by Beck, Glenn
Some interpretations of shariah require Muslims to respond violently to any insult directed against the Prophet Muhammad. And now we have a judge supporting these arcane laws that conflict with the very freedoms provided by the U.S. Constitution.
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Stifling Debate
Abed Awad was also asked what he thought about the campaign to officially ban shariah law from the United States. I don’t know about you, but I think he doth protest too much:
Other than the fact that such bans are unconstitutional . . . they are [also] a monumental waste of time. Our judges are equipped with the constitutional framework to refuse to recognize a foreign law or take into account religious law. In the end, our Constitution is the law of the land. The only explanation is that they appear to be driven by an agenda infused with hate, ignorance and Islamophobia intent on dehumanizing an entire religious community. The fringe right-wing minority in our country is trying to turn this into a national 2012 election issue. Are you with the Shariah or with the U.S. Constitution? It is absurd.
Actually, what’s absurd is for someone to inject “hate” and “ignorance” and “Islamophobia” into a legitimate debate in an attempt to shut it down.
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Several states have recognized the problem and are trying to take action to protect their courts and arbitration systems from this encroachment. A Michigan lawmaker, for example, has proposed a bill that, according to the American Islamic Leadership Coalition, “is intended to bar Michigan courts from enforcing any foreign law, if doing so violates any rights guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution and/or the state of Michigan’s constitution.” I can’t believe we actually need to pass a law for that to be clear (I was pretty sure the Constitution was the supreme law of the land), but if that’s what it takes, then that’s what we need to do.
The Michigan law does not mention the words Islam or shariah, a fact that makes it much harder for groups like the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) to complain that Muslims are being singled out. Other states (like Oklahoma) have attempted to pass laws targeted more specifically at Islamic law, but those attempts have generally been ruled unconstitutional.
Another tenet of Islamic law that makes it incompatible with our democracy is shariah-compliant finance (SCF). While this is not a concept that dates back to the days of the prophet Muhammad (as some Muslims would like us to believe), it is nonetheless an accepted part of Islamic law today. And it, too, has come to America.
Developed primarily by Sayyid Qutb, one of the early leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood in Cairo, SCF is a means of infiltrating financial markets and institutions for the purpose of integrating shariah into yet another element of society. While the general assumption is that an SCF transaction cannot include interest and cannot be associated with anything determined impure by Muslims, there is a far more sinister side to SCF transactions.
In order to be SCF compliant, a financial institution must have Islamic “advisers,” or an advisory board that is deemed qualified to judge or issue “fatwas” (religious rulings) as to whether transactions are pure (halal) or impure (haram). This gives these advisers unprecedented insight into, and influence over, the activities of companies in America. In some cases, these advisers can advise who the companies deal with and how their transactions are accomplished. For example, they could object to a deal with an Israeli company on grounds that it is impure.
The idea that these transactions are without interest is also inaccurate. Zakat (a tithe or charitable donation) is one of the five pillars of Islam and is considered mandatory for every Muslim. Rather than charging interest on a loan, SCF lenders build in a healthy zakat up front. They also devise creative “lease-to-buy” schemes that mask interest as fees, all the while empowering Islamist clerics to control the finance system.
The charity component is also potentially troubling and deceptive. Among many areas of Islamic charity, shariah describes three categories of zakat that involve indirectly supporting jihad, and also explicitly providing support to Muslims who are fighting in the cause of Allah. Many, if not most, Muslims may be unaware of where the leadership of various charities in the faith community end up sending the money they put into the hands of these organizations. But that doesn’t matter much when the leadership is driven by the ideology of Islamism, which mandates that zakat monies go to the poor or to jihad, “those fighting for Allah.” The Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development (HLF), which was once the largest Muslim charity in America, was, in fact, shuttered and designated as a “Specially Designated National” by the U.S. Treasury for funneling funds to the terror organization Hamas under the guise of zakat.
“[Sharia law] seems unavoidable and indeed, as a matter of fact, certain provisions of Sharia are already recognized in our society and under our law; so it’s not as if we’re bringing in an alien and rival system. . . .”
—Dr. Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, when asked if Sharia was necessary for social cohesion in Britain
THE BROTHERHOOD
In 2004, a Maryland Transportation Authority police officer performed a traffic stop on a car in which a Muslim woman in traditional Islamic dress was filming the support structure of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge out the window. The woman’s husband, Ismail Elbarasse, who was driving the car, was arrested for an outstanding material witness warrant that had been issued in Chicago. The Elbarasses’ home in Annandale, Virginia, was searched, and a hidden subbasement was located. The FBI discovered that the basement housed the archives of the Muslim Brotherhood in America.
According to the book Shariah: The Threat to America, these documents “confirmed what investigators and counterterrorism experts had suspected and contended about the myriad Muslim-American groups in the United States—namely, that the vast majority of them are controlled by the MB (Muslim Brotherhood) and, therefore, as their Shariah dictates, are hostile to this country, it’s Constitution and freedoms. The documents make clear that the groups’ sole objectives are to implement Islamic law in America in furtherance of the goal of reestablishing the global caliphate.”
