Sharia Lobby Shifts into 5th Gear

Slow down, moving too fast, got to make the U.S. last…

by Alyssa A. Lappen
Family Security Matters | Sept. 7, 2011

Sharia advocates desperately want to convince legislators and the public that Islamic law is plain vanilla — and totally nonthreatening to existing U.S. legal codes. Notwithstanding a nationwide Muslim Brotherhood-backed pro-sharia push, nothing could be further from the truth.

“There are many unpleasant doctrines within Islam,” including its “repugnant” criminal code, honor killings, female genital cutting, and a Quranic verse Muslim clerics often cite, proclaiming “wives as a tilth unto you” (2:223), to deny the existence of marital rape.[1]

So allowed sharia professor Sadiq Reza at an Aug. 25-26 New York Law School (NYLS) conference. Any attempt to enforce its criminal code, he added, “would violate Constitutional law.” He insisted, though, that western Muslims don’t “favor” these aspects of Islam and none seek to impose them. Evidence that they do abounds (here, here, here, here, here) but Reza said his broad web search found none.

Northwestern University Islamic law professor Kristen Stilt, too, disdained sharia criticism as “lunacy.” And University of Toronto Islamic law professor Mohammed Fadel referred the audience to a glossy, Soros-funded condemnation of skeptics, breathlessly entitled “Fear, Inc.” to persuade the gullible.

Soon afterward, journalist Joseph Klein recalled some points of Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood “scholar” Yusuf Qaradawi, revered by the Islamic world — and “Fear, Inc.” co-author Wajahat Ali. Qaradawi identifies fully with sharia as described by former CIA director R. James Woolsey and fellow so-called hate mongers headed by Center for Security Policy CEO Frank Gaffney, not Ali and his co-detractors. Qaradawi considers charity “jihad with money, because God has ordered us to fight enemies with our lives and our money,” as I noted in fall 2007. Like the MB-backed Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), Qaradawi also seeks to internationally criminalize insults to Islam or Mohammed.

CSP’s sharia description is quite correct — not the “hate” or “lunacy” that Reza, Ali, Stilt and Fadel call it. Sharia is indeed a

“complete way of life” (social, cultural, military, religious, and political), governed from cradle to grave by Islamic law… Shariah is, moreover, a doctrine that mandates the rule of Allah over all aspects of society.”

Despite all sharia’s sobering negatives, orchestrated campaigns to hype it and smear its critics — with Reza in a vocal role — have worked their expected magic. Days after NYLS’s pro-sharia confab, in a Sept. 2 New York Times op-ed, Yale assistant professor Eliyahu Stern dutifully parroted the line of former Harvard Custodian of Two Holy Mosques prof. Frank Vogel, who thinks sharia “quite brilliant.” (On Sept. 3, its shine likewise compelled an unasked Dutch cleric, to “invite” Queen Beatrix to Islam.)

One might think a Yale assistant professor or the Times would check their facts prior to publication. One would be wrong. True enough, over 12 U.S. states are currently considering legislation that would outlaw using laws alien to U.S. foundational precepts in American courts. But Stern misspoke. A “bill recently passed by the Tennessee General Assembly equates Shariah with a set of rules that promote ‘the destruction of the national existence of the United States’,” he incorrectly groused.

Stern cited the summary of a proposed Tennessee bill version not actually passed into law. The real banana, Material Support to Designated Entities Act of 2011 (House Bill No. 1353), signed into Tennessee law Jun. 16, 2011 to amend its criminal code on terrorism, never once mentions the words “sharia,” “Muslim,” “Islam,” or “Islamic law.” Nor does American and Tennessee Laws for Tennessee Courts, House Bill No. 3768, signed into Tennessee Public Chapter 983 in May 2010, to address foreign laws containing discriminatory or unequal precepts or clauses otherwise alien to U.S. and state civil, criminal and Constitutional laws and public policies.Yet — evidently, without any independent study of sharia — Stern admonished its U.S. critics to forgo their Constitutional rights to free speech, and worse, allow and accept U.S. court recognition of Islamic law.

