Texas: Muslim who spoke at pro-Khomeini conference and threatened columnist anointed as "the country's leading Muslim deradicalization expert"

Does Mohamed Elibiary, who is called in this ridiculous puff piece "the country's leading Muslim deradicalization expert," need to deradicalize himself? After all, he was one of the speakers at a December 2004 conference in Dallas entitled "A Tribute to the Great Islamic Visionary," Ayatollah Khomeini. When Rod Dreher of the Dallas Morning News called him on this, he threatened Dreher, telling him: "Expect someone to put a banana in your exhaust pipe." I have met Mohamed Elibiary. He is a slick fellow. You can read here his dancing and obfuscation about deception in Islam and other matters, in a long exchange we had here at Jihad Watch. Read it carefully, noting the questions I ask him and the answers he gives to them, and ask yourself whether he really is or ought to be thought of as "the country's leading Muslim deradicalization expert" -- not that there is any more suitable candidate out there.

"Many Muslims quietly working to head off radicalism," by Eileen Flynn for the Austin American-Statesman, February 6 (thanks to Ed):

In 2008, a New York woman feared her brother, a troubled young Muslim man living in New York, might be getting involved in a violent radical group in Pakistan. So she called a cleric in Houston for advice. The cleric in turn called Mohamed Elibiary, head of the Plano-based nonprofit Freedom and Justice Foundation.

Elibiary, who has quietly emerged as the country's leading Muslim deradicalization expert, devised an intervention that played on the young man's familial duties and got him to return to the United States where counselors and mentors steered him away from militant extremism.

That case is detailed in a new report from the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a think tank that has compiled stories of other would-be terrorists who abandoned their violent plans.

And it's a reminder that in the aftermath of last year's Fort Hood shootings and the recent terrorism-related arrests of young Muslim Americans, we need people like Elibiary working with government and law enforcement....

Of course, people like Elibiary, and only people like Elibiary, are already working closely with government and law enforcement.