Frank Gaffney and his friends can relax: Sneaky Muslims aren't going to impose Sharia Law on the US and take away their bacon cheeseburgers. It's impossible.
But you'd never know that from what's pouring out of outfits like Gaffney's Center for Security Policy, from Fox News or from right-wing bloggers across the land, all of whom say the threat is real -- real enough to spawn 15 proposed state and federal laws against it.
Here's how Gaffney described what he calls the threat to the New York Senate's Homeland Security and Military Affairs Committee on April 8th: ."The threat...is best described, I believe, as a politico-legal-military threat whose express purpose is to have it imposed world-wide, subject to a theocratic ruler called a Caliph. That is of course a program that is completely at odds with our Constitution, our form of government, our way of life, our freedoms."
I'll admit that sounds pretty grim. Even if it does seem a lot like the threat of Global Communism I used to hear about as a kid.
The truth? Sharia is religious law, and no religious law can be imposed on the US without amending the Constitution -- twice -- to repeal both the opening clause of the First Amendment, and the Supremacy Clause in Article 6.
So how can Sharia Law be imposed on the US? No one seems to know. Or at least, nobody who's pushing the claim would talk to me about it, though they seemed eager to tell me how bad it would be.
These non-talkers included Gaffney's COO, Christina Brim, who even came to the phone to tell me she wouldn't talk to me; Rex Duncan, who sponsored an Oklahoma law last year forbidding Sharia Law from being used in the state; Newt Gingrich (famously afraid of "Islamic atheists"); the Thomas More Center; and NewsMax, Town Hall, and The National Review magazines, all of which have been vocal about the so-called danger but wouldn't explain why there's anything to it..
Meanwhile, the so-called examples of how Sharia Law is already being used in American courts are frauds. Take a look at them and you find out what they're talking about are arbitrations -- not trials under civil or criminal law. And two parties in an arbitration can agree to be bound by Star Fleet regulations without crossing the Constitution.
This includes the most recent so-called example of Sharia law being imposed on America, in Tampa, where in late March a judge ruled that Sharia could be applied in an arbitration over money between two parties--from the same mosque--only to be overruled the next day by a higher court. That event triggered a frenzy in the right wing blogosphere -- all, oddly, written almost exactly the same way.
The same goes for the so-called 85 Sharia Courts in England that are often raised as an example of how bad things already are: These are arbitration panels, conducted under the authority of the British courts -- not Sharia law courts.
And in fact, similar arrangements are a long-standing commonplace in America jurisprudence -- all of them operating under the authority of state and federal laws.
Until the 1920s, for instance, the legal system of the entire state of Utah was largely conducted in Bishop's Courts, operating under the authority of the Church of Latter Day Saints -- courts that are still in use in more limited ways. Native American reservations -- actually, sovereign nations -- govern themselves. So do religious communities like Kiryas Joel in Orange County, N.Y., a home to the Satmar sect of Hasidic Jews.
So what are Gaffney and friends talking about? No one knows, really. But that hasn't stopped 15 laws forbidding international laws, including Sharia Law, from being put before state legislatures and the US House of Representatives.
That count includes Duncan's Oklahoma law, which he called "...a first strike" to prevent something he admitted had never happened. That law was approved by 72 percent of Oklahoma voters in a referendum last November, but was then ruled unconstitutional under the First Amendment. It's now on appeal.
In response to that objection the anti-Sharia folks merely edited their language to forbid international law from being considered in US courts and dropping the Sharia reference. This includes one before the US House of Representatives, H.R. 973, proposed by Florida's Sandy Adams, whose office didn't return calls requesting comment.
There's only one problem here: Modern business is international, the parties to a contract can choose which laws govern their contract, and typically in any international deal, the laws that govern a contract include foreign laws.
So if, say, an Oklahoma company wanted to sell something to a company in Kuwait, Kuwati law could apply--and be honored in American courts, All these laws would do, says Avery Katz, who teaches contract law at Columbia Law School, is force the parties to conduct their business elsewhere--probably London, where the problem wouldn't exist. But, he adds, this could add extra costs to the deal, which could kill it altogether.
