Leahy’s “Truth Commission”

Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy tries to fuel the partisan mud-slinging machine

by Alyssa A. Lappen
Front Page Magazine | Feb. 16, 2009

Two of Congress’s most radical members believe George W. Bush’s America was the equal of apartheid South Africa.

Last week, Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy proposed that Congress establish a “truth commission” to investigate alleged Bush misdeeds. In the House, Judiciary committee chairman John Conyers seconded Leahy’s request.

The concept of the “truth commission” originated in post-apartheid South Africa, when the Mandela government launched an investigation into crimes against humanity. Punishments were waived on the grounds that the nation needed to know the truth about the white minority regime’s suppression of black Africans. Presumably, Leahy assumes President Bush engaged in equally egregious behavior during the War on Terror. Leahy, like his Michigan colleague Carl Levin, hopes to distort any circumstantial evidence he uncovers about how Bush-44 successfully kept this nation free from a second terrorist attack for seven years into proof of the greatest violation of civil rights since Lincoln suspended habeas corpus.

If the investigation exposes the ongoing, covert measures Bush has taken to keep America safe, Leahy will only smile as they are revealed. He has a long history of exposing the most vital secrets of our nation. At least one operative was murdered after Leahy publicly leaked a 1985 intercept that had enabled the capture of the Achille Lauro terrorists. After Leahy leaked a 1986 covert operation to topple Libyan dictator Moammar Gaddhafi, it was necessarily canceled. But for that, in other words, 270 victims of Libya’s Pan Am 103 bombing over Lockerbie Scotland might still be alive.

Finally in January 1987, Leahy was forced to resign as vice-chair of the Senate’s Select Committee on Intelligence after leaking classified information on the Iran-Contra affair. Not surprisingly, after 9/11, the FBI investigated national security leaks from Congress, specifically House and Senate Select Intelligence committee leaks.

In the 14 years after resigning from the intelligence committee in disgrace, the Vermont Senator also thwarted key speech and public education. In July 1999, then Defense Secretary William Cohen in a Washington Post op-ed predicted a major terrorist attack on U.S. soil. He and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright were so convinced Osama bin Laden would hit the U.S. that they canceled a planned visit to Albania that month. Yet in 2000, for fear of an unspecified threat against “civil liberties,” Leahy successfully opposed publication of a 2000 National Commission on Terrorism report in intelligence legislation—another measure that could have saved lives.

Had terrorists ended up in the U.S. courts, many benches would be empty thanks to Leahy. Through January 2001, he chaired the Senate Judiciary Committee. He grew petulant, however, when New Hampshire Sen. Judd Gregg replaced Leahy—and Bush appointed John Ashcroft as Attorney General over his intense objections. (Mind, many early Ashcroft opponents ended up heralding him as a hero for defending the U.S. Constitution far better than they’d expected.) In June 2001 Leahy returned as Senate Judiciary chair for 18 months. He then worked overtime to halt and block Bush judicial nominations. As ranking committee member from January 2003 through December 2006, he likewise plotted to thwart every Bush judicial nominee, an allegation he tried to turn against Republicans who attempted to expose him. In January 2007, upon resuming the Judiciary chairmanship, Leahy reinforced his stalwart political blockade, which he maintained throughout the 110th Congress. Political shenanigans over judicial nominees grew so pronounced that even the Washington Post objected to what it called intentional “justice delayed.”

The scales of justice are highly imbalanced in Leahy’s world. Pat defended Illinois Senator Richard Durbin when he compared U.S. troops in Guantanamo Bay to Nazis on the Senate floor. Leahy quickly appeared on Vermont’s Charlie & Ernie talk radio show. Although the Wall Street Journal directly quoted the U.S. Congressional Record, Leahy whined WSJ reporters “are notorious for taking quotes totally out of context, even making them up.”

Now, Leahy wants to convince the public that his “Truth Commission” is merely a good faith attempt to “get to the bottom of things.”

Were he interested in investigations that may have some political impact, he could turn his attention to potential conflicts of interest in the Obama administration. Although Obama signed an executive order barring lobbyists from serving in his administration, he also signed 17 lobbyist waivers including Attorney General Eric Holder (until 2004, a registered lobbyist for clients like bankrupt Global Crossing), White House intergovernmental affairs director Cecilia Munoz (through 2008, an anti-immigration enforcement advocate for National Council of La Raza) and Deputy Defense secretary nominee William Lynn (until 2008, a Raytheon defense contractor executive and registered lobbyist).

