"Hitler never intended to mass-destroy the Jews... The Hoax of the Holocaust — I advise you to read this book, you'll want to write this down — The Hoax of the Holocaust, a very good book. All of this is false propaganda..."

— Yasir Qadhi, one of Feisal Abdul Rauf's Muslim Leaders of Tomorrow

Feisal Abdul Rauf is the founder and chairman of the Cordoba Initiative, the group trying to build a $100 million, 13 story mosque near Ground Zero. One of the Cordoba Initiative's key programs is called Muslim Leaders of Tomorrow (MLT), "cultivating the next generation of Muslim leaders....the spokespersons and activists for peace and tolerance around the globe today."

To become a MLT, one must be nominated and approved according to the group's selection criteria.

Yasir Qadhi is one such MLT. He is featured in this MLT promotional video (at 4:26) and in this MLT newsletter.

He's also on record for a series of blatantly antisemitic remarks.

Further, Mr. Qadhi put forth a spirited and absolute defense of imams caught (undercover) preaching vitriol against gays ("If I were to call homosexuals perverted, dirty, filthy dogs that should be murdered, that’s my freedom of speech isn’t it?"); women ("Allah has created the woman, even if she gets a Phd, deficient. Her intellect is incomplete, deficient."); and non-Muslims ("We love the people of Islam and we hate the people of kufr [non-belief]").

Are these the messages that will be taught at the Ground Zero mosque? After all, Abdul Rauf's group hand-selected Yasir Qadhi as a "Muslim Leader of Tomorrow" and featured him in their promotional video.

Yasir Qadhi's anitsemitic rants can be heard here. Qadhi explains that the Jews "tried to kill" Jesus (2:47). He then tells a libelous tale claiming that "80 to 90 percent" of Jews — those with "crooked nose, blond hairs" (6:55) — aren't descendants of the original Jews of Israel but instead are descendants of a Turkish tribe that converted to Judaism much later. Qadhi proceeds to explain (as quoted above at 7:55) that Hitler never intended to destroy the Jews and recommends a "very good book" documenting the Holocaust as a hoax. The Jews "want to destroy us [the Muslims]." (11:43) Almost a decade later, prompted by his own increase in popularity, Qadhi wrote that he had made some "serious historical blunders." Listen to the audio, and then read the "retraction." Judge for yourself.

In January, 2007, Channel 4 in the UK aired a documentary called Undercover Mosque, highlighting months of undercover recordings taken at British mosques (the transcript is here). The program was nothing short of a bombshell, showing a barrage of unvarnished statements from popular imams across a range of topics:

On non-Muslims (kuffaar):

• "I don’t believe them, because they are kuffaar, lying is part of their religion... they are liars, they are terrorists themselves, liars, they will come before the people and talk and they are lying, you can’t believe them, these are pathological liars."
• "No-one loves the kuffaar, no-one loves the kuffaar, not a single person here from the Muslims loves the kuffaar, whether those kuffaar are from the UK or from the US. We love the people of Islam and we hate the people of kufr, we hate the kuffaar."
• "He’s better than a million George Bushes, Osama Bin Laden, and he’s better than a thousand Tony Blairs, because he’s a Muslim."
• "Whoever changes his religion from Islam to anything else – kill him in the Islamic state."
• "Verily Allah is going to bring a group of people that he loves and they love him, these people will be soft and kind to the believers and they will be rough and tough against the kuffaar, they will fight in the cause of Allah...
  I encourage all of you to be from amongst them, to begin to cultivate ourselves for the time that is fastly approaching where the tables are going to turn and the Muslims are going to be in the position of being uppermost in strength, and when that happens, people won’t get killed – unjustly."
• "Jews and Christians who do not follow the Prophet Mohammed are kuffaar. They will go to hell."

On homosexuality:

• "Do you practise homosexuality with men? Take that homosexual man and throw him off the mountain."
• "If I were to call homosexuals perverted, dirty, filthy dogs, that should be murdered, that’s my freedom of speech isn’t it?"

On women:

• "Allah has created the woman, even if she gets a Phd, deficient. Her intellect is incomplete, deficient. She may be suffering from hormones that will make her emotional. It takes two witnesses of a woman to equal the one witness of the man."
• "By the age of ten, it becomes an obligation on us to force her to wear hijab, and if she doesn’t wear hijab, we hit her."
• "The Prophet Mohammed practically outlined the rules regarding marriage prior to puberty, with his practice he clarified what is permissible and that is why we shouldn’t have any issues about an older man marrying a younger woman, which is looked down upon by this society today, but we know that Prophet Mohammed practised it, it wasn’t abuse or exploitation, it was marriage."