But also on Sept. 2, the American Islamic Leadership Coalition (ALIC) endorsed Michigan’s proposed HB4769 version of American Laws for American Courts.

Though apparently oblivious, in assuming a pro-sharia position, Stern effectively accepted a 7th century sharia dictate intended to suppress second class, non-Muslim subjects (dhimmis): Islamic rule prohibits non-Muslims especially, at dire risk, from criticizing Mohammed, Islam or sharia, what most Muslims project as divine, perfect, immutable — and indivisible — laws. (Several conference speakers unwittingly echoed Qaradawi and, while lauding sharia, also noted Islam’s total ban on its criticism.)

Put another way, the professors want American non-Muslim critics to comply with sharia and shut up.

Many women suffer real “oppression” in Muslim majority lands, for example, especially rape victims living under zina (extra-marital sex) or other sharia statutes, U. of Wisconsin law professor Asifa Quraishi admitted. Yet at every opportunity, including the NYLS conference, Quraishi has pushed hard to integrate sharia for Muslims into U.S. courts. Meanwhile, she’s advised international women’s rights advocates in Muslim majority countries that they would serve best “not to mention Islamic law at all.”

Quraishi blamed overseas human rights opposition to “sharia legislation (and sharia in general)” for exacerbating the plight of Muslim women. They “created an unwinnable and unnecessary war, of ‘sharia vs. women’s rights’.” That again said Muslims will not adapt, and infidels must follow sharia.

Here is the 7th century dictate to second class, non-Muslim subjects (dhimmis), writ large: non-Muslims’ criticism of Mohammed, Islam or sharia equals blasphemy. Such efforts to silence legitimate discussion render exceedingly troubling any consideration of separate and unequal sharia practices for use in U.S. courts. Already, too many U.S. Muslims ask and expect fellow citizens to censor themselves on sharia-related questions — or suffer bullying, and name calling best limited to pre-schoolers.

In 19th century Europe, Stern wrote, both political elites and philosophers embraced “fear that Jewish law bred disloyalty.” Immanuel Kant “argued that the particularistic nature of ‘Jewish legislation’ made Jews ‘hostile to all other peoples’,” Friedrich Hegel opposed Jewish dietary and other Mosaic laws as limits on an ability to identify with “fellow Prussians” or provide dutiful civil service and Bruno Bauer demanded that Jews renounce private religious rules in exchange for “full legal rights” and citizenship.

However, European Jewish history offers no logical reason for U.S. sharia critics to forgo their “full legal” and Constitutional rights to free speech or to allow Islamic law in secular courts. All citizens, including Muslims, already hold full rights, which no one seeks to revoke. Freedom requires no fixing.

To Muslims, sharia means justice, we’re told. Ironically, accepting such law in U.S. courts would create injustice, by making American Muslims more equal than others. They’d get exclusive rights, namely civil court access to religious cannon, not allowed to anyone else. This would substantially differ from the right to privately adhere (within the law) to religious cannon, which America has always allowed. Reinforcing this truth, the courageous U.S. men and women of AILC have clearly enumerated,

“the law should treat people of all faiths equally, while protecting Muslims and non-Muslims alike from extremist attempts to use the legal instrument of shari‘ah (also known as Islamic jurisprudence, or fiqh) to incubate, within the West, a highly politicized and dangerous understanding of Islam that is generally known as “Islamism,” or “radical Islam.”

“We see no evidence that statutes like HB 4769 will adversely impact the free exercise of our personal pietistic observance of Islam, which is not in conflict with the U.S. or Michigan constitutions. We recognize that not only Muslims, but also Jews, Christians and all people of faith need the government to protect their right to peaceful assembly, mediation and arbitration free of coercion, … within the bounds of American constitutional principles. Therefore, we stand together as a diverse coalition in support of any legislation that serves to protect and integrate our communities into the fabric of this great nation, by strengthening our accountability to the laws of the land, and the constitutions of the various states in which we live.”

If sharia were advanced, progressive, wonderful and “brilliant,” its truth and beauty could withstand all criticism and questions. But sharia raises a major reg flag, in banning free speech and inquiry. How it would play out in the U.S. is perhaps best examined by looks at Britain and Germany, where all sharia‘s ills stand fully exposed. One needs no PhD or LD to realize that officially accepting any part of a legal system so often demonstrably at odds with our own would, yes, prescribe genuine national disaster.

If anything, intense pressure from closet Muslim radicals for U.S. sanction of sharia should push every state that can to pass its own bill as quickly as possible.

________________________________
NOTES

[1] Andrew G. Bostom, “Sharia-sanctioned marital rape in Britain—and North America,” American Thinker,Oct. 15, 2010,, citing “Is there such a thing as marital rape?,” AMJAonline Jurisprudence Section, Association of Muslim Jurists in America, May 30, 2007, (first viewed 10/15/2010). Based on sharia, the influential Assembly of Muslim Jurists of America insists that marital rape is not a crime. The imams actually approve of felony attacks on wives. In 2007, a husband asked AMJA,“Is there such a thing as marital rape in the shariah?…is a man permitted to FORCE his wife to have sexual intercourse with him? … she is naashiz and unwilling to have coitus.” Fatwa # 2982 replied,

“For a wife to abandon the bed of her husband without excuse is haram [forbidden]. It is one of the major sins and the angels curse her until the morning as we have been informed by the Prophet (may Allah bless him and grant him peace). She is considered nashiz [rebellious] under these circumstances. As for the issue of forcing a wife to have sex, if she refuses, this would not be called rape, even though it goes against natural instincts and destroys love and mercy, and there is a great sin upon the wife who refuses; and Allah Almighty is more exalted and more knowledgeable.”

FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Alyssa A. Lappen is a U.S.-based investigative journalist focusing on the Middle East and Islam. She is a former Senior Fellow for the American Center for Democracy (2005-2008); former Senior Editor of Institutional Investor (1993-1999), Working Woman (1991-1993) and Corporate Finance (1991). She was previously an Associate Editor at Forbes, where she worked upwards of 12 years (1978-1990), and an editor and staff writer at several other publications. She is also a poet. Her website is https://www.alyssaalappen.org.

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Lies of the Nixon Center

Whitewashing the Muslim Brotherhood
by Alyssa A. Lappen
FrontPageMagazine | Nov. 15, 2007

On the wall over my desk hangs an amusing trophy from the late, disgraced former President, Richard M. Nixon, whose lies about Watergate ultimately forced him from office. I framed Nixon’s letter–extolling secretive textile magnate Roger Milliken as one of America’s greatest businessmen–beside the May 1989 Forbes piece in which I also reported on the suitcases of cash Milliken gave to both Nixon presidential campaigns.

On October 19, 2006, I encountered a liar rivaling Nixon–ironically then a “senior fellow” at Washington’s Nixon Center. Also then a consultant to ABC News and the U.S. Defense Department (DOD), Alexis Debat appeared at New York University Law School’s Center on Law and Security on an “expert” panel on the Muslim Brotherhood. Debat claimed he was writing “a book on the Muslim Brotherhood,” reportedly with an enormous, indirect DOD grant, through the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA) headed by former DOD analyst Andrew Krepinevich.

Masquerading as a Sorbonne Ph.D. and former French Defense Ministry adviser, Debat simultaneously made the most preposterous claims. “Let’s stop hyperventilating about the Muslim Brotherhood,” he said, adding, “I hear the same things in a [British] church as I hear in a mosque”–despite frequent, recurrent incitements emanating from Islamic mosques, centers and schools, including myriad tapes, textbooks, and other media.

“Islam is a source of enlightenment,” Debat said, calling the Muslim Brotherhood “chiefly a ‘political movement, not a party,”–a “liberation” movement, and a “highly pragmatic” prospective “leader in Egypt.”