So, what's up here? You have to assume these lawmakers are smart guys. Certainly, Frank Gaffney and his ilk are smart guys. They have to know that as far as this issue goes, there's no there there. So why are they bothering?
Well, ginning up an empty issue like this does several things for them.
One is the reality of the news business. Even in the 24-hour news cycle, there's only 24 hours in a day, and every minute or column inch spent covering this is a minute or column inch not spent covering, say, how lobbyists are gutting the Dodds-Frank Bill and leaving the American financial system vulnerable to another disaster like 2007-2008.
Then there's the politics. "It's clearly an effort to stir the pot and keep the noise level up," says Matt Duss, a policy analyst with the Center for American Progress. "They just have to keep people freaked out about this even though they know it can never happen, and the Democrats have to respond."
And then, there's the money. Right wing politics is a business with a simple business plan: Sell people the idea they're under imminent threat, tell them you're fighting to stop it, and ask them for money. It's worked like a charm for the National Rifle Association.
Visit me at my website, ReinbachsObserver.com
Eric N. Kniffin: Are American Muslims Entitled to the Same Free Exercise Rights as Other Americans?
Joshua Stanton: Islamophobia: Increasingly Ordinary and Therefore Most Terrible
A side note: I happened to read a comment on this page with someone quoting "Reliance of the Traveler" to you as a reason why Sharia is incompatible with a modern society. Just thought I'd point out that this book was written in the fourteenth century. The idea of Sharia coming to the US is utterly ridiculous, but the assertion that it would come based off of 600 year old legal rulings is even more ridiculous. Not even us Muslims would be okay with that.
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Good. Put your money where your mouth is. Reform Sharia law.
Don´t demonize Muslims but understand there are those determined to apply Sharia worldwide. Religious ´belief¨ and legal practices should be indisputable rights. Once those rights are the law of the land no further concessions should be made.
Do you like it when certain groups try to sneak in anti-abortion laws? Well those guys are doing the same thing...eventually violence will be used to implement and enforce Sharia. People like you will have unwittingly helped them. I implore others to give Muslims a break by not letting sneaky abusers of tolerance to make any headway whatsoever!
The fact that some Muslims somewhere want Islam to be the world's religion is no different than Baptists or Mormons' seeking converts, and doesn't mean all Muslims are working for it. What it also doesn't mean is that there's some sort of Islam Central directing everything, and by your own admission, those Muslims who want to spread Sharia are merely a group, and not the religion.
And what's with putting belief in quotes [paragraph 2]? Are you siuggesting Muslims don't believe in their own religion, or are you suggesting that Islam is somehow an illegitimate religion? This is what I mean by "sneaky".
Sharia can't become the law of the land in this country, period. Didn't you read the piece?
There are plenty of Muslims with a public face who say the same thing as Safiya Malik. Will you impugn their motives also? Is Dr. Jasser of AIFD posing as a Muslim, too?
Is your view of Islam so parochial that you cannot imagine a Muslim condemning Islamists?
You should get out more. Good place to start:
http://www.aifdemocracy.org/
A number of critics tamper with the beliefs of sincere Muslim believers and cast doubts on their beliefs and try to show such beliefs to be fraudulent and non-divine. There is blind, uncritical patriotism, extreme xenophobic nationalism and downright rather unpleasant chauvinism.
May not all agree, but many faith based individuals like me feel that we need some strong moral foundation to stand on, even if it is meant outside the statute books. Some critics overtly or covertly want to accomplice a materialistic empire that is attached to the imperialism of yesteryear by forcing people to declare themselves to be Westerners or Easterners forgetting the unity of humanity.
They are under the impression that ethnic minorities in the U.S. can not represent themselves nevertheless, out of political necessity the minorities can be represented only by the majority race.
The opposition between Orient and Occident, Christians and Muslims or even secular and religious, is both misleading and highly undesirable in the fast changing globalising world that moves towards multiculturalism rather than the xenophobic and aggressive cultural nationalism.
