I’m not sure why Jamie Glazov and Joseph Klein thought it right to recently savage our ecumenical, Big-Tent-For-All-Religions friend, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, but it’s a good thing the bloggers at Care2 were around to set them straight.

How else were we to find out what a sympathetic, multi-layered individual the Holy Man really is?

I mean, as Mosque-eteers go, this guy is softer than a collision with Barney Frank in a dimly-lit House hallway; he has feelings, you know, and besides, has been under lots of stress lately.

Evidently it has been one tough nut serving as the “public face” of the “polarizing” “We-Will-Build-It-No-Matter-What-You-Do” contingent that birthed and set in motion the Ground Zero Mosque initiative back in 2009.

As Care2 stalwart Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux recounts,

“Rauf was one of the original architects of the Park51 project, and became one of the polarizing spokesmen for the project when massive protests erupted over the summer, serving in many senses as the organization’s public face.  He announced late this fall that he would be starting a movement to oppose extremism and promote interfaith dialogue, which is what he will presumably be doing instead of working more closely with the Park51 project.”

Yes, that is what is known as an awkward sentence (did the “protests” serve as the “organization’s public face”, or was it Rauf himself, or…?), but we are not here to judge anyone’s writing style, so let’s just say that the spotlight got to our cleric and he needed to spend more time reaching out to his friends, the Christians and the Jews.

But at what cost? Thomson-DeVeaux wonders

“…whether the negative publicity became too much for (Rauf) – it has to be extremely taxing, even traumatic, to feel like the hated public face of a project like the Park51 mosque….”

I know, I know…. It must really suck to be despised  by all the relatives and friends of the people your co-religionists killed way back on that September morning. Especially when many of the proponents of that sort of slaughter are your friends and heroes. Still…isn’t it time to bury the hatchet? Maybe we should just remember that we are all brothers and sisters…and sing along to the following video: