04/05/2009
Rod Dreher writes:
Here’s a link to the video that’s roiling Pakistan. Cretinous Muslim savages publicly flog a 17-year-old woman who is alleged to have committed adultery. This is tough to watch. As longtime readers will remember, I had lunch a few years back here in Dallas with a local Muslim leader, a prosperous, well-spoken businessman who dresses like a Westerner, who defended this kind of primitive punishment as "pro-family." It is important to watch this video and to realize that this is the kind of thing many Islamists, even those who aren’t Swat Valley tribesmen, believe in.
The businessman he’s talking about is Mohamed Elmougy, of Pyramids Hospitality. See a Dallas business journal profile here, which doesn’t mention this story:
Two years ago, the editor-in-chief of my newspaper, a very fair-minded man, put together a working lunch in which Mohamed Elmougy, for years the leader of CAIR in Dallas, and I could meet to discuss our differences. Mr. Elmougy, who is no longer with CAIR but who had been for some time the leading public voice of Dallas-area Muslims, brought with him two associates. The editor-in-chief and the editorial page editor of the News accompanied me. Mr. Elmougy and I did most of the talking. It was a long meeting, but a cordial one. As we waited for the check, Mr. Elmougy said he didn’t understand why I considered Shaykh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the popular satellite TV evangelist and spiritual advisor of the Muslim Brotherhood, to be violent. I responded by pointing out that Qaradawi has advocated executing homosexuals, and that he gave advice on his website about how a Muslim man can beat his wife in an Islamically correct way.
“That’s violent,”I told Mr. Elmougy. He slammed his hand on the table and said he agreed with the Shaykh, and that he wouldn’t apologize for it. He went on to tell a story about an adulteress who came to the Prophet asking for release from her sins. The Prophet ordered her stoned to death, said Mr. Elmougy, and declared that he could see her rejoicing in paradise. Mr. Elmougy finished his account by saying that things we Westerners consider to be unacceptable violence are considered by Muslims like him to be pro-family “deterrence.”
I thanked him for his candor, for admitting that he favors executing gays, wife-beating, stoning adulteresses, and chopping the hands off of thieves. I could tell, though, that my colleagues from the paper were shocked by what they had heard.
American journalists simply aren’t used to hearing Islamic leaders in this country talk like that. And Islamic leaders in this country, I’dwager, are not used to being questioned sharply about their views. It’s also the case that Mr. Elmougy fits no Westerner’s idea of what a radical Muslim looks like. He is smart, well-dressed, professional,and to all appearances, Westernized. You simply don’t expect to be sitting in a fancy steakhouse and to hear a man who looks like the manager of a luxury hotel — which is what he was at the time — advocating medieval tortures. The cognitive dissonance can be overwhelming.. [Reporting The Muslim Brotherhood Center on Islam, Democracy and the Future of the Muslim World, February 01, 2008]
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