Bill O’Reilly had Ground Zero mosque radical Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf on for a full segment last week to shill the deceptive narrative of his latest book. In a telling moment, Rauf claimed during the segment to have lost “at least” 60 Muslims on 9/11. Only the Muslims separate out the Muslim dead from the rest (and that number of Muslims goes from 19 to 300). No other group points to the number of Christians or Jews, etc., who were killed on 9/11.
For his part, O’Reilly promised to pick up a hammer and help the imam build his Islamic center if Rauf “condemned terrorism.” What O’Reilly neglected to qualify was Rauf’s definition of “terrorism.” In Islam, terrorists are those who defend themselves against Islam. Under Islam, the definition of “terrorism” is resistance to Islam.
O’Reilly neglected to query how Rauf could claim to want to build a multi-faith center since, under Islam, non-believers are prohibited from praying in a mosque except when invited for dawah (proselytizing). Rauf said, “We have to fight against the extremists in all of our faith traditions.” This was patently dishonest. Rauf was trying to deflect attention away from the fact that only Muslim “extremists” are killing other people because of their faith. Christian and Jewish “extremists” – i.e. those who are devout the way Islamic jihadists are devout Muslims – aren’t committing violence in the name of their religion. Only Muslims are. Rauf and other Islamic supremacists hope you don’t notice that his call to fight against “extremism” is really a diversion of attention away from the only “extremists” who are violent.
O’Reilly never addressed Rauf’s idea of “peace.” Nor did he ask him about comments like this one: “In a true peace it is impossible that a purely Jewish state of Palestine can endure. … In a true peace, Israel will, in our lifetimes, become one more Arab [Muslim] country, with a Jewish minority.”
Ground Zero mega-mosque Imam Rauf raised no objections to official calls for suicide bombing in America and Israel. In a revealing interview, Rauf said: “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 U.S.-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.”
No mention of the 270 million victims of over a millennium of jihadi wars, land appropriations, cultural annihilation and enslavement. No mention of the recent slaughter by Muslims of Christians, Hindus, Jews and non-believers in Indonesia, Thailand, Ethiopia, Somalia, the Philippines, Lebanon, Israel, Russia, China, Egypt, Nigeria, Iraq, etc.
Rauf exhibits no candor, and never comes close to any criticism of Islamic jihadists. He has even said: “Islam does not need a reformation.” He has also been dishonest about the Ground Zero mosque, which is now a “community center” nowhere near Ground Zero – but in December 2009, Rauf said in the New York Times: “New York is the capital of the world, and this location close to 9/11 is iconic.” The Times was clear, unlike now, that the location was crucial: “The location was precisely a key selling point for the group of Muslims who bought the building in July. A presence so close to the World Trade Center, ‘where a piece of the wreckage fell,’ said Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, the cleric leading the project, ‘sends the opposite statement to what happened on 9/11.’”
Rauf is also a “prominent figure” in “The Perdana Organization,” which funded the genocidal Jew-hating terrorist group behind the murderous attack on Jewish soldiers on the warship flotilla that sailed against Israel in 2010.
Why didn’t O’Reilly ask Rauf about his desire to impose the Shariah? In his book from 2000, “Islam: A Sacred Law,” he wrote: “And since a Shariah is understood as a law with God at its center, it is not possible in principle to limit the Shariah to some aspects of human life and leave out others.”
Did O’Reilly ask about Rauf about his slums? His slum building has gone into receivership. Out from under the Rauf crawl rats and roaches. Worse still, Rauf snagged more than $2 million in public financing to renovate low-income apartments. He took the money and forced good people to live with vermin and dilapidation.
Did O’Reilly query Rauf about the imam’s false tax forms claiming that his apartment was a mosque?
Why didn’t O’Reilly have anyone on to counter Rauf’s baldfaced deception?
Why doesn’t O’Reilly have Robert Spencer on to discuss his brilliant new book, “Did Muhammad Exist?” But he’ll promote the greasy Rauf and reps from Hamas-CAIR, and call them “standup guys.” Look at Rauf’s knowing and sinister half-smile when O’Reilly says to him, “You’re a well-intentioned man.”
Shame on you, Bill O’Reilly.
Yet for all O’Reilly’s shilling, Rauf fooled no one. After appearing on O’Reilly with his 3 million viewers, Rauf’s book stood at No. 4,273 in sales at Amazon.com. The American people are smarter than O’Reilly, but at 8 p.m. prime time, he’s the only game in town.
The day after the O’Reilly interview, the Toronto Star ran an interview with Rauf that was almost as fawning and sycophantic as O’Reilly’s. In it, Rauf said, “Given that we are in this society, my position is that we should practice our faith in a way that makes us seem as if we belong to this society.” Not actually to belong, but to seem as if they belong. That’s Rauf.