Cultures are hydrid and heterogeneous and cultures and civilizations are closely interrelated and inderdependent to beggar unitray description of their individuality
A handful of western values and ideas none of which have any meaning outside the history of conquest, immigration, travel and the mingling of peoples that gave the U.S. its present mixed identity.We have crossed barriers. Why do some want to maintain artificial barriers?
"However, American courts, in not granting comity, refuse to enforce Islamic divorces given under Sharia, as they violate the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment — which forbids the government from establishing a national religion or unfairly favoring one religion over another.
Additionally, courts are allowed to refuse to recognize the divorce from another country if the foreign law is “repugnant” — doesn’t conform with U.S. notions of fairness to both parties or violates public policy.
In one recent case, a Maryland court held that the talaq was contrary to the state’s constitutional provisions providing women and men with equal rights. Further, the court held that the talaq violated public policy because it didn’t afford the wife in the case due process of law."
In other words, US courts do not recognize Sharia divorces. So what's your point?
In Judiasm, there's something similar to this called a "Get"--a religious divorce. Even if you have one from a rabbi, an observent Jew still needs to get a civil divorce from a civil court. Without the Get, the rabbis wouldn't recognize the divorce. This seems to me to be a parallel set of circumstances. Yet it doesn't mean Rabbinic law is about to take over the US, and I'd suggest the same applies to Sharia law..
Thing is, any Constitutionalist would defend the right of Muslims to practice Sharia under the First Amendment as understood since 1789, and would have no truck with banning any religious practice--including Sharia.
The defense of freedom of religion extends as far as allowing people to take drugs, as in the case of the Native American church, which takes peyote as part of its ritual. That decision has not been interpreted to mean all Americans are required to take peyote. In the same way, Muslims choosing to have private matters decided according to a Sharia-based arbitration are entitled to make that choice; if the decision and/or punishment rendered by the panel violates the Constitution, it cannot stand, because Article 6 section II says the Constitution and the laws that flow from it--that is, all laws--are supreme. I honestly don't see how a close examination of the facts supports any other conclusion.
I honestly wish the issue were much less politicized, but if one takes a closer examination of the facts he/she learns Muslims want to be right with their community and agree to arbitration that ends up being a raw deal. Let's examine the UK since I grew up there and have deep roots in England. Sharia judges treat women less respectfully than men to the point of being insulting. The rulings always benefit men and women can chose to accept it or accept possible being ostracized. On the other hand if Sharia were rejected out of hand then human rights would rule. Do you think judges should probe further into allegations of spousal abuse by asking questions to women as if they might have provoked it? Recently a man beat his wife quoting Sura 4:34. Would he go to jail under Sharia courts?
Relenting to those "dangerous zealots with their crazy practices" might seem like a good idea at first but once you look closer you see it harms the most vulnerable and you end up with a state within a state. Get a sex change and convert to Islam, then tell us in which of those states you'd rather live.
http://www.laughatthenews.com/2011/04/saudi-arabia-rejects-oklahoma-law.html
"precedent
1) n. a prior reported opinion of an appeals court which establishes the legal rule (authority) in the future on the same legal question decided in the prior judgment. Thus, "the rule in Fishbeck v. Gladfelter is precedent for the issue before the court in this case." The doctrine that a lower court must follow a precedent is called stare decisis "
Thank you for considering this and taking the time to answer in a thorough, educated, and unbiased manner.
What's happening here is that people warning that Sharia Law poses a threat are conflating the results of court decisions--made under US law--and the results of decisions made in arbitration. In arbitration, as I say, the parties can agree to be bound by Star Fleet regulations and be bound by it; this is not however a matter of law, and unless the US substitutes Sharia Law for the system of courts and laws we have now, Sharia Law cannot replace US law, as explained above.
One more thing: Unlike US law, which comprises many millions of printed words, there is no written corpus of Sharia Law. Sharia Law is more like a guide to right conduct, and thus could never be the basis of a courts system in this country unless we somehow became an Islamic country--forbidden under the Establishment Clause of the First Amerndment.
