‘The Real Challenge Is To Love The Stranger’
A local rabbi and imam try to bridge a wide gulf.
Rabbi Marc Schneier is the founder and president of the Foundation for Ethnic Understanding, an organization that works internationally to promote understanding and cooperation between Jews and other ethnic communities. He recently published with Imam Shamsi Ali “Sons of Abraham: A Candid Conversation about the Issues That Divide and Unite Jews and Muslims” (Beacon Press), featuring a foreword by President Bill Clinton. (More)
Read it and weep. Critical comments go straight into the spam, Schneier is no friend of free speech. Not sure if “Rabbi” Marc Schneier is aware that Imam Shamsi Ali has just been sacked from New York’s biggest mosque:
New York: Liberal imam fired from city’s biggest mosque
This story — I do not know how accurate it is — portrays Shamsi Ali as a liberal Muslim who flouted the Sharia prohibition on music and wasn’t overcome with rage over Muhammad cartoons. Apparently he didn’t call for censorship and the adoption of Islam’s blasphemy laws in the wake of those cartoons, either. At length, he was fired from New York City’s largest mosque — a move quite revealing about Muslims in New York. Was Ali’s liberal Islam unpalatable to them?
“Shamsi Ali: The rise and fall of a New York imam,” from the BBC, November 2 (thanks to JW):
An imam once regarded as one of New York’s leading religious figures had a sudden fall from grace. So what does the story of one man’s attempt to adapt Islam to modern America tell us, asks Sune Engel Rasmussen.
The ugly reality of apocalyptical Jew hatred remains.Â
The genocidal commands in Koran, sira and hadith are eternal.