Leahy could investigate campaign donations Obama received from disgraced former Federal National Mortgage Association (Fannie Mae) chairman Franklin D. Raines and his supporters, which total more than $100,000. Obama gave his blessings and state and federal legislative help to several developers who subsequently received more than $700 million in subsidies and loans for their projects. The developers, including Obama’s Chicago law partner Allison Davis, Syrian developer Antoin “Tony” Rezko (now incarcerated on 16 political corruption charges) and Chicago slumlord Cecil Butler, among others, all profited greatly from loans to unqualified borrowers—largely at U.S. taxpayer expense. These may have only the appearance of impropriety — but had they occurred in the Bush administration, Leahy would have long since started mining the “truth.”

Leahy’s blatant partisan witch-hunt is the most recent sign that Bush Derangement Syndrome remains alive and well. Whatever the left’s talk of “hope and change,” of abandoning the “politics of fear,” its bomb-throwers simply wish to continue fighting yesterday’s battles, because their hatred will not allow them to, err, Move On.

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Obama’s Census-ational Power Grab

Judd Gregg blows the whistle on the silent coup

By Alyssa A. Lappen
Front Page Magazine | Feb. 13, 2009

After President Barack Obama nominated his second Commerce Secretary candidate in two weeks, his uber-liberal core constituency began screeching that his “big tent” was “bursting at the seams.” A grand jury investigation into state contracts for political donors had forced New Mexico governor Bill Richardson to drop out and Obama tapped New Hampshire Republican Sen. Judd Gregg. California Rep. Barbara Lee petulantly decried Gregg’s complaints over Clinton Administration Census Bureau methods.

Gregg didn’t refuse to fund the Census, as Lee wants the public to believe. He objected to Clinton administration attempts to “redraw their congressional districts” and reallocate federal grants to states with “statistical sampling” adjustments. The Supreme Court ruled against Census use of statistical sampling to reapportion the 435 House of Representative seats in the 1999 case Commerce Department v. U.S. House. Alas, the high court did not outlaw statistical samples methods to redistrict within states. But Lee got her way: Gregg too dropped out on February 12, citing his dissatisfaction with the administration’s handling of the census and stimulus packages Thus, the “recurrent fantasy of Census critics on the Left” remains, to revise “population numbers more to their liking,” observes former Census chief Bruce Chapman (1981-1983). If successful, such a feat would redistribute power and funds for least a decade—and could permanently damage America’s political landscape and its carefully constructed internal balance of power.

Nevertheless, President Obama relaunched the notion into political play on February 5. The Census Census Bureau will report directly to his Chief of Staff for the 2010 decennial count. Wresting Census from Commerce Department to White House control threatens “reckless politicization of the Census Bureau.” It could project “the image of a Chicago-style partisan power play”—and corrupt all fundamental data sustaining U.S. national statistics. Obama is a Daley-style Democrat, though, and Democratic party stalwarts since Jimmy Carter have broadly supported deploying the Census to their permanent political advantage. In 1978, President Carter ordered immigration enforcement officers not to arrest illegal aliens without executive branch approval, reports retired senior INS investigator Michael Cutler, who afterwards sarcastically labeled them “pre-citizens.” Angry immigration enforcement officers nationwide adopted Cutler’s term to protest Carter’s outrageous political maneuver.

Over law enforcement objections, Democrats have been monkeying with the Census ever since. Besides Obama, the chief culprits today are partisans like New York City Rep. Carolyn Maloney, a former ranking member of the House Subcommittee on Federalism and the Census, who want Obama to appoint former Census chief Kenneth Prewitt to head the 2010 Census. Prewitt advocated “statistical sampling” to reapportion House seats under Clinton, until the Supreme Court nixed it in 1999.

Then, as now, Democrats coveted statistical projection to enumerate for the census rather than counting individuals one by one. Opponents correctly recognize “the proposal as a violation of the Constitution, which calls for ‘actual enumeration’,” and an obvious ploy to bolster Democratic standing in congressional redistricting following the census, according to the Los Angeles Times.

In politics, though, pretense is everything.

As “one of our country’s premier scientific agencies,” the Census Bureau “should be accorded the status of peers such as NASA, the National Institutes of Health, and the National Science Foundation,” Maloney said last September, on introducing the “Restoring the Integrity of American Statistics Act of 2008” to make it independent in 2012. With backing from the census chiefs of the last seven presidents, from Richard M. Nixon to George W. Bush, Maloney heralded the bill as “a clear signal to Americans that the agency they depend upon for unbiased monthly economic data as well as the important decennial portrait of our nation is independent, fair, and protected from interference.” It went no where, although Maloney plans to reintroduce the bill this session.

Yet in February 2009, Maloney sings a different tune. “Obama won the election. Ultimately he’s the boss anyway,” says a staff member, waving her true political colors. Therefore, the argument goes, it doesn’t matter whether the Census Bureau reports to the White House or Commerce. And on Feb. 12, Maloney claimed that former Census chiefs’ concerns over the Obama administration Census agency hijacking amount to a “page from Seinfeld…a show about nothing.”

Chapman and Charles Louis Kincannon (Census chief, 2002-2008) vociferously disagree. Science should be scientific. Statisticians almost universally reject adjusting numbers. It follows that having Census report to the White House—which has previously never been done—would turn statistical science “into something where speculation and guesswork could introduce egregious and prejudicial errors.”

It is bad enough that the Constitutional Census clause does not distinguish between citizens and non-citizens. The founding fathers would undoubtedly have cast it differently had they envisioned a time when illegal aliens would distort the rights of citizens to fair representation.

“Undocumented is synonymous with unauthorized and illegal,” observes Connecticut Data Center manager Orlando J. Rodriguez at the University of Connecticut. Illegal aliens, if counted, will “distort the relative voting power of all citizens nationwide,” thereby influencing “America’s representative political system.” Excluding non-voters from congressional reapportionment would provide a much broader geographical disbersement of House seats, and fairer citizen and voter representation, he found in 2007 and subsequent studies. The converse is to allow illegal alien settlement to generate Congressional seats for southern border states at the expense of citizens and voters in northern and mid-western states.

Most disconcerting, however, is Democrats’ “plain hope” to leverage illegal aliens via controversial sampling and computer modeling to “adjust” the Census numbers in 2010, and further distort citizens’ relative voting power. Surely, Americans should not tolerate a political party redistributing power and funds away from citizens by riding roughshod over the Constitutional requirement for actual numeration.

“Let’s see,” Chapman quips of Democratic concerns. Obama Commerce nominee Gregg “cannot be trusted, but the Democratic politicos in the West Wing can?”

By commandeering the Census Bureau, Obama may hope to orchestrate a silent political coup. If so, however, key House Democrats insist this amounts to “nothing.”

The Stimulus as Spoils System

Illegal immigrants are the latest beneficiaries of the Democrats’ patronage politics

by Alyssa A. Lappen
FrontPageMagazine | Feb. 9, 2009

After most legislators went home last Friday, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid announced to the few remaining on the floor a tentative deal to pass that chamber’s version of the American Recovery and Renewal Tax Act. Pared to “just” $827 billion from $937 billion a day earlier, the package includes another dozen or so amendments and one giant rub: The Senate’s “economic stimulus” package provides Americans zero assurance that its corporate and government beneficiaries would use all that taxpayer money to hire only verified U.S. citizens and legal foreign workers.

“This makes about as much sense as trying to fill your bathtub while the bottom drain is open,” says retired senior U.S. immigration agent Michael Cutler, who served the government for 30 years. “The U.S. claims determination, through its economic stimulus plan, to put money in the hands of Americans who presumably will spend money in the U.S. At this time, it’s counterintuitive and antithetical to hire foreign workers whose goal is to ship their earnings overseas.” Indeed, before World War II, the Dept. of Labor enforced U.S. immigration laws to protect American workers and mandated a shortened, 40-hour work week “to spread jobs to as many American citizens as possible,” Cutler adds.

President Barack Obama insists that the U.S. has “inherited an economic crisis as deep and dire as any since the days of the Great Depression.” If true, it would make no sense to pass an economic stimulus plan that simultaneously increases the number working in the U.S.

Senator Majority leader Harry Reid would like nothing better, however. On January 7, Reid introduced the paradoxically named the “Stronger Economy, Stronger Borders Act of 2009.” Reid constructed the imprecisely worded two-page “placeholder” to later house comprehensive immigration “reform and rationalize” legislation. Translation: Reid wants massive amnesty for illegal aliens—now realistically estimated at 20 million. He even hopes to increase lawful immigrants to the U.S., whose numbers by 2006 had topped 1.3 million a year. Such “reform” would only further weaken the U.S. economy and erode already lax borders.

In response, Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala) has introduced SA 239, a measure that would require local governments and businesses that receive stimulus funds to use E-Verify, an online verification system that allows employers to check the legal status of their workers. Under the SA 239, government contractors benefiting from the stimulus plan would electronically validate job applicants’ social security numbers and names against a central database.

Challenged Friday night by Sessions on why SA 239 was not included in proposed stimulus amendments, Reid hemmed and hawed. He did not know, he said, asserting that Senators would later have opportunities to add further amendments. Although polite, Sessions was understandably not sanguine. Reid has now scheduled the “stimulus package” floor vote for Tuesday without adding the necessary E-Verify protections.

Verifying employees’ legal qualifications to work in the U.S. should not be partisan politics. Not doing so costs everyone—Democrats, Independents and Republicans alike—big bucks. Illegal aliens send as much in untaxed earnings as possible “back home.” They withdraw from the U.S. economy much more than they contribute. Working or not, moreover, illegal aliens also use educational, natural, welfare and other U.S. resources for which they do not pay taxes. The estimated cost is nearly $325 billion annually.

Illegal aliens account for most federal prison inmates, too, according to many studies. Immigration cases made up 57% of “all new federal criminal cases brought nationwide” in March 2008, according to Syracuse University-affiliated analysts. They include hundreds of thousands of criminals—a violent alleged sexual predator in New Jersey; a convicted drug dealer and alleged shooter of two New York policemen; a juvenile felon and alleged triple murderer; crack cocaine dealers; a drunk driver who killed two Virginia teens; an illegal Panamanian ex-convict and police killer and so on. Contrary to popular opinion, authorities often criminally charge illegal aliens following felonies and violent crime, not just illegal U.S. entry.

The governmentâ€™s failure to enforce immigration laws has not been lost on voters. In 2008, millions of citizens time and again appealed to the 110th Congress to renew the expiring E-Verify bill, which had hundreds of legislative co-sponsors. Last week, both parties therefore gave broad support to the House E-Verify amendment.

Yet House Speaker Nancy Pelosi last year flatly refused to allow a House floor vote on the comprehensive “Secure America through Verification and Enforcement” (SAVE) measure, intended to permanently expand E-Verify usage to all U.S. companies and government contractors. Now, Senate majority leader Reid is stonewalling on E-Verify in Madam Pelosi’s stead. The only possible logic rests in illegal aliens’ reputed preference for the Democratic legislators determined to swap political responsibility for future votes.

That problem dates back to 1978. During the U.S. Census count, President Jimmy Carter ordered Immigration officers not to arrest illegal aliens, says Cutler. “He did not order us not to arrest drug dealers or murderers.” The House of Representatives is apportioned by the U.S. Census—and populous states tend to vote Democratic. Carter recognized illegal immigration as a means of increasing Democratic party power. A magnet for illegal immigration, California now has 53 representatives—over 23% more than in 1978. Texas, another state attracting a large illegal alien population, now has has 32 congressmen, more than the 29 in New York. Representatives from those states use the Census to serve their party—rather than their positions to serve legal citizenry, Cutler says.

Friday night, Senators did adopt an amendment prohibiting more than 200 banks that got federal bail-out funds from hiring foreigners. Legislators were compelled to act after the Associated Press reported that banks who had laid off thousands of U.S. workers in 2008 requested nearly a third more foreign worker visas. The amendment gives American workers small change, however. It bans banks from hiring foreigners only for one year.

President Obama’s economic stimulus seems intended not to benefit the U.S. public but rather to shore up the core constituencies of the Democratic Party—including those illegal immigrants who will form the partyâ€™s base in the future. Such cynical political engineering may be good for the Democrats, but there is little evidence that it is good for the country.

Stealing the stimulus

Why the Democrats’ pork-stuffed stimulus package won’t help the economy

By Alyssa A. Lappen
FrontPageMagazine | Feb. 6, 2009

When are earmarks not earmarks? When Congressional Democrats add them to New Deal-style legislation.

According to Congressional Democrats, “there are no earmarks” in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, the massive $1.1 trillion stimulus bill under debate in the Senate this week. In fact, there is little except earmarks in the pork-laden legislation the Obama administration is marketing to skeptical Americans as the urgent cure for the country’s ailing economy.

As things now stand, less than 10 percent of the stimulus bill’s proposed projects could be expected to generate real economic uplift, mostly through tax credits and infrastructure funds. On the other hand, more than 90 percent of the bill would channel taxpayer funds to “special-interest earmarks,” state-level bailouts, and “permanent spending” increases for what will in effect be social engineering by the federal government.

Pork abounds in the bill. For instance, there is $88 million for a new Coast Guard polar icebreaker, $13 billion to repair and weatherize public housing, $2.25 billion for national parks, and $1 billion for the National Railway Passenger Corp. (Amtrak), which hasn’t earned one red cent since its original 1971 government rescue from Penn Central’s ashes. And that’s just the beginning.

The Senate bill greatly expands welfare spending. There are $13.3 billion earmarked to raise health insurance for unemployed workers, $27.1 billion for increased unemployment benefits, and $11.1 billion for “Other Unemployment Compensation.” Another $20 billion will go to raise maximum Supplemental Nutrition Assurance Program benefits (i.e., food stamps).

Elsewhere, the bill looks like a vehicle for Barack Obama’s campaign plan to foster a national “green economy.” To that end, there is $18.5 billion set aside for energy efficiency and renewable energy programs, another $2.4 billion for demonstrations of how to safely remove atmospheric greenhouse gas, $2 billion for a Matoon, Ill. FutureGen near-zero emission power plant, and $600 million for federal government employee hybrid vehicles.

Despite its grand billing as a national life preserver, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, in a telling demonstration of what Democrats once called “the politics of fear,” had earlier warned that “five hundred million” Americans would loose their job each month if the stimulus package were not passed…,” the bill is increasingly becoming liberal politics by other means. All in all, the bill packs in $136 billion for unproven ideas to create 32 new open-ended federal programs—most of which failed close inspection in earlier Congressional sessions.

While the bill will vastly increase the federal government’s reach, it is noteworthy that the government has never profitably managed a single enterprise. A by-no-means-exhaustive list of government failures might include mortgage giants Fanny Mae Freddie Mac, the mismanaged Federal Reserve Bank and US Postal Service, and the insolvent Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid systems. They’re all bankrupt, as are 40 of the 50 states, each of which is now begging for handouts from a federal government effectively just as bankrupt. As pundit David Coughlin asks, “Why do we think the people who caused these problems are able to fix them …?”

The stimulus bill amounts to a major opportunity missed. Bankruptcy—not a government bailout—is often the road back to solvency. Consider that six major airlines—including United, Delta, Northwest, and Continental—all filed for Chapter 11 and emerged with real hopes for profit. Such large and small steel companies as National Steel, Bethlehem Steel, Wheeling-Pittsburgh, Kaiser, Bayou, Weirton Steel, and many others have leveraged Chapter 11 to emerge as stand-alone companies—or to sell a leaner version of themselves to competitors. Pacific Gas & Electric and Kmart are healthy again, too, following their Chapter 11 filings.

No surprise, then, that over 100 economists are petitioning the Senate against the stimulus and 200 oppose financial bailouts in general. The public seems to agree. Support for the Senate stimulus plan has plummeted to just 37%, according to Rasmussen. Cooler heads are even starting to prevail in the Senate. President Obama called “centrist” Maine Sen. Susan Collins to the White House this week to discuss cutting the plan’s price tag to $700 billion, and to focus on tax cuts and spending to specifically generate jobs. That means spending of dubious stimulative potential—$780 million to prepare for a flu pandemic, for example—may soon be trimmed from the bill.

Still, it’s too bad that no one has managed to convince President Obama to eliminate the idea of “stimulus” spending all together. The U.S. already has squandered nearly $1 trillion in bailouts, to no avail. We got here “by spending and investing money that didn’t exist,” notes Oklahoma Sen. Tom Coburn. As a good physician, Coburn wisely prescribes treating the disease, not its symptoms.

The generic term for raising holdings in a tanking stock is “doubling down.” But great investors only do that for successful companies. The stimulus bill is something else entirely. If the Senate passes this “stimulus,” it would merely be doubling down on legislative pork. In the end, not even calling such proposals “job-creating investments” can disguise the fact that the bill won’t actually create jobs.