I hope that's thorough, educated, and unbiased enough for you.
Poor copy editing on my part.
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You have said this several times in your comments, and you are wrong. I have in front of me now "Reliance of the Traveller, A Classic Manual of Islamic Sacred Law."
And what sort of books do you imagine fill the library shelves of an Islamic judge? What books do you think a Ph.D. candidate in Islamic law studies?
An excerpt:
"o8.0 APOSTASY FROM ISLAM (RIDDA)
[...]
o8.1 When a person who has reached puberty and is sane voluntarily apostatizes from Islam, he deserves to be killed."
For any Muslim who follows the Shafii madhab, and is not overruled by civil law, this is binding law.
We also don't need to have this country run under strict Biblical law, which prescribes death for wearing a cotton/poly shirt [Leviticus 19:19] or working on the Sabbath.
However: The corpus of every country's law is one huge arcane technicality filled with archaicisms. For instance, it's still illegal to shoot rabbits from streetcars in many cities,
If you don't understand those things, you just don't know anything about the law. Period.
The fact that there may be archaic laws on the books in the US is a red herring. The objections to Sharia have nothing to do with laws that ban shooting jackrabbits from streetcars or the care of public spittoons. The objections have everything to do with the hardwon rights of American women -- the right of each woman to determine her life and sexual behavior without interference from fathers, husbands, and imams.
It's ironic that you would cite the Satmar sect of upstate NY as an example of a community that operates its own religious legal system. If you hope that informing the public about the Satmar's quaint little kangaroo court will con them into accepting Sharia Law in the US, you are barking up the wrong tree. You may not be aware of the flagrant abuses that go on inside this secretive Hasidic town, but many people know it rivals the Taliban in its Stone Age treatment of women and tyrannical control of every aspect of life.
I highly recommend the following article from New York Magazine so you can learn about the distasteful practices of the totalitarian Satmars. Pay special attention to the section that describes how the town's rabbi inspects each woman's underpants to determine whether or not she is menstruating.
http://nymag.com/news/features/48532/
http://jezebel.com/#!5025025/23+year+old-woman-leaves-religious-sect-loses-daughter
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More that a billion Muslims worldwide know what Gaffney is talking about, and the Muslim ancestors of American Muslims know what Gaffney is talking about, and now many non-Muslim Americans have been made aware of it. Yet the author is unaware?
Why not ask those who are resisting anti-Sharia laws? They know.
A sample of the Sharia law, as explained by Osama bin Laden, everyone else seems to be aware of:
“[O]ur talks with the infidel West and our conflict with them ultimately revolve around one issue, and it is: Does Islam, or does it not, force people by the power of the sword to submit to its authority corporeally if not spiritually?
Yes. There are only three choices in Islam: either willing submission [i.e., conversion]; or payment of the jizya [poll-tax paid by non-Muslims], thereby bodily, though not spiritual, submission to the authority of Islam; or the sword—for it is not right to let him [an infidel] live.
The matter is summed up for every person alive: either submit, or live under the suzerainty of Islam, or die…. Such, then, is the basis of the relationship between the infidel and the Muslim. Battle, animosity, and hatred—directed from the Muslim to the infidel—is the foundation of our religion.”
(The Al Qaeda Reader, p. 42.)
Are you asking us to take this seriously--especially since, during the First Gulf War, the US Marines had to rescue the Saudi unit that insisted it launch the first attack on Iraq, because they were such inept soldiers?
I really have to thank you for your numerous comments: Nothing I could possibly have said could have better illustrated my assertion that there's nothing to this meme than what you've said here today. In fact, you've proven my suspicion that the reason none of the major voices insisting that Sharia Law is a threat to America would explain how it could every come about is because, witohut sounding like idiots, they can't--because it can never happen.
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Is that how it happened in Kosovo, Mr. Reinbach?
