This item is available on the Militant Islam Monitor website, at http://www.militantislammonitor.org/article/id/564
The CTU -Bernardin Center's Christian Muslim interfaith director Scott Alexander keeps bending over for the sake of Allah
April 26, 2005
MIM :Scott Alexander of the Catholic Theological Seminary's Bernadin Center's Christian Muslim program, together with the head of the Muslim Community Center in Chicago , Dr.Kaiseruddin.
Alexander was hailed by the Muslim community as one of "the most vocal defenders of Muslims in the Chicago area since 9/11"
In an interview Alexander stated that he was "transfixed by Islam".
In 2001 Scott Alexander accused Americans who expressed outrage at Muslims for the 9/11 attacks of "linking arms with the fringe and joining it's twisted crusade".
http://www.pipelinenews.org/index.cfm?page=ctusix%2Ehtm
April 27, 2005 - by William A. Mayer, E & P PipeLineNews.org
Rahma is the Arabic word for compassion, something we have very little of for Chicago's Bernardin Center, an affiliate of the ultra-liberal Catholic Theological Union.
On May 6-7 CTU's Bernardin Center will sponsor another of its interminable inter-faith dialogues presenting Islamists masquerading as moderate Muslims and their apostate Christian apologists. Entitled - RAHMA: Spiritual Companionship with Muslims in a Hospital Setting" the program is supposed to highlight areas in which all faiths can work together, ministering to the ill.
We have written numerous articles about Bernardin's sham outreach programs - presided over by Dr. Scott Alexander, a thoroughly reprehensible dhimmi* toad - over the period of a year now, the last being - The Catholic Theological Union And The Limits Of Understanding, June 1, 2004, which drew considerable comment and saw wide circulation, having been reprinted in such publications as Daniel Pipes Campus Watch.
Bernardin's "interfaith" programs are not aging well, they are becoming more, not less controversial.
For starters the May event is underwritten by something called the Sophia Foundation.
The Sophia Foundation is a cult organization which advocates goddess worship, the following from the Sophia Foundation's website
"The Sophia Foundation of North America is an educational and cultural foundation dedicated to awakening a new consciousness of Sophia, Divine Wisdom. It was founded on New Year's Eve 1994, amidst the great redwood trees of Northern California..."
"Let it be known: today the Eternal Feminine
In an incorruptible body is descending to Earth.
In the unfading light of the new Goddess
Heaven has become one with the depths."
In a post-modernist world, denuded of orthodoxy, groups like the Sophia Foundation abound, however the Bernardin Center in choosing to partner with such crackpot organizations sullies itself to a degree we heretofore thought impossible.
Let's look a little more deeply at the speakers for this conference - Dr. G.H. Aasi, Refat Abukhdeir [who is listed as a "chaplain, Christ Advocate Hospital, and Christian colleague"], Pisamai Vogelaar, Harold Vogelaar, PhD., Shakeela Hassan, M.D. and Cheryl Damiani, M.A.P.S.
G.H. Aasi is a Muslim trainer working with the Institute of Islamic Information & Education [III&E]. This group offer what they refer to as a Da'wah [Da'Wah is the Muslim effort to convert "unbelievers"] Intensive Course which is being used to present Islam as a moderate religion to those not familiar with it.
This group has a rather skewed view of American society:
"Anti-Islam forces are extremely active in North America and are doing everything money can buy to stop the spread of Islam and, if possible, remove Islam from the West."
According to experts on militant Islam such as Beila Rabinowitz, Militant Islam Monitor.
"III&E counts WAMY and ISNA among its sponsors and cooperation groups. The World Assembly of Muslim Youth, is a Saudi organisation which is on the Senate list of Muslim organisations involved in terrorism funding."
Mr. Aasi is also on the advisory board [along with a panoply of Islamists] of an Iranian based "interfaith" program called "A Dialogue of Civilizations"
From a 2004 program:
"In the year 2000, President Mohammad Khatami of Iran called for a global Dialogue of Civilizations..."
So it appears that Mr. Aasi is engaged in evangelical efforts to spread the Islamic faith with groups who are in league with known radicals, and doing the bidding of the President of the world's most dangerous terrorist nation, Iran.
Mr. Aasi isn't very moderate.
Refat Abukhdeir is listed as a "chaplain and a Christian colleague," however when he participated at the Islamic Society of North American [ISNA a radical Islamist pressure group] in the ISNA Summer Leadership Institute program in 2004, Abukhdeir is listed as a Muslim Chaplain SLI 2004
In the above document, Abukdeir is identified as being connected with Chicago's Bridgeview Mosque Foundation, a Saudi funded Mosque noted for its ties to terrorism, including the Holy Land Foundation. It has been the subject of ongoing Federal investigation.
Mr. Abukdeir isn't very moderate
Harold Vogelaar, PhD is ex of the Reformed Church of America [RCA] The RCA preaches an odd - heterodox - version of Christianity, denying the considerable Biblical evidence that the Israelites were a chosen people:
"Hubers notes that Christian Zionists like Robertson and Falwell have failed to address the injustice meted out to Palestinian Arabs who were driven off their land to make way for the Jewish state. Worse still, they call on Israel to take even more land through their insistence that the Jewish state be expanded to the fullest extent of its biblical borders...Christian Zionist support for an exclusivistic Jewish state with apartheid-like tendencies."
Vogelaar is just another doctrinaire anti-American Palestinian sympathizer - another dhimmi*.
The following from a speech he made which was published online at Epistle Spring 2002
"Simultaneously, the United States armed Afghan rebels to fight Russia, recruiting people from the Arab world and calling them "mujahidin," or fighters for God. bin Laden was among those trained by the CIA.Then in the 1991 Gulf war, we broke the stick used to beat the dog. And now we are at war with the bin Ladens of this world, people we helped train in the art of terror, a skill now turned against us...grievances that seem to drive some in the Arab/Muslim world to such hatred of the West. The prolonged occupation of Palestinian territory by Israel; the death of so many Iraqis, mostly women and children, as a result of sanctions; the West's policy of putting its interest in oil above the people's cry for freedom and democracy in the Middle East..."
Mr. Vogelaar isn't very moderate, and that is the continuing problem with the Bernardin Center's and Dr. Alexander's phony interfaith programs. They are not about understanding, or responsible dialogue. They have nothing to do with moderate Islam.
The Bernardin Center seems to be carrying on the tradition of its namesake, the late Cardinal Joseph Bernardin. While Cardinal Bernardin was deeply involved in the internecine warfare between radical homosexual pressure groups and Catholic orthodoxy - siding with the former - the center named after him remains steeped in controversy, underwriting duplicitous programs which are essentially anti-Christian, anti-American, pro-Jihadi love-ins, each one seemingly more outlandish than the last.
CTU, Bernardin's parent remains aloof, unresponsive and unapologetic, while Dr. Alexander has made a cottage industry out of speaking on the Islamist rubber chicken circuit - in that sense they deserve each other. The tragedy here is that traditional Catholicism deserves far better.
Footnote:
*dhimmi - A Christian who would be content living under the yoke of an Islamist caliphate, a Muslim theocratic government.
This item is available on the Militant Islam Monitor website, at http://www.militantislammonitor.org/article/id/564