When Fiesal Rauf, the Ground Zero mosque imam, is not painting America as worse than al-Qaeda and suggesting and the “solution to Israel” is the “one-state solution,” he is promoting the Iranian mullahs and Khomeini’s 1979 revolution. At his Pajamas blog, Michael Ledeen explains:

Imam Rauf is a fan of the tyrannical Islamic Republic of Iran.  He said so in the Huffington Post within a week of the phony “elections” of June 12th, 2009, when thousands of protesters were being tortured and killed all over the country He proclaimed that calm had returned to Iran, and that the “official” results — Ahmadinejad in a landslide — were correct.  Indeed, the whole system, according to Imam Rauf, is admirable:

The Iranian Revolution of 1979 was in part to depose the shah, who had come to power in 1953 after a CIA-sponsored coup overthrew democratically-elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mossaddeq. And in part it was an opportunity to craft an Islamic state with a legitimate ruler according to Shia political theory. After the revolution, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini took the Shiite concept of the Rightly Guided Imam and created the idea of Vilayet-i-faqih, which means the rule of the jurisprudent. This institutionalizes the Islamic rule of law. The Council of Guardians serves to ensure these principles.

As Michael points out, there is hardly consensus among Shiite scholars regarding the validity of Khomeini’s system. That, however, would not matter to Rauf, since Khomeini’s iron fist accomplished exactly what Rauf seeks: the institutionalization of the Islamic rule of law — sharia.

Thus, in Ahmadinejad’s fraudulent reelection, Rauf supported the mullahs over the Iranians the regime was brutalizing. And here was his advice to President Obama (whose State Department has since started using Rauf as an emissary): “He should say his administration respects many of the guiding principles of the 1979 revolution — to establish a government that expresses the will of the people; a just government, based on the idea of Vilayet-i-faqih, that establishes the rule of law.”

Leave aside that the main principle of the 1979 revolution is “Death to America” and has been since its firsts moments. What Rauf offers here is a page right out of Muslim Brotherhood ideology as well as Khomeini ideology: sharia is the “will of the people” . . . whether the people want it or not.

No wonder, Michael concludes, the good imam is not only open to having Iran fund the Ground Zero mosque but may, in fact, have already lined up some of that support.