I know, I know, caliphate is a dirty, conspiracy-theory-laden word. Those who talk about it are craaaazy, or, in the words of our attorney friend Abed Awad, they’re “infused with hate, ignorance and Islamophobia intent on dehumanizing an entire religious community.” Or, maybe there’s another explanation. Maybe it’s those who want to pretend that this does not exist, or keep Americans in the dark about it, who are actually the ones filled with hate and ignorance. Maybe these documents about the global caliphate and the Brotherhood’s plans are actually a sign of a deeper, far more pervasive problem among many Muslims: the supremacy of political Islam.
More on that later, but for now, back to those archives recovered from the Elbarasses’ basement. Included in them was a five-phase plan for how the Muslim Brotherhood and its front groups plan to turn America into an Islamic country. I know, we all have plans, big deal. (I planned to be a magician when I was younger, so I get it: man plans, God laughs.) But there’s a good reason to pay attention to these particular plans: there’s already a road map for how this works. It’s not quick, it’s not easy—but it’s definitely possible.
About a decade ago, most Europeans would have laughed in your face at the suggestion that Islam might one day find a home there. Yet, today, almost all of the experts, including Princeton’s Bernard Lewis, the most renowned expert on Islam in the United States, are stating emphatically that by the end of this century “at the very latest,” Europe will be predominantly Islamic.
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Quality, Not Quantity
It’s not really the number or percentage of Muslims in any population that should concern people (just as no one worries about the “percentage of Catholics” in a country)—it’s whether those Muslims follow a politicized version of Islam. Bassam Tibi, a prominent moderate Muslim in Germany, summed up the issue pretty well: “Either Islam gets Europeanized, or Europe gets Is
lamized. . . . The problem is not whether the majority of Europeans is Islamic, but rather which Islam—sharia Islam or Euro-Islam—is to dominate in Europe.”
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The Europeans made the same mistakes that we are making right now: They did not take the idea seriously. They simply buried their heads in the sand and either bought the propaganda of the distractors or bought into the political correctness and decided to “mind their own business.” They tried to appease the very groups that were out to take over their countries by allowing them to incrementally integrate shariah into European societies.
Soeren Kern, senior fellow at the Madrid-based Strategic Studies Group, recently wrote an article about the proliferation of private Muslim enclaves in Europe:
Islamic extremists are stepping up the creation of “no-go” areas in European cities that are off-limits to non-Muslims.
Many of the “no-go” zones function as microstates governed by Islamic Shariah law. Host-country authorities effectively have lost control in these areas and in many instances are unable to provide even basic public aid such as police, fire fighting and ambulance services.
The “no-go” areas are the by-product of decades of multicultural policies that have encouraged Muslim immigrants to create parallel societies and remain segregated rather than become integrated into their European host nations.
This self-segregation has encouraged and strengthened Muslim groups in Britain. One group has initiated a program called the “Islamic Emirates Project” with the stated intent of modeling several cities all over Britain as areas for Islamic law. Many experts estimate that there are already eighty-five shariah courts in Britain operating outside British common law. The result is that Christian preachers, for example, have been accused of hate crimes for handing out Christian material in predominantly Muslim neighborhoods.
France is not faring much better. According to Kern, their “no-go” areas are made up of 751 so-called “Sensitive Urban Zones” (ZUS), encompassing five million Muslims. The French government has a website, complete with exact addresses and satellite maps so that non-Muslims can avoid these areas.
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Freedom Takes a Detour
Given France’s history with riots, the government is very cautious in the way it handles these enclaves, for fear of inciting more of them. This kid-gloves approach is great until you consider how it affects the non-Muslim population. For example, in some areas Muslims are allowed to essentially take over streets and sidewalks for Friday prayers. There are plenty of YouTube videos showing what this looks like, and there’s been plenty of outrage about it—yet nothing seems to be done. Why would any group of people’whether they’ve come together to pray, riot, or protest—be allowed to take over public walkways and streets at the exclusion of others?
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You’d be hard-pressed to find a part of Europe that has not been affected in some way by the growth of Islam:
In some parts of Belgium police cruisers travel throughout “no-go” zones in pairs. The first squad goes about their business, and the second car looks out for the first.
In Germany, the police commissioner was asked about these “no-go” areas and how they are patrolled. He responded:
“Every police commissioner and interior minister will deny it. But of course we know where we can go with the police car and where, even initially, only with the personnel carrier. The reason is that our colleagues can no longer feel safe there in pairs, and have to fear becoming the victim of a crime themselves. We know that these areas exist. Even worse: in these areas crimes no longer result in charges. They are left to police it ‘among themselves.’ Only in the worst cases do we in the police learn anything about it. The power of the state is completely out of the picture.”
Similar situations exist in Italy, Sweden, and the Netherlands, and Europe is now watching its nations being destroyed by the infiltration of shariah into every corner of society. Proponents call it “multiculturalism” and tolerance—but when a nation no longer has a common bond keeping it together, then tolerance and political correctness won’t matter much.
THE BROTHERHOