The "On Faith" page of The Washington Post website is plugging an interview with controversial Ground Zero Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, a brief chat with a very agreeable Sally Quinn, with a modicum of slightly tougher questioning from her atheist pal Jacques Berlinerblau, a professor at Georgetown. The professor asked if during the mega-mosque controversy he found himself thinking of his opponents, "That was a reasonable criticism, I can agree with that."
The imam firmly denied that: "There was no logically correct, or critically correct, or defensible opposition to us. The only opposition that they kept repeating was that we were insensitive to the feelings of 9/11 families. So the only thing I would have done differently would have been to have prepared more the 9/11 family members."
The interview just moved on from there without follow-up, as the Imam claimed to represent the "authenticity of Islamic thought" and that "Sharia completely in sync with American principles," which should have drawn a stronger dissent from the atheist who prizes church-state separation.
In the blog entry accompanying the interview, Sam Dinger was still defending the Imam from conservatives:
Lost in the debate over the "Ground Zero Mosque" was the fact that Imam Rauf had become an indispensable voice for moderate American Muslims, sent by both Presidents Bush and Obama to be an American ambassador to Muslim nations.
