While all eyes this week are on London’s royal couple, Prince William and Kate Middleton, my eyes were on an opening statement from the U.K.’s Daily Mail Reporter: “Women who do not wear headscarves are being threatened with violence and even death by Islamic extremists intent on imposing shariah law on parts of Britain.”
Rich Dart, a former BBC worker who now attends Muslim rallies, spoke for many about how they favor Islamic law’s integration in Western politics, when he was heard to say: “When the Taliban defeat the allies we will establish shariah law and take the fight to the enemy.”
Of course, we’re told such views represent an extreme minority. And yet just a couple months ago, the Los Angeles Times (Dec. 6, 2010) contested that thread in an article, “Majority of Muslims want Islam in politics.” Based upon a global poll taken in seven countries with large Muslim populations, the Times reported, “According to the survey, majorities in Pakistan, Egypt, Jordan and Nigeria would favor changing current laws to allow stoning as a punishment for adultery, hand amputation for theft and death for those who convert from Islam to another religion. About 85 percent of Pakistani Muslims said they would support a law segregating men and women in the workplace.”
But we shouldn’t believe such sentiment could ever reach the shores of America, right? Or has it already penetrated our land and even our governmental seats?
I’ll say what I said at the outset of the last column: It is no mystery that radical Islamists intend to use the freedoms in our Constitution to expand the influence of Shariah law. But, still, too many Americans don’t know or understand how it threatens the very fabrics of our republic.
And let me categorically restate that I’m neither an Islamaphobe nor a fear monger. I welcome the plurality of religions in America and am a firm believer in the First Amendment. But just as our religious freedom is secured in the Bill of Rights, so is our freedom of speech to share even our religious concerns.
Having defined what Shariah law is in Part 1, in Part 2 here I’m going to give what I label as the top 10 evidences to date that support the fact that Shariah law is seeping into society from homes to halls of justice. As you read these, ask not only what they mean today but how they might escalate and morph 10 years from now into more progressive forms.
10) According to Middle East Quarterly, Muzzammil Hassan informed New York police on Feb. 12, 2009, that he had beheaded his wife, being justified by Shariah. Hassan emigrated to the U.S. 30 years ago. In 2007, after Aqsa Parvez was murdered by her father in Toronto for not wearing hijab (the headscarf worn by Muslim women), Sheila Musaji wrote in The American Muslim, “Although this certainly is a case of domestic violence … ‘honor’ killings are not only a Muslim problem, and there is no ‘honor’ involved.” For those who think these heinous crimes are just random acts of domestic violence, a study published in the spring 2009 edition of Middle East Quarterly documented how 50 honor killings in the U.S. over the past 20 years prove otherwise.
9) Fox News reported that in 2010, a New Jersey family court judge refused to grant a restraining order to a woman who was sexually abused by her Moroccan husband and forced repeatedly to have sex with him, ruling that the Muslim husband did not have “criminal desire to or intent to sexually assault,” because under Shariah, he had a right to rape his wife. Though the ruling was overturned by New Jersey’s Appellate Court, which ruled that the husband’s religious beliefs were irrelevant and that the judge in taking them into consideration “was mistaken,” it still shows Shariah effects.
8) In March 2011, a Florida judge ruled that a dispute between Muslim parties could proceed under Shariah law. This was not just a simple matter of arbitration, but an induction of foreign law. “This case,” the judge wrote, “will proceed under Ecclesiastical Islamic Law.”
7) Legislators now in 15 states in the U.S. have put forth bills to ban international law and Shariah from being applied in their states. Are we going to label them all as paranoid? Or are they protecting our Constitution and rule of law as they should? I’m so grateful that many legislators are not sticking their heads in the sand about the potential threat that international law can have on our republic and our way of law and life.
6) Based upon the investigative work of P. David Gaubatz and Paul Sperry in their expose, “Muslim Mafia,” The Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR, the nation’s largest Islamic advocacy group, “teamed up with a terror-tied Islamic investment bank to attack publicly traded American firms who refuse to comply with Shariah law by using shareholder resolutions, divestitures, and boycotts against them,” a very successful strategy used already in Britain, too. In 2008, when the FBI severed its formal ties to CAIR because of its questionable ties to extremism, CAIR rallied other Shariah-supporting Muslim Brotherhood front groups to send the FBI a threatening letter, in which was a ban against providing the FBI with information about “acts of violence” and “threats” in the Muslim community. CAIR is riddled with pro-Shariah components and proponents seeking to permeate every aspect of our culture – e.g. multiple U.S. congressmen are calling the Department of Justice to investigate whether or not CAIR has been successful at a strategic mission to infiltrate congressional offices and plant Muslim interns there.
In the next column, I will conclude with my top five points of my “Top 10 U.S. Shariah infiltrations,” including more in Washington, D.C., itself.
Until then, let me ask those who refuse to acknowledge any evidence of Shariah law seeping into the U.S. landscape to ponder one more question: Do you find it inconsistent and even hypocritical that many warn the world about the dangers of the Christian right and yet defend the Islamic right?
(In future articles, I will also address the issues of “Shariah law vs. the U.S. Constitution,” “Shariah law vs. biblical law in the U.S.,” “The greatest proponent of Shariah law.”)
WATCH Tucker Carlson in Moscow: U.S. is now in a ‘hot war with Russia’
Tucker Carlson