Just Desserts: Eating Taqiyya en Flambé

From our reader, Flyboy, comes a report on that hapless holyman who tried to slam Ezra Levant with terrorism libel. Turns out that Imam Syed Soharwardy’s Pinocchio nose is lengthening at an alarming rate:

Earlier this week, Calgary Imam Syed Soharwardy spent nearly two hours with the Herald’s editorial board before announcing he would withdraw his two-year-long Alberta human rights complaint against Ezra Levant, the publisher of the defunct Western Standard magazine.

Soharwardy lodged the complaint after Levant published Danish cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad that were central to murderous protests around the world by Muslims, including renewed violence in Denmark on Friday.

The good Imam would like to retrieve his lies complaint, but as he is learning - a bit late - some things can’t be undone. Especially since he’d made sure everyone was watching:

The founder of the Islamic Supreme Council of Canada (ISCC) asked for a meeting with the Herald’s editorial board via an e-mail, arguing that Levant was “attempting to paint me as a hate-mongering, anti-Semitic, Wahabbi radical who wants to see Canada governed under sharia law. Nothing could be further from the truth.”

See, that was the stumbling block right there. If you tell the truth all the time (at least on the major stuff), you don’t have to remember your lies. But the “founder of the Islamic Supreme Council of Canada” forgot what he’d written and left for everyone to find. Didn’t take the reporter, practicing due diligence, any time at all to ferret out the facts. “Facts” here means whatever is left after you take out all the hyperbole. Before he could get there for the meeting, Ms. Licia Corbella was speedy on the keyboard:
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While preparing for the meeting, a quick search on Canwest’s library system showed a Jan. 17, 2004, column written by the cleric.

In it, he wrote: “Sharia cannot be customized for specific countries. These universal, divine laws are for all people of all countries for all times.”

In the same column he also boasts: “I am one of the founding members of the Islamic Institute of Civil Justice. The mandate of the institute is to resolve disputes within existing Canadian laws by using the principles of conflict resolution from Islamic Law, or sharia.”

His column is clear. He wanted to bring sharia to Canada and even helped found the organization that spearheaded the drive to do so.

However, once at the meeting, he denied any such idea. Nah, wasn’t him who planned to cover Canada with a blanket of shari’a law. Must have been some other Imam Syed Soharwardy of Calgary because he didn’t do such things.

…in our meeting, Soharwardy denied his own column. “I never asked to bring sharia in Canada,” he now insists.

As for the allegation he’s anti-Semitic, in 2000 he wrote in his newsletter: “Presently, what Israeli forces are doing to Palestinians is worse than the Holocaust of World War II.” Comparing Israel’s attempts to defend itself to the carting of millions of Jews in cattle cars to gas chambers is obscene.

…in our meeting, he said the above quote was taken out of context, that he has numerous Jewish friends and holds a Hanukkah celebration at his mosque, the Al Madinah Calgary Islamic Centre.

Yeah, yeah, everyone has their favorite Jew. Hey, but that’s not even the worst of it. This guy gets an “F” for memory:

Some of Soharwardy’s most vile words came after the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami that killed more than 280,000 people.

While Christians from around the world were emptying their wallets to help the victims of this natural disaster, Muslim leaders were blaming the disaster on immoral Christian tourists in their countries.

Soharwardy seemingly got swept up in the wave of anti-Christian rhetoric and sent out a news release accusing Christians of kidnapping Muslim orphans in Indonesia. Again, he denied his own written words.

But that was then. This is now. New times, new message - or several of them:

“I don’t believe that, I just quoted what was in the newspaper and asked where are the wealthy Muslim governments, why are they not helping.”

However, the hapless chap is in the clutches of a reporter who has done her homework. Ms. Corbella quotes the taqiyya master:

…here’s what his Jan. 23, 2005, news release actually said: “ISCC… strongly condemns the exploitation of tsunami victims by the Christian missionaries. There have been several reports that the Christian missionaries are kidnapping Muslim children in Indonesia. . . . It is now proven that the Christian missionaries do not help people on humanitarian grounds. They help people in order to exploit their needs and convert them to Christianity.”

Now that there is where the Christians differ from the Jews every time. See, the Christians want to exploit children to get their required quota of converts. The Jews? They just want to drink da blood.

As Ms. Corbella says:

Even though it was mostly “Christian” countries and organizations that came to the aid of these devastated people, these kinds of news releases caused many Indonesian Christians to be attacked and killed, including three Christian school girls who were beheaded by Muslim men.

The reporter kindly calls his lies “his explanation.” According to the imam, he had the best intentions in the world and was just trying to help spread the word:

Soharwardy explained: “I wanted to use that news to send a message to Muslim governments.” In other words, he knew his news release would find its way overseas. Perhaps he was hoping to join the lecture circuit there, too.

Soharwardy is a charmer. He convinced me that I must have misread his columns. But re-listening to the tape of our meeting and rereading his original texts, one thing is clear: he cannot be believed.

To us, he said he lodged his complaint with the AHRC because he felt Muslim “youth were getting alienated” not because the cartoons subjected him to hatred.

Ma’am, he's what you call a Two-Message Imam: one message for the Ummah, and an opposite communication for the Dummah, or as we are quaintly called in the plural, “dhimmi.” And if you listen to some Westerners you know how dim we really are.

Fortunately, she taped the conversation. Otherwise, we’d be stuck with the choice of believing him or our lying eyes. With this aural addition to the evidence, we can now choose whether to believe him or our lying ears.

The reporter observes:

This man with two master’s degrees in engineering, who has lived in North America since 1980, now says he has just realized how important free speech is. For a fella who practises outrageous forms of it -- you would hope so.

To the CBC’s The National on Wednesday, however, Soharwardy gave a different reason for dropping his complaint against Levant, who has spent two years and $100,000 in legal fees fighting this Orwellian battle: “People were looking at Ezra Levant as a martyr of freedom of his speech . . . taking this into a different direction that I did not want.”

And what did Soharwardy want?

According to Ms. Corbella he merely wanted to be both the hero of the story and the Imam who was martyred for the cause by that infidel Jew, Levant. She says his plan “backfired.” I concur.

Ah the mills of Allah grind slowly, but they grind exceedingly small. Now the Imam himself is on the receiving end of a human rights complaint:

• Women at his mosque are filing a claim of sexual discrimination.
  
• Levant plans an abuse of process lawsuit against the Imam,
  
• and now he’s being scrutinized on CNN and across Canada.

Ms. Corbella says “Soharwardy fell into his own trap.” She’s right. As for Levant, he’s enjoying the prospect of a dish best eaten cold: rightful revenge.

Soharwardy needs some brush-up lessons from the Wahhabis: taqiyya has to be subtle, untraceable, and clever. The boy’s got a lot of practice before he reaches the pro levels.

What is the correct punishment under shari’a law for bumbling your taqiyya so transparently in front of the kafr?

I hope it’s a liturgically proper stoning with the correct rocks --, i.e., of a size not so small as to do no damage, and not so large as to kill him off immediately. One needs sufficient time to consider eternity's arrival.


Thanks again, Flyboy.