Yesterday, groping for any evidence of extremism on the part of the imam behind the Park 51 project, conservatives deliberately distorted a speech Faisal Abdul Rauf had given in 2005 regarding the effect of U.S. foreign policy on sparking hostility in the Muslim world. It's very clear what Rauf is saying -- that U.S. policies have contributed to misery in the Middle East and South Central Asia and that misery is a key ingredient in a very complicated stew from which radicalism spews forth. That conclusion is entirely uncontroversial in military and intelligence circles.
Basically, Pamela Geller quoted Rauf, then offered a flagrant distortion that can't possibly be drawn at face value from what he's actually saying, which other right-wing media figures, including Matt Drudge and Rush Limbaugh, then repeated. Media Matters has a careful debunking of what Geller is saying, but here's an example. Geller claims Rauf "supports homicide bombers." In fact, in the very lecture she's quoting from, he answers a question in which he says, "Acts like the London bombing are completely against Islamic law. Suicide bombing, completely against Islamic law, completely, 100 per cent."
There's an entire blog post of stuff like this, but basically Rauf made a few "mistakes." No. 1, he made the mistake of acknowledging that there are external factors beyond the individual moral depravity of terrorists and the intrinsic evil of Islam that contribute to terrorism. Depending on the circumstances, not even Gen. David Petraeus is allowed to do that.
Second, at this point he is a political target of the right wing in the United States, and as such he is not allowed to criticize American foreign policy without being seen as justifying terrorism. This is mostly about the fragile sensitivity of the far right and their inability to reconcile their firm belief that everything America does is just and good with how American foreign policy is often actually received than it is about Rauf's rather banal statements on this subject, but his problem is basically that he made them without being a trusted member of the tribe in good standing with the conservative elite, and he did so while Muslim. Surely it'll work on a previously obscure imam from Manhattan.
Finally, Geller's allegations are so clearly wrong on their face that I'd be embarrassed for her if I didn't know how this whole process works. Someone makes an unsupported claim that appears to confirm exactly what conservatives want to believe, and it basically gets repeated ad nauseam by the entire conservative noise machine until it's accepted as fact. It's a very simple political formula; if you repeat something often enough and loudly enough, people will believe it's true, even if it isn't. That's how you end up with a fifth of the country believing the president is Muslim.