Investing in Jihad

The hidden perils of shari’a finance

By Alyssa A. Lappen
FrontPageMagazine | Feb. 4, 2009

Indonesian sukuk buyers may sink in the same ship with the dupes heeding Western headlines and Islamic gurus since the Bernard Madoff scandal broke last December. These financial product pushers have increasingly exaggerated the “safety” of Islamic finance securities to offset “the cancer of interest-bearing debt.” Investors are now snapping up three-year Indonesian bonds that will supposedly hold their full value and make money—an astronomical 12%—while paradoxically avoiding speculation, alcohol, gambling, interest, and other “haram” activities forbidden under shari’a law.

Granted, Bernie Madoff’s “hedge fund” investors did not expect to be robbed blind. But they knowingly exchanged high risk for high returns. Indeed, alternative funds are so risky that U.S. securities laws limit their sale to investors with at least $2 million in financial assets—in other words, enough to protect them against being totally wiped out.

But even folks who should know better don’t grasp the risks of Islamic finance. London’s Financial Times, for example, touted the Amana Trust “Islamic” Income fund, based in Washington state, for “losing only 25.8 per cent” in 2008… half [sic] the average 44% loss for US stock funds.” Likewise, an SEI Investments company analyst recommended Islamic mutual funds as protection from the stock and bond markets’ “extreme ups and downs,” despite their substantial losses in the last quarter of 2008.

Odds are, the average Muslim “Mohammed Sixpack” doesn’t understand the financial risks of 12% Indonesian sukuk bonds either. High yields—for example 12%, when the U.S. Federal Reserve lends “overnight” to banks at rates close to zero—are usually called “junk.”

Unfortunately, these bonds are also backed by “assets” carved up like pie and “securitized.” Meaning: they can head south in a hurry, just like the sub-prime mortgages that sank the U.S. economy, which were also also backed by assets and securitized, not to mention the mortgage-backed issues that unraveled dozens of huge bond, pension and public institutional funds in 1994. In 1637, Dutch tulip bulb contracts sold for over 20 times the annual wages of a skilled craftsman—until their “solid” value withered overnight in the first financial crash in recorded history. [1]

Islamic finance carries many other risks besides.

The Thomas More Law Center in Ann Arbor, Mich. in December sued former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and the Federal Reserve Board to stop $40 billion in U.S. bail out aid from reaching American International Group (AIG). The insurance giant devotes an entire division to shari’a finance products, which Thomas More considers unsafe, unconstitutional and anti-American.

The suit zeros in on statutes fundamental to shari’a law, such as funding jihad warfare. It also focuses on AIG’s “supervisory committee” members—Bahraini Sheikh Nizam Yaquby, Saudi Mohammed Ali Elgari and Pakistani Muhammed Imran Ashraf Usmani, a “devoted disciple” of his father Mufti Taqi Usmani. The latter Shari’a-compliant finance authority directs Western Muslims to aggressively pursue violent jihad against the their governments.

AIG is not alone.

As I’ve often previously noted, the shari’a finance boards setting “Islamic banking” standards themselves employ highly objectionable “authorities.” Both the Accounting and Auditing Organization for Islamic Financial Institutions (AAOIFI) and Islamic Financial Services Board (IFSB), for example, include many representatives of nations, banks, and organizations implicated in terror-funding.

Atlas Shrugs recently comprised a more inclusive list of hot shot shari’a personalities. Apart from Taqi Usmani—a Pakistani shari’a court justice since 1982, shari’a director of the Saudi Al Baraka Investment Corp. implicated in 9/11 financing and until recently an advisor to Dow Jones Islamic Indexes—shari’a boards include other graduates of the most radical Saudi and Pakistani Islamic universities and madrassas that duplicate Usmani’s wish to impose shari’a law globally.

Shari’a finance still retains Western adherents. A Jan. 16, 2009 Hedge Funds Review article for example advises forlorn, out-of-work money managers, “Don’t forget Islamic finance.”

Several readers disagree. “Forget Islamic finance…. It won’t make it through the crisis,” a private equity venture capitalist comments. Islamic finance itself is “flawed in principle,” since “charging more than you loaned is called ‘interest’,” adds an investor relations man. As these Hedge Funds Review subscribers avow, the industry cannot possibly elude the financial risks that now face every other bank and investment house in the world.

