebrating community. Among other things, he has a particular enthusiasm for respectfully working with people of other faiths. 

I’ve been preparing to face the New Year by watching An African Answer, a documentary that traces the efforts of Pastor James Wuye and Imam Muhummad Ashafa, in bringing peace after the post-election blood-letting in Kenya’s Rift Valley. Some of the best answers to questions about how we can create peace in the midst of war are being forged in Africa.

I first encountered James Wuye and Muhammad Ashafa when The Imam and The Pastor told their story of moving from leading militias killing one another to leading peace-making initiatives in Nigeria. They have visited Australia and they have become a model for the peacemaking initiatives I am taking this year with Nora Amath, a Muslim colleague and close friend.

Nora’s Mosque in Kuraby was the first one burnt down anywhere in the world after 9/11, so we have decided to reach out to all the faith communities around the Mosque, in the hope of negotiating a Memorandum of Understanding to affirm a working relationship committed to personal respect, mutual regard, community harmony and a willingness to address issues of concern that may arise. It is our deepest prayer that all our faith communities will be sincerely committed to:

·     Make an effort to relate respectfully

to all people regardless of their faith.

·     Listen to what others have to say.

·     Not tell other people what they believe, let them to tell us.

·     Respect other’s views, even if we disagree with their views.

·     Be honest and sensitive in what we say.

·     Speak positively of our faith, not negatively of other’s.

·     Not try and force people to agree with our own views.

·     Not treat people as a spokesperson for their faith

·     Not judge people by what other people of their faith do.

·     Acknowledge both similarities and differences between our faiths.

·     Share our faiths with sincerity, transparency, mercy and compassion.

·     Be honest, if an event includes sharing our faith. Not bait and switch.

·     Serve without strings attached. Not exploit the vulnerability of people.

·     Witness, but not convert. Never try to induce or to coerce a conversion. 

·     Respect the choice of faith others make. Accept them without resentment.

·     Encourage positive relationships between faith communities.

·     Encourage constructive relationships with the wider community.

·     Use our wisdom, knowledge, skills and resources to serve people. 

                ·     Discuss problems arising face to face so we can solve them peacefully.

Peace

Picture from Al Jazeera: 31 January 2011

A veritable labyrinth of lovarchy

The liberal (in the US sense) site Truthout carries an article on what muslims have to say about teaching nonviolence.
Fair enough and recommended reading.

It will land you at a site which sadly is not active anymore: the contents of a journal on (the study of) nonviolent action from Berkeley, CA, Peace Power. This is the story which the Truthout-piece is referring to. The journal will get you through its three years of existence at all kinds of places, including the (non-existing?) Roma Country, which is the world.

By all means, explore the journal - you will find this one on the question whether Gandhi was an anarchist. Not the first time, but the question will come up again and again.

This article may bring you to a new labyrinth, lovarchy, which in turn directs you to a particular branch of the Catholic Worker. There we are,with the federal arrestees of the day trip to Bangor.


I hope you will enjoy your surprising journey.

Islamic anarchism

The example of an Islamic or Muslim anarchist I present in this issue is pretty weak because the man in question, baptised in the Roman Catholic Church as Gustave-Henri Jossot (Dijon, France, 1866 - Sidi Bou Said, Tunisia, 1951), didn't consider himself an anarchist and wasn't considered an anarchist by a knowledgeable person like Jean Grave, editor of the French anarchist weekly "Les temps nouveaux", to which Gustave-Henri Jossot contributed several caricatures. The problem is that to call somebody or oneself an anarchist (= somebody who rejects ruling others and being ruled by others) is something contradictory because, at least in practice, it means the person in question adopts or applies a set of ideas and models of behaviour fitting a certain pattern designed and, to a certain extent, checked by others. As Gustave-Henri Jossot once wrote to Jean Grave: "... you may as well admit that in your eyes true anarchists are people who think like you, isn't it?" (7 Oct. 1906).

