Sharia is Coming!
BY Herschel Smith
13 years, 11 months ago
From a Small Wars Council discussion thread of September 2010 entitled Sharia is Coming! Sharia is Coming!
Rex Brynen:
From the Centre for Security Policy, Shariah: The Threat to America (An Exercise in Competitive Analysis—Report of Team ‘B’ II):
Today, the United States faces what is, if anything, an even more insidious ideological threat: the totalitarian socio-political doctrine that Islam calls shariah. Translated as “the path,” shariah is a comprehensive legal and political framework. Though it certainly has spiritual elements, it would be a mistake to think of shariah as a “religious” code in the Western sense because it seeks to regulate all manner of behavior in the secular sphere – economic, social, military, legal and political….
…as this report documents powerfully, our leaders have failed to perceive – let alone respond effectively to – the real progress being made by the Muslim Brotherhood in insinuating shariah into the very heartland of America through stealthy means. Team B II believes that the defeat of the enemy’s stealth jihad requires that the American people and their leaders be aroused to the high stakes in this war, as well as to the very real possibility that we could lose, absent a determined and vigorous program to keep America shariah-free. To that end, Team B II sets forth in plain language who this enemy is, what the ideology is that motivates and justifies his war against us, the various forms of warfare the enemy employs to achieve his ends, the United States’ vulnerability to them, and what we must do to emerge victorious.
The team was lead by retired Lieutenant General William G. “My God is bigger than yours” Boykin. As far as I can see, it contains no actual experts on Islam or Islamic law. That may explain the factual inaccuracies and rather hysterical, paranoid tone.
Tom Odom:
Is Allen Arkin gonna play the Imam?
I mean really, “concerned with the preeminent totalitarian threat of our time: the legal-political-military doctrine known within Islam as “shariah,” is more than a little hysterical.
Steve Metz:
It’s very sad that Boykin and Soyster were part of this. Some people are just hard wired for fear and hate. They’ve been lost without a mission since the demise of the Soviet Union. In the absence of a real demon, they concoct one out of whatever raw material is available.
Dripping with sarcasm and disbelief, no? Perhaps a mixture of pity and indignation. Guffaw. Harrumph. Stupid Appalachian hicks. How ridiculous that whomever wrote about such an idea as militant Sharia would even be allowed to own property or vote. They must be in need of reeducation. At a minimum it’s time to roll out the sensitivity classes.
Or maybe not.
Europeans often fantasize about America’s so-called Jewish lobby, which they claim has a chokehold over American finance, media and politics and is responsible for all manner of conspiratorial evil. But few Europeans like to talk about the growing influence of Europe’s Muslim lobby, a conglomeration of hundreds of Muslim political and religious organizations — many of which are media-savvy mouthpieces for militant Islam that openly pursue anti-European, anti-Western and anti-Semitic agendas and often receive financial support from Islamic fundamentalist countries like Saudi Arabia.
In a Europe where Islam is the fastest-growing religion, and where the number of Muslims has tripled over the past 30 years, Europe’s Muslim lobby is becoming increasingly assertive and skilled at pressuring European policy-makers into implementing countless pro-Islamic policies, especially ones that institutionalize Islamic Sharia law. Muslim lobby groups are, in fact, transforming European society in ways unimaginable only a few years ago; critics say their ultimate goal is nothing less than the Islamification of Europe.
Some of the most effective Muslim lobby groups are located in Britain, home to one of the largest Muslim communities in Europe, and include organizations such as the Muslim Council of Britain [MCB], Britain’s largest Muslim umbrella body with around 500 affiliated national, regional and local organizations, mosques, charities and schools. It recently pressured the British government into adopting Islamic law and giving Sharia courts full powers to rule on Muslim civil cases.
The British government has quietly sanctioned the powers for Sharia judges to rule on cases ranging from divorce and financial disputes to those involving domestic violence. Whereas previously, the rulings of Sharia courts in Britain could not be enforced, and depended on voluntary compliance among Muslims, rulings issued by a network of five Sharia courts are now enforceable with the full power of the judicial system, through the county courts or High Court. Sharia courts with these powers have been set up in Birmingham, Bradford, London and Manchester and the network’s headquarters are located in Nuneaton, Warwickshire; and two more courts are being planned for Edinburgh and Glasgow.
Overall, at least 85 Islamic Sharia courts are now operating in Britain, almost 20 times as many as previously believed. A study by the Civitas think tank found that scores of unofficial tribunals and councils regularly apply Islamic law to resolve domestic, marital and business disputes, many operating in mosques. The study warns of a “creeping” acceptance of Sharia principles in British law.)
Although the MCB, which represents half of the country’s 3 million Muslims, presents itself as the moderate face of Islam in Britain, the group has its origins in the extreme orthodox politics of Pakistan. The MCB and some of its affiliates sympathize with, and have links to, conservative Islamist movements in the Muslim world, particularly the Muslim Brotherhood and Pakistan’s Jamaat-e-Islami, a radical party committed to the establishment of an Islamic state in Pakistan ruled by Sharia law.