As was obvious from his foolish remarks, Debat was no Muslim Brotherhood “expert.” Indeed, in September 2002 Agence France Presse had reported, the French Defense Ministry never employed Debat in any capacity–a fact further corroborated by terror expert Jean Charles Brisard, in a Sept. 26, 2007 email. Moreover, Debat never received a Sorbonne Ph.D.

Responding to my Oct. 23, 2006 American Thinker report, Debat falsely complained of “misquotes and distortions,” which I easily refuted. NYU’s Center for Law and Security didn’t publish a recording–which would have been too embarrassing.

Events quickly put the lie to Debat’s nonsense, as my colleague Patrick Poole noted in February 2007. Continue reading “Lies of the Nixon Center” →

Tithing for Terrorists

Financing Jihad
by Rachel Ehrenfeld and Alyssa A. Lappen
National Review Online | Oct. 12, 2007

“Governments have political considerations,” said senior N.Y. Senator Charles Schumer, upon learning in September that Bourse Dubai intends to buy 20 percent of NASDAQ. Republican Senator Bob Bennett of Utah countered, saying, “Dubai is making a purchase on the open market of an asset that’s for sale. What’s wrong with that?”

Senator Bennett is correct — buying portions or all of NASDAQ is perfectly legal. Moreover, no changes could be made to NASDAQ regulations without Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) approval. But of concern is Bourse Dubai’s Islamic influence in the heart of the U.S. markets and economy. And the deliberate United Arab Emirates (UAE) devaluation of the dollar since December 2006 is vastly increasing their purchasing power.

Bourse Dubai began operating as the world’s first fully shar’ia-compliant stock exchange, in December 2006. Sharia compliance requires companies traded to also be sharia-compliant, and establishes a special tax on all the others to “purify” them.

The Islamic “purity” (Tazkiya) of Bourse Dubai was approved by the sharia board of the 1991-Bahrain-registered and based Accounting and Auditing Organization for Islamic Financial Institutions (AAIOFI). The AAIOFI laid the groundwork for the global Islamic financial network and regulates all Islamic financial organizations and products, including Bourse Dubai.

Like every Muslim country, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) collects mandatory Islamic charity (Zakat– the Third Pillar of Islam — an annual wealth tax), of about 2.5-percent from Muslim institutions and companies. Being non-Muslims, foreign banks and oil companies theoretically don’t pay Zakat. But foreign banks and oil companies in fact do pay 20 percent of their profits, but rather than Zakat, these mandatory payments are called “tax.”

Zakat we are told, is to help the needy. However, Muslim Brotherhood spiritual leader, Yusuf Qaradawi decrees, “Declaring holy war…is an Islamic duty, and fighting ….is the Way of Allah for which Zakat must be spent.” In his 1999 publication, “Fiqh az-Zakat,” Qaradawi adds,

The most important form of jihad today is serious, purposefully organized work to rebuild Islamic society and state and to implement the Islamic way of life in the political, cultural and economic domains. This is certainly most deserving of Zakat.

And as previously demonstrated time and again, Muslim jihadist-terror organizations are indeed prominent Zakat recipients.

In 2003, the UAE established an independent federal agency collecting Zakat on government tax revenues from “companies listed on the Dubai Financial Market and Abu Dhabi Securities Market…, oil-producing companies and branches of foreign banks.” In 2007 these revenues were estimated at $13.5 billion.

Saudi Arabia, for example collects $18 billion a year in Zakat — which includes the 20-percent flat corporation tax from foreign companies. The Saudis claim that the money collected develops their infrastructure. However, two thirds of Saudi men are unemployed and the infrastructure is crumbling. Yet, since the 1970s, the Saudi government has spent more than $100 billion to build thousands of mosques, Islamic centers and Islamic studies programs in universities worldwide.

