Rod Dreher and several others have kindly alerted me to this conference that was held in Dallas last weekend: a “Tribute to the Great Islamic Visionary,” Ayatollah Khomeini.
Dreher comments at the Dallas News blog (thanks to R. Solomon):
Take a look at who the guest speakers were. There was Imam Yusuf Kavakci of the Dallas Central Mosque, a religious leader widely regarded outside the Islamic community as a moderate. Do real moderates agree to speak at a conference in praise of Ayatollah Khomeini? Just wondering.
Another speaker was Imam Mohammed Asi of…Washington, DC. Asi co-hosted a National Press Club forum not long after 9/11, in which militant Islamic speakers trashed Jews, Christians and America; according to this report from Michelle Malkin, he did nothing to stop them. Malkin writes of the rally, which was broadcast on C-SPAN, “If this event had been an anti-Muslim rally, the story would be front-page news.”
Imam Shamshad Haider, another local speaker, has publicly condemned Islamic terrorism. Good for him. But if he really means it, how can he host a conference praising Khomeini? Inquiring minds want to know. An unnamed representative of Dallas’s Council on American-Islamic Relations was set to speak at the Ayatollahpalooza; again, they say they’re against terrorism, but it’s hard to square being against it with making a “tribute” to a devil like Khomeini.
Also on the bill at Khomeinifest: Dallas Mavs player Tariq Abdul-Wahad, who says on his website that he prays at the Richardson mosque — presumably, that’s the Dallas Central Mosque.
Would someone from the Muslim community please write to explain to me why this conference in “tribute” to one of this country’s worst enemies, and an avatar of worldwide Islamic radical revolution, is not something that I, or anybody else, should worry about? I’ll post your comments, promise.
Not long ago I wrote a column about an Islamic demonstration in Dearborn, Michigan, in which several demonstrators held aloft large pictures of the Ayatollah. I think the last bit of it bears repeating:
It is unlikely that the protestor knew that in 1985, Sa’id Raja’i-Khorassani, the Permanent Delegate to the United Nations from the Islamic Republic of Iran, declared, according to Amir Taheri, that “the very concept of human rights was “a Judeo-Christian invention” and inadmissible in Islam. . . . According to Ayatollah Khomeini, one of the Shah’s “most despicable sins” was the fact that Iran was one of the original group of nations that drafted and approved the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.”
I wonder if anyone at the Dearborn protest realized that the appearance of these signs in Dearborn, Michigan, exalting this man as a hero, indicated that Khomeini’s vision for society is alive in America today — and that it is dangerously naive to assume that all Muslims immediately and unquestioningly accept American pluralism and the idea of a state not governed by religious law. The Netherlands is just finding out, thanks to the cold-blooded murder and attempted decapitation of the “blasphemer” Theo van Gogh by a Muslim who appears to have been part of a larger jihadist cell, that not all the Muslims in Holland are the committed pluralists and secularists that they have been assumed to be by credulous European authorities.
With Khomeini a hero in Dearborn, Americans may be finding that out for themselves before long. Just where American Muslims stand on Khomeini’s doctrines — and how many stand with Khomeini — are still forbidden questions for the major media. But if the old man could have spoken from his sign in Dearborn, he might have said, “Ignore me at your own risk.”
UPDATE: The link has been removed, so I put up a jpg of the conference announcement, courtesy LGF.