Muslims and alcohol have a close and tawdry relationship — Iran is busy hiding its alcoholics, Pakistan’s bootleggers deliver firewater like pizza, and the Saudis smuggle forbidden hootch — but those inconvenient truths didn’t stop a group of preachy Muslim Brooklynites from flogging American morality into the ground or a limp local civic panel from taking the browbeating like a wimp.
“We know people in America. They legalize sodomy, prostitution, and they legalize alcohol, but that does not make these things right,” whined a Muslim protestor at a Sept. 20 Community Board 18 hearing over Tasso Bar and Restaurant’s right to serve beer and wine next door to a Flatlands mosque, adding, “Our basis is moral and religious.”
Spineless board members caved to pressure and rejected the restaurant’s application for a license to serve beer and wine which, unlike hard liquor, is legal to sell even right next to a house of worship. At last check Brooklyn was not a shariah zone, New York was not a dry state, and quackery was not a national trait.
Also at last check some Muslims continue to revel privately in the taboos they publicly decry.
A 2013 Pew Research Center poll found that most Muslims surveyed around the world said drinking alcohol, sex outside marriage, homosexuality, and prostitution were morally wrong, but even shariah law can’t stop men and women from doing what they want to do:
• The International Wines and Spirits Record, a London-based market-research firm, found alcohol sales in the Muslim-majority Middle East between 2001 and 2011 leapt by 72 percent, against a global average of 30 percent.
• Premarital sex is so rife in the Muslim world that the hymenoplasty — an operation restoring a women’s virginity — is a hot topic on Iranian weblogs.
• The gay lifestyle flourishes in Saudi Arabia, where sodomy is punishable by death.
• Muslims permit sex on the side — misyar, a temporary relationship between men and women for sexual pleasure, is legal prostitution thinly veiled.
CB18 should have shut down the holier-than-thou Islamo-protestors on the grounds that Judeo-Christian laws — not shariah hypocrisies — power America.