Notably, Stern School economics professor and former Treasury Department and White House advisor Nouriel Roubini, the publisher of Roubini Global Economics Monitor (RGE Monitor), also considers Islamic finance to be risky. The Islamic finance reliance on debt issues backed by assets exposes the business and investors both to “devaluation” of underlying assets (hyperbolically speaking, like wilting tulips) and the overall freeze in normal capital flows, or liquidity. The level of new Islamic bond issues worldwide fell 60% from January through October 2008, to only $15.2 billion, against that of the first 10 months in 2007. Low oil prices and Middle East liquidity troubles could also hurt demand for shari’a finance instruments throughout 2009, Roubini posits, according to the Asian Energy blog.

Yet the greatest, albeit hidden, risks of shari’a finance are unseen by even the most astute economists. By investing alone, non-Muslims actively participate in what former Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamed calls “a jihad worth supporting,” namely an effort to impose “universal Islamic banking.” Islamic banking is not an ancient religious tradition, but a 20th century invention of the Muslim Brotherhood and their spiritual chief Yusuf Qaradawi. It was developed to subsume capitalism with Islamic finance—a prospect neither safe nor mere fantasy.

Furthermore, shari’a investors may also inadvertently support economic jihad, as mandated by Qur’an 49:15: “Strive with their wealth and their lives for the cause of Allah,” and reiterated in 61:10-11: “Shall I show you a commerce that will save you from a painful doom? …strive for the cause of Allah with your wealth and your lives.”

Shari’a funds collect at least 2.5% of income, wealth and profits, plus arbitrarily determined “purification” levies on profits derived from those Islamically forbidden, or “haram,” activities. The Standard & Poor’s Islamic indexes do list some companies that get revenues from “non-compliant activities” totaling under 5% of their gross corporate sales. In those instances, S&P applies what it calls a “dividend purification ratio,” dividing “non-compliant” revenues by the total revenues of the index. The thing is, S&P doesn’t specify exactly what activities or other attributes constitute “non-compliant,” much less how or to whom it distributes zakat and purification levies. [2] Continue reading “Investing in Jihad” →

Jihad in Gaza’s history

By Andrew Bostom and Alyssa A. Lappen
American Thinker | Feb. 1, 2009

Victor Sharpe’s interesting discussion of Gaza’s history omits any discussion of the impact of its brutal jihad conquest for the native vanquished Jewish (and Samaritan) and Christian populations, or the chronic, oppressive imposition of dhimmitude in all of historical Palestine, including Gaza, during more than 13 centuries of Muslim occupation. For additional analysis about the historical plight of the subjugated dhimmis, see this essay at The American Thinker, both parts 1 and 2. Below are some relevant details about the initial Muslim conquest and colonization.

Moshe Gil’s monumental study of Muslim subjugation and rule of historical Palestine (from 634-1099 CE) elaborates on the initial wave of jihad conquests (during the fourth and fifth decades of the seventh century, CE), and details the lasting destruction they wrought (cited in my Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism, pp. 79-80 )

…at the time of the conquest, Palestine was inhabited by Jews and Christians….The Arab tribes were to be found in the border areas, in keeping with arrangements made with the Byzantine rulers….one can assume that the local population suffered immensely during the course of the war [i.e., jihad conquests] and it is very likely that many villages were destroyed and uprooted in the frontier regions, and that the lot of these local populations was very bitter indeed. It appears that the period of the conquest was also that of the destruction of the synagogues and churches of the Byzantine era, remnants of which have been unearthed in our own time and are still being discovered. The assumption is based both on what is said in a few Christian sources…and on Muslim sources describing ‘Umar’s [Umar b. al-Khattab] visits to al-Sham. There is no doubt that one of the main purposes of these visits was to establish order and put an end to the devastation and slaughter of the local population…Towns in the western strip and the central strip (the region of the red sand hills and the swamps) in the Sharon, decreased from fifty-eight to seventeen ! It is estimated that the erosion of the soil from the western slopes of the Judaean mountains reached – as a result of the agricultural uprooting during the Muslim period – the gigantic extent of 2,000 to 4,000 cubic meters….We find direct evidence of the destruction of agriculture and the desertion of the villages in the fact that the papyri of Nessana are completely discontinued after the year 700. One can assume that at the time the inhabitants abandoned the place, evidently because of the inter-tribal warfare among the Arabs which completely undermined the internal security of the area.

Moreover, with regard to the conquest of Gaza, specifically, the Muslim chronicler Baladhuri maintained (The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism, p.79) that 30,000 Samaritans and 20,000 Jews lived in Caesarea alone just prior to the Arab Muslim conquest; afterward, all evidence of them disappears.