For my purpose: to show the possibility of anarchism and religiousness going together in the same person, it's more convenient to consider whether the ideas, attitude and behaviour of a person fit the definition I chose for the notion "anarchist". One may object that a co-habitation of anarchism and Islam in the same person is contradictory and impossible from the outset as the word "Islam" means "submission". But religion is an expression of a person's view of reality, a very flexible and malleable thing, in the final instance something entirely individual. If a religion seems authoritarian it's because of the shape certain influential persons have chosen, and tried to impose on others. Other people may have other practices and attitudes and yet claim to adhere to the same religion. In the same way as somebody is an anarchist, a person is religious because s/he considers her/himself religious expressing her/his religiousness in certain acts or attitudes basically chosen by her/himself. Even if those acts and attitudes are imposed by others the person in question has chosen to submit to the diktat. Her/his attitude may be disapproved by other people claiming to hold the same beliefs and these may even exclude that person from their religious community but the person her/himself may still consider her/himself to be religious and, if s/he so wishes, to fit into a particular religious current.

In a first period of his life Gustave-Henri Jossot contributed caricatures and other drawings to several French publications, among them the anarchist publications "Les Temps nouveaux" and "l'Assiette au Beurre". Targets of his caricatures were the authoritarian family, the army, the courts, the police, the church, school. Michel Dixmier sees in this not a reflection of a coherent anarchist world view but a personal revolt against his upbringing in an authoritarian bourgeois family and a response to certain experiences. Nobody can deny, however, that his production as a whole reflected anarchist concerns.

In 1912, after the death of his only child, Jossot went through a mystical time during which he first turned to spiritualism and occultism, then back to the Roman Catholicism he had been brought up in, to end up as a Muslim in 1913 henceforth calling himself Abdou-l-Karim Jossot. Writing about the many reasons for his transition he mentioned among other things the falseness of Western civilisation and the simplicity of Islam: no mysteries, no dogmas, no priests, almost no ceremonies, the most rational religion in the world (in: La Depeche Tunisienne, 10 February 1913). What if he had read Maxime Rodinson's biography of Mohammed or Ibn Warraq's Why I'm not a Muslim? His transition to Islam doesn't seem to have been the outcome of a thorough study of the tenets and history of Islam and much a mere question of the heart. After his transition to Islam Abdou-l-Karim remained an enemy of the notion "fatherland" (although seemingly not on "anarchist" grounds: "to start Islamic fatherlands is betraying Islam"), he demanded equal incomes for all and continued to reject political action, violence and school ("school deforms the brain"); he also rejected social action considering that improvements were possible only on an individual level.

These elements do not constitute what one might call a complete set of anarchist ideas but they show at least that independent thinking and acting are possible in Islam, perhaps at the risk of one's life if powerful or otherwise influential Islamic theologians disagree with the outcome of such thinking. (My idea is not that anarchism can go together with orthodox forms of religion.)

"Submission to Allah", which is the essence of Islam, doesn't conflict with anarchism if one considers that in practical life submission to Allah is "to live one's convictions", which may or may not coincide with the convictions of other people claiming to be Muslims

. Sure, somebody who would have read and considered both Islamic writings and writings critical of Islam seriously and yet had stuck to Islam on explicit rational grounds and had equally consciously embraced anarchism would have served the purpose of my bulletin better. Perhaps this weak example will induce some reader to point me to the better example(s) s/he knows?

As usual, this issue of my Religious anarchism bulletin is not the fruit of thorough studies but entirely based on the book Jossot by Michel Dixmier (No 23 in the series Cahiers de l'art mineur published by the associations Limage and Vent du ch'min, Paris & Saint-Denis, s.d.). The book consists far more of reproductions of drawings and paintings than of text: of the 128 pages only 17 consist mainly or exclusively of text and out of them 4 pages just list works by Gustave-Henri / Abdou-l-Karim Jossot.

(Bas Moreel's Religious Anarchism Newsletter nr. 4, dated May 2003).