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.”
perfect, somehow, to believe.”
