Future President?
By Eastan McNeal on August 30, 2010 at 4:45 PM in Current Affairs
You may think we are devolving back to 2006 – 08 but pay close attention here. We go a little further back – The 1990s. We start with a young state senator who has a friendly relationship with a businessman who has funding ties in the Middle East. As state senator this aspiring politician arranges tax dollars to go to this businessman’s low income housing business. The properties are purchased but, instead of spending the rest of the tax money on fixing the dilapidated buildings, our money is parlayed and it brings the businessman into higher political circles. No. This is not what you think.
The businessman and his wife become known, by their tenants, however as slumlords. This slumlord cheers the state senator all the way to the U.S. Senate and now the slumlord is a subject drawing a lot of attention. If you are thinking Rezko and Obama then you are in the wrong part of the country.
The U.S. Senator in question is Bob Menendez from Union City, New Jersey. The slumlords? None other than Ground Zero Mosque Mastermind Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf and his wife Daisy Khan. It appears that Sen. Menendez has accumulated the prerequisite background associations to be declared a Future President.
Location of the properties? Just across the river in New Jersey.
Excerpt from the NY Post: Mosque ‘slumlord’
NJ tenants rage at G. Zero imam.
Barillas ( a tenant ) said that bedbugs plague the building — but that when she tried to get building managers to respond, they claimed they didn’t have the money to hire an exterminator. Tenant Vilma Then chided Rauf as greedy. “All he likes is money,” she said. “Nothing ever gets fixed. I complain to the super, and all he says is that he has the same problem.”
Vilma Then said she lived at Rauf’s building around the corner until a fire forced her to move to 2206 Central Ave. She said her current situation is similar to her old digs, where she had a stove that was more like “a roach den.” She also complained that Rauf’s wife, Daisy Khan — who has been the imam’s spokesperson while he is touring overseas — “listens to what you have to say and writes things down and leaves — and nothing gets done.” “She gives nothing but false promises,” the resident said.
Read more.
A much closer look at the Imam’s finances and dealings with NJ political figures is well covered the The Record newspaper of Hackensack:
Imam Feisal A. Rauf won support for his Hudson County projects from powerful politicians, among them Robert C. Janiszewski, the disgraced former county executive. He also was awarded grants from Union City when U.S. Sen. Bob Menendez was mayor. (In NJ you can be a mayor and in the state legislature at the same time.)
Union City’s Community Development Agency awarded three grants, totaling $384,000. Three years later, two of those buildings on Bergenline Avenue also received nearly $1.3 million in construction loans from Hudson County’s affordable-housing trust fund and $630,900 from the state with the proviso that the units be rented at “affordable” rates through 2017.
Rauf met with Menendez in late 1991 before applying for the state funds, and months later made a pitch to the mayor for $80,000 in city funds to help carry him until the loans came through, documents show.
And this zinger from a local person interviewed by Jewish World Review: Tenants don’t see imam as ‘healer’
“He can’t even repair the bells in the hallway. He doesn’t take care of his properties. But he’s going to take care of a mosque?”
Rezko. The Imam. Are there other “businessmen” with Middle Eastern ties lurking behind rising political establishments and officeholders in other cities and states around the U.S.? Pay attention to the little details and look closely into the background of candidate supporters. As if you – a concerned citizen – don’t already have enough to ponder about.
, the basis for the Best Motion Picture Nominee (Golden Globes) starring Brad Pitt.
, the novel by John Le Carre, a new motion picture starring Gary Oldman and Colin Firth.
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