But let's take an altenative scenario, suggested to me by a conservative friend: Muslims--now totalling no more than 10 million of our 310 million population--will simply out-reproduce the rest of the country and then have their way with us.This requires that
*Non-Muslims stop reproducing;
*Muslims never become Americanized;
*There's some secret Muslim council directing all this--that Islam is a unified, totalitarian force acting secretly to control the world.
Aside from that last soundling a lot like a Muslimized version of THE PROTOCOLS OF THE ELDERS OF ZION, and the fact that there's no Muslim central committee, my friend's idea holds no more water than the invasion idea, if you ask me. It would be nice to have an easily-identifiable enemy the country could rally against, but I'm sorry to tell you that world history has moved beyond the Cold War. Today's world is infinietely more complex, and simplistic approaches are probably the best way for us to minimize our standing in the world being created before our eyes.
Maybe some readers will be convinced by your reply that there is no problem that deserves a serious response.
Maybe not.
This is a very old competition between Sharia values and all others, presently the values of liberal democracy. That's why the OIC promotes the Cairo Declaration rather than the UDHR.
Ignoring this ideological war will not make it go away.
A large segment of American Muslims are in this country because of that sort of extremism in their country of origin. It would add insult to injury to flee totalitarian regimes to construct yet another.
That being said, if you gather 20 Muslims in a room you will find that there are at least 20 different opinions on what Shariah is and how it pertains to the life of a Muslim. Those of us with common sense and scriptural awareness recognize that it is a code of ethics that is to be self-imposed upon Muslims only. It was a mistake for it to enter the civil law of nations with an Islamic majority.
For us "progressive Muslims", Shariah is nothing that endorses stonings, executions or other Draconian punitive codes. It is, instead, a method for each Muslim to understand his social and ethical obligations. For me specifically, Shariah reminds me not to speed, to help those that need it, to be kind to my neighbors and to have a community of respect for my fellow Muslims and especially for those not of my faith.
What happens within a Muslim family is not always as unbiased but I know that situation is just as true for American families who practice Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, etc.
Maintaining rights is an on-going struggle in any segment of society and not something that we should ever yield or become complacent in.
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Why should America be the exception?
Every country to which Muslims have migrated has been subjected to an effort, variously successful, to replace local law with Sharia law. Why not here?
It took 400 years in Indonesia, less than that in Kosovo. What has changed since then?
Is there some new Sharia law that rescinds the usual pattern-- migration followed by jihad--that has been followed since Mohammed left Mecca for Yathrib? What happened to the Jewish and pagan city of Yathrib, anyway? What is the dominant law there and what happened to the Arabian Jews and pagans?
And those in present day Syria, Jordan, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Tunisia, Morocco, Algeria, Turkey....
What is the dominant law in those places, all of which had local law?
You are suggesting America is not exceptional? Careful now, you might tread on someone.
"It" appears to have consisted primarily of voluntary conversions.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spread_of_Islam_in_Indonesia
How is that the same as insidious colonization?
History has proven these people not only wrong, but dangerous to our democracy. Joe McCarthy proved it. The internment of Japanese Americans proved it. Slavery and Jim Crow proved it. Yet again and again, we fight the same battle to prove that they are wrong. It is, on the one hand, a sad commentary on the selfish and small nature of so many of our countrymen; yet on the other hand, it also provides the opportunity for us to remind ourselves and each other, what this great country really stands for.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b191NQzJyss
Faved.
So really, being bound by religious laws isn't bad, it just depends which religion.
If an idea is spawned out of pure sectarianism and prejudice it should be rethought, examined and scrutinized in the secular courts until it's refined to a useable ethic or dismissed as too prejudicial.
Faved.
Indeed. In the minds of the right:
Christian = Good
Muslim = Bad
This is the level of their world view.
As Reinbach references, money talks. Politicians are very good at creating a chaos, instilling fear in the public of the intrusion of the chaos, then selling a solution (if only you will donate NOW).
This is very similar to an advertisement. Watch the next television commercial. It tells you there is a problem of some sort, one you had better do something about. It then sells you a solution to the problem it just created, whether real or not.