Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy Karen Hughes will be a speaker this weekend at an event in Dallas sponsored by Mohamed Elibiary. Rod Dreher asks, “If she knew, would she care?”

But I do wonder why Hughes is getting mixed up with Elibiary and his organization. Elibiary was one of the speakers at the local event billed as a “Tribute to the Great Islamic Visionary, the Ayatollah Khomeini” a few years back here in town. He later explained in a newspaper column that he had no advance knowledge that the conference was going to be framed that way, but even if he had, he would still have participated, to offer what he calls a counter-perspective.

Elibiary is also the guy who argued that Sayyid Qutb’s influential book “Milestones,” which the Dallas Central Mosque had teenagers participating in an Islamic quiz contest study several years ago, was … well, here’s what he wrote to me:

I’m looking at a copy of “Milestones”, “In the Shade of the Quran” and “Islam and Universal Peace” (all written by Syed Qutb) in the Library at our office as I’m writing you this. Now I’m not an extremist preacher nor a radicalism tolerating board member, but what I am is an American who knows our laws very well and first amongst these is freedom of speech. Now after overlooking your laced language once more harking back to a more convenient time period for your political views (“bloodcurdling manifesto”), I’d like to ask you to explain how Milestones calls for the “violent imposition of Islamic totalitarianism worldwide” because I must of missed something there? Like I’ve stated to you on multiple occasions and shared with your colleagues, you don’t understand the subject matter you speak on with such authority and it would benefit you to act as a student before grabbing the teacher’s ruler.

You can follow the link I provided to read excerpts from “Milestones,” Qutb’s manifesto calling for violent world Islamic revolution to impose shariah rule.

UPDATE at 8/16/07 12:51:25 pm:

When President Bush began saying “Islamofascism” to refer to the jihadist menace, Elibiary was one of the Islamic “activists” who went ballistic and demanded (successfully) that Bush stop using the word:

Mohamed Elibiary, a Texas-based Muslim activist, said he was upset by the president’s comment. “We’ve got Osama Bin Laden hijacking the religion in order to define it one way. We feel the president and anyone who’s using these kinds of terminologies is hijacking it too from a different side.”