More locally, Andrew McCarthy observes, after discussing our our Western pet desires to coddle Islam as a religion of peace, that:
The Jeruslam Post’s Barry Rubin won’t play along. He disrupted our sweet dreams last week with a pronouncement from al-Azhar University. Al-Azhar is the centuries-old seat of Sunni scholarship in Egypt, a status that vests its sharia scholars with unparalleled doctrinal influence over the world’s 1.4 billion Muslims.
It is conventional wisdom among the West’s Islamophilic opinion elites — and thus prototypically among Obama administration officials — that jihad, the Islamic injunction to struggle in Allah’s cause, has been distorted by sharia-obsessed Islamophobes into a summons to destroy the West. Jihad, this wisdom holds, is just an internal exercise in self-betterment — kind of like greening the planet and brushing after every meal. Jihad becomes confrontational and even violent only in self-defense, when Muslims are truly under siege.
Au contraire, says al-Azhar’s Imad Mustafa. To be sure, he agrees that the doctrine of “defensive jihad” calls for war against non-Muslims who “attack” Muslims. But defense, for purposes of this doctrine, is in the eye of the beholder — or, more accurately, in the eye of the mufti who decides what sorts of provocations constitute an “attack.” Implicitly, that leaves room for lots of pretty offensive jihad if the mufti construes the concept of “attack” broadly enough. What is bracing about Mustafa’s new fatwa, however, is that he’s not leaving anything to chance. He’s making what is implicit unmistakably explicit.
Besides the defensive variety, Mustafa expressly endorses “offensive jihad” as the license to attack non-Muslims living in non-Islamic countries. It is the consensus of sharia scholars, he instructs, that offensive jihad is “permissible” in three different situations: (a) “to secure Islam’s border”; (b) “to extend God’s religion to people in cases where the governments do not allow it”; and (c) “to remove every religion but Islam from the Arabian peninsula.”
So it’s up to you. There are those who lampoon calls for caution and diligence concerning assertive Islamic theology and civil law. Then there are those who point to examples of it already having essentially taken over, such as in parts of Britain or those Islamic neighborhoods in France where the police wont even go.
Where do you stand?
On January 26, 2011 at 8:42 am, jewishodysseus said:
That thread is emblematic of how the “modern sophisticate” has handled any of the great totalitarian ideologies, from communism to Nazism to Islamism. Basically 2 steps:
1–Attack/Make fun of people who recognize the threat and unambiguously oppose it.
2–Acknowledge piecemeal so many facts of the threat that the sophisticed blase attitude becomes utterly inchoerent and untenable–but of course no admission that the ideology must be unambiguously opposed.
I did get the impression that these gentlemen are in the distinct minority in their field, the net is their little “exile cafe’ in Switzerland,” heheh.
On January 26, 2011 at 1:32 pm, Steve Metz said:
A couple of points:
1. France and the UK are different nations than the US, with different histories, cultures, and values. To point to something happening there and arguing that someone demonstrates that there is a “threat” to the United States is absurd. Should we also worry about creeping French-speaking or spelling defense with a “c” in the United States?
2. A big part of pumping up the threat of Islam by those whose life has no meaning without someone to hate is either misconstruing or misunderstanding the meaning of the word “law”? Many organizations and cultures have rules that the call “laws” which apply to their members. These do not take precedence over or supersede U.S. law. Should we worry about the creeping influence of the Boy Scout laws? More people follow that in the United States than sharia.
On January 26, 2011 at 2:12 pm, Herschel Smith said:
Thanks for dropping by and weighing in Steve. I posed the conclusion of the post as a question to my readers, and you have answered that from your own perspective. I would like still others to weigh in as well. That’s why I posed the question.
A few (not comprehensive) responses to your response.
First, you are correct in implying that there is a greater bulwark against the imposition of something like Sharia law here in the U.S. U.S. case law is based primarily on English common law (except for the method of implementation which is based on an evolved form of Roman and English practices – see “law of the dusty feet”), and English common law is based primarily on Biblical precepts (in terms of value judgments). This is true except for Louisiana, as you know, which is based on the French system. The French revolution ensured that France was fundamentally a different country than Britain or the U.S.
So I agree with your point that there are deep differences. However, I would caution that students of history like me could also show significant morphing of the American culture causing evolving value judgments. I think your point would have been stronger 100 years ago. Today, it is weakened by changes over the last century.
Second, laws and the framework in which they are promulgated can change. Other countries have constitutions too, Steve.
Third – and this point goes to something a little more personal and slightly off the subject – I think you make a huge but avoidable logical and psychological blunder when you ascribe motive and state of mind to others. For instance, commonly accepted rules for debate and deliberation forbid that (witness “Robert’s Rules of Order”). You may disagree with or even attack what someone has said. You may advocate for or against any given position. What you cannot honestly do is know why something was said or why an individual does one thing or another. You said, “those whose life has no meaning without someone to hate.” You simply don’t know this. You just don’t. A person may honestly disagree with you on something or you with him. I suspect if you sat with those whom you paint like this and talked, you would find that their psyche is as complex as yours, rendering your caricature of them meaningless.
