Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, the Imam behind the proposed Islamic Center and Mosque near Ground Zero, appeared in 2005 at the Bob Hawke Prime Ministerial Center in Australia. He was the speaker at a question and answer session dedicated to what the sponsors say was a dialogue to improve relations between America and the Muslim world.

The moderator pointed out that Rauf was the Imam of a Mosque, 12 blocks from Ground Zero.

The Imam called himself a spokesman for Islam, saying his goal is to create coalitions across the religious divide, but during the session he also said that America has done more harm than al Qaeda.

“We tend to forget, in the West, that the United States has more Muslim blood on its hands than al Qaeda has on its hands of innocent non-Muslims. You may remember that the U.S led sanctions against Iraq led to the death of over half a million Iraqi children. This has been documented by the United Nations.”

But diplomats and others, including former President Bill Clinton, have said that was not true. They put the blame directly on Saddam Hussein’s regime, saying that Saddam had corrupted the U.N. sanctions by denying proper humanitarian aid to his own people.

In a November 8, 2000 interview on Pacifica radio, President Clinton said if any child is without food or medicine, it’s Saddam’s fault, not that of the U.S.

“If any child is without food or medicine or a roof over his or her head in Iraq, it’s because he is claiming sanctions are doing it and sticking it to his own children,” said Mr. Clinton about Saddam. “He is lying to the world and claiming the mean old United States is killing his children. He has more money today than he did before the embargo, and if they’re hungry or they are not getting medicine, it is his own fault.”

A 2001 State Department report noted that it was Hussein’s lack of cooperation that made it difficult to assess if food was actually being distributed properly.

“Baghdad has been caught exporting dates, corn and grain outside of Iraq while claiming the Iraqi people are starving,” said the report.

”The U.N. did not stand up to this propaganda. It cowered in the face of this notion that the sanctions were killing Iraqi babies,” testified former U.N. Oil for Food coordinator Michael Soussan before the House International Relations Committee in April of 2004.

“We should never have let Saddam Hussein win this propaganda war,” he said.

During his appearance, the Imam also said there is a sense in the Arab and Muslim world that the West doesn’t care about Muslim lives, that their pain and anguish are not heard.

He condemned terrorism, saying frustration and emotions can lead to it.

“Acts like the London bombing are completely against Islamic law. Suicide bombing, completely against Islamic law, completely, 100 percent. But the facts of the matter is that people, I have discovered, are more motivated by emotion than logic. If their emotions are in one place and their logic is behind, their emotions will drive their decisions more often than not.”

He also said,

“How do you tell people whose homes have been destroyed, whose lives have been destroyed, that this does not justify your actions of terrorism. It’s hard. Yes, it is true that it does not justify the acts of bombing innocent civilians, that does not solve the problem, but after 50 years of, in many cases, oppression, of U.S. support of authoritarian regimes that have violated human rights in the most heinous of ways, how else do people get attention? So I’m not, I’m just providing you with the arguments that are happening intra-Islamically by those who feel the emotion of pain.”

The Bob Hawke Center says the Imam was presented in the interest in open debate and discussion.

Rauf’s office has not responded to our request for a reaction about his statements, he is still on that taxpayer funded State Department trip to the Middle East, where he serving as a representative of the United States.