On April 30, 2007 the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) — which also initiated Muslim riots after the Danish Mohammed cartoon publications — established the clerical International Commission for Zakat. The ICZ replaces more than 20,000 organizations that previously collected the money. The Islamic clerics’ centralized “expert committee” in Malaysia now supervises and distributes Zakat funds globally. The new committee will shortly distribute roughly $2 billion collected over Ramadan this year to Muslim charities.

Historical Development
The origins of all Islamic economic and financial regulatory organizations, including the AAIOFI’s date back to the 1920s invention of Muslim Brotherhood (MB) founder Hassan Al-Banna, who designed political, economic, and financial infrastructures to enable Muslims to fulfill a key form of jihad mandated by the Koran (Al Jihad bi-al-Mal — financial jihad)—“you… should strive for the cause of Allah with your wealth and your lives….” 61:10-11.

He viewed finance as a critical weapon to undermine the infidels “and…work towards establishing an Islamic rule on earth.” To do that, he understood that Muslims must create an independent Islamic financial system to parallel and later supersede the Western economy.

Al-Banna’s contemporaries and successors (such as the late Sayed Qutb and current Yusuf Qaradawi) set his theories and practices into motion, developing sharia-based terminology and mechanisms to advance the financial jihad — “Islamic economics,” finance and banking.

Early 1930s MB attempts to establish Islamic banking in India failed. Egyptian president Gamal Abdul Nasser shut down the second attempt, in 1964, after only one year, later arresting and expelling the Muslim Brothers for attempts to kill him. Saudi Arabia welcomed this new wave Egyptian dissidents, as did King Saud bin Abdul Aziz earlier waves in 1954 and 1961. Their ideas so appealed to him and his clerics that in 1961, Saud funded the MB’s establishment of the Islamic University in Medina to proselytize their fundamentalist Islamic ideology, especially to foreign students.

In 1962, the MB convinced the king to launch a global financial joint venture, which became the cornerstone and engine to spread Islam worldwide. This venture created charitable foundations, which the MB oversees.

The first were the Muslim World League (MWL) and Rabitta al-Alam al-Islami, uniting Islamic radicals from 22 nations and spinning a web of many other charities with hundreds of offices worldwide. In 1978, the kingdom backed another MB initiative, the International Islamic Relief Organization (IIRO), which with all these “charities” are implicated for funding al Qaeda, the 9/11 attacks, Hamas and others.

These “charities” are used to advance the political agenda set forth by the MB. “I don’t like this word “donations,” Qaradawi told BBC Panorama on July 30, 2006.

“I like to call it jihad with money, because God has ordered us to fight enemies with our lives and our money.”

In 1969, the Saudis convened Arab and Muslim states to unify the “struggle for Islam,” and have, ever since, been the OIC’s major sponsor. The 56 OIC members include Iran, Sudan, and Syria. Based in Jeddah “pending the liberation of Jerusalem,” the OIC charter mandates and coordinates “support [of] the struggle of the Palestinian people…recovering their rights and liberating their occupied territories.”

The OIC charter includes all the MB principles. Its first international undertaking in 1973 was to establish the Islamic Development Bank “in accordance with the principles of the Shariah,” as prescribed by the MB, and launching the fast growing petrodollar-based Islamic financing market. The IDB, more a development than commercial bank, was established largely “to promote Islamic banking worldwide.”

“[A]n Islamic organization must serve God…and ultimately sustain ….the growth and advancement of the Islamic way of life,” writes Nasser M. Suleiman in Corporate Governance in “Islamic Banking.”

And so it has done — as noted in a 1991 U.S. Library of Congress report on Sudan’s Faisal Islamic Bank, established in 1977 under Sudan’s Faisal Islamic Bank Act, by Saudi prince Mohammed ibn Faisal Al Saud, and initiated and managed by local Muslim Brotherhood members and their party the National Islamic Front. Soon other political groups and parties formed their own Islamic banks. Together, Sudanese Islamic banks then acquired 20-percent of the country’s deposits — providing the financial basis to turn Sudan into an Islamic state in 1983, and promoting the Islamic governmental policies to date.

From 1975 to 2005, the IDB approved over $46 billion in funding to Muslim countries, ostensibly to develop their economic and educational infrastructures, but effected little regional economic impact. Their educational efforts, however, paid huge yields — via the rapid and significant spread of radical Islam worldwide.

Moreover, in 2001 alone, the IDB transferred $538 million raised publicly by Saudi and Gulf royal telethons to support the Palestinian Intifada and families of Palestinian suicide bombers. The IDB has also channeled U.N. funds to Hamas, as documented by bank records discovered in the West Bank and Gaza. And yet the IDB received U.N. observer status in 2007.

The IDB and other Islamic financial successes encouraged MB leaders to formalize al-Banna’s vision. In 1977 and 1982, they convened in Lugano, Switzerland to chart a master plan to co-opt Western economic foundations — capitalism and democracy — in a treatise entitled “Towards a Worldwide Strategy for Islamic Policy,” also known as the Project. MB spiritual leader Qaradawi wrote the explicit document, dated Dec. 1, 1982.

The 12-point strategy includes diktats to “establish the Islamic state and gradual, parallel work to control local power centers…using institutional work as means to this end.” This requires “special Islamic economic, social and other institutions,” and “the necessary economic institutions to provide financial support” to spread fundamentalist Islam.

Consequently, the IDB founded the AAOIFI in 1990. AAOIFI members include the Saudi Dallah Al-Baraka Group, al-Rajhi Banking & Investment Corporation, and Kuwait Finance House; each of its members were implicated in funding al Qaeda and other MB offspring according to Richard Clarke, former counterterrorism chief . The 18 AAOIFI members also include Iran and Sudan, both on the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) sanctions list; Iran is an U.S. State Department-designated terror sponsoring state, too. UAE banks wired half of the funding for the 9/11 attacks

In addition, the “de facto Islamic Central Bank,” the Islamic Financial Services Board (IFSB), was established in 2002 in Kuala Lumpur “to absorb the 11 September shock and reinforce the stability of Islamic finance.” Chairing the organizers’ meeting, then Malaysian Prime Minister Mohamed Mahathir stated, “A universal Islamic banking system is a jihad worth pursuing to abolish this slavery [to the West].”

IFSB members include the central banks of Iran, Sudan, and Syria (all designated state sponsors of terrorism) and the Palestinian Monetary Authority (PMA), which is widely documented since its inception as a terror funder.

According to DAG and Islamic Chamber of Commerce and Industry (ICCI) President Saleh Kamel, more than 400 Islamic financial institutions currently operate in 75 countries. They now hold more than $800 billion in assets — growing 15 percent annually. HSBC, UBS, J.P. Morgan Chase, Deutsche Bank, Lloyds TSB and BNP Paribas, are but a few that offer Islamic banking and sharia-based products to their Western clients — and promote them as “ethical investments.”

Rapidly rising oil prices fill the coffers of Islamic banks, the expansion of sharia economics and financial jihad — threatening the U.S. and entire non-Muslim world, in real-time.

Indeed, shortly after 9/11, Osama bin Laden called on Muslims “…to concentrate on hitting the U.S. economy through all possible means,” going on to say …. Look for the key pillars of the U.S. economy. Strike the key pillars of the enemy again and again and they will….”

The pending NASDAQ acquisition, purchases of over 52 percent of the London Stock Exchange (LSE) and 47.6-percent of OMX (Nordic exchange), and the vigorous expansion of sharia finance, all steadily implement al Banna’s plan to spread and ultimately impose sharia worldwide.

Yet, still unaware of the implications of importing sharia finance, hoards of American bankers will later this month convene at New York’s Islamic Finance Summit at the Helmsley (Oct. 29-30, 2007) — which will focus on “Innovations in Sharia compliant Finance.”

In view of the facts, Senator Schumer has a valid point.

— Rachel Ehrenfeld, author of Funding Evil, is director of the American Center of Democracy, and a member of the board of the Committee for the Present Danger. Alyssa A. Lappen is a senior fellow at ACD.