So what I find here is that your description of someone’s motive, intent and state of mind really is rather boorish and immature. Your position may not be, but your manner of conveying it is. Stick to what’s been said. You don’t know anything beyond that, and you can’t prove that you do.
Finally, you have told me that I did something absurd, and I think you haven’t proven your point – and cannot prove it. You said that pointing to something happening somewhere else as a threat here is absurd. My point didn’t go to the nature of differences between France and the U.S. I addressed that (albeit briefly) above. That’s worthy of another post, and I am trained well enough at the graduate level that I can hold my own in that conversation.
My point went NOT to the nature of the differences between France and the U..S., but to the similarity of militant Islam across the Globe. Just because you don’t believe that there will be a welcome home for Sharia law in the U.S. doesn’t mean that those who advocate Sharia law have lost their designs for Sharia law in the U.S., if in fact they have such. In this, you are again conflating two different issues. Again. I didn’t speak to the U.S. and France. I spoke to something else, and it is that “somethng else” to which you didn’t respond.
On January 26, 2011 at 11:15 pm, scott s. said:
I suppose if we look at it from a strictly anthropological standpoint, we have to admit that cultures do migrate and aculturalization does happen. Unfortunately (to me at least) current thinking tends to view things from a post-modern, post-colonial mindset, which sees culture only moving by being imposed by the powerful onto the powerless (at least, that’s my interpretation). I’m not sure that can explain how Islam came to be so widely accepted in East Asia. I think we need a richer vocabulary to consider the way or ways in which sharia might be diffused into American culture.
On January 27, 2011 at 8:40 pm, JewishOdysseus said:
Oh, Herschel, don’t be so closed to Mr. Metz’s charming ad hominem technique. It can be both fun and effective! Let’s see if I can adopt the Metzian style of logic and persuasion:
“A big part of minimizing the threat of Islamism by those whose payrolls are padded by Saudi oil money is either misconstruing or misunderstanding the meaning of the word “civilized.” Many tribes or cultures over the centuries claimed they were civilized or superior, but, for example, practiced pedophilia, or infanticide, or slavery. But for a person to deny that such practices clearly define a culture as barbaric or primitive demonstrates that person must have ulterior motives–probably corrupt ones– for denying the obvious.”
Wow, that was fun and so easy! But we really don’t get much of a refinement of ideas, do we?
Mr. Metz, I don’t know how old you are, but those are the most juvenile and self-insulting devices I’ve ever seen from someone who pretends to be serious. Take my advice and drop them. You just discredit yourself.
On January 29, 2011 at 5:50 pm, Rob Owen said:
Dear Captain. Am a great admirer of your ‘voice in the wilderness ‘ beating head against stone wall writings.Unfortunately there are millions of Steve Metzes in the West and until they wake up (probably never) arrogant minorities in our society will punch above their numerical weight and wars will be lost that should have been won.Regards
On January 30, 2011 at 9:41 am, TS Alfabet said:
Shariah in the U.S. is happening here and now, no two ways about it.
Christians were prevented from passing out literature on public property at an Arab Festival in Dearborn, Michigan in 2009. http://atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com/atlas_shrugs/2009/07/arab-muslim-festival-2009-sharia-in-the-us-our-freedoms-are-under-siege.html
The federal government in 2009 gave over $150 Million to the failed insurance giant, AIG, that was used to establish shariah-compliant financing in the U.S. The Obama DOJ defended that activity against a civil suit brought by a Marine veteran. The case is on appeal after the U.S. District Court judge dismissed the case.
http://lonelyconservative.com/2011/01/sharia-in-the-us-and-government-funding-of-islam/
Mr. Metz’s only, real point regarding differences between the U.S., Britain and France is incorrect. If anything, the U.S. is *more* vulnerable to shariah law than either Britain or France. Like the rest of Europe, neither country has anything like the robust protections of free speech and freedom of religion enshrined in the U.S. Constitution. Radical Islam is quickly learning how to take advantage of those freedoms in order to establish shariah de facto if not de jure.
On February 21, 2011 at 12:28 pm, Lynn said:
The only real incursion of Shariah I’ve seen so far involves the de facto imposition of islamic blasphemy laws – a la the 1). unwillingness to publish the Danish cartoons, 2). their deliberate removal from a scholarly book published by the Yale press ABOUT the Danish cartoons, 3). the Comedy Central fiasco, 4). the general unwillingness of our admin. to stand up to attempts to criminalise criticism of islam at the UNHRC, 5). the hysterical reaction to the Quran burning pastor amongst the highest levels of government (literally), and 6). the mysterious “disappearance” of Molly Norris (Notably, there have been ongoing attempts to prosecute critics of islam in both Europe and Canada). Also, islamic law forbids saying anything bad about islam or a muslim, even if it’s truthful. Thus, I perceive the persistent refusal amongst many liberal elite to acknowledge or even discuss the goals and allies of various Brotherhood front groups like ISNA, CAIR, MAS and IIIT or address the more problematic elements of islamic law as a form of “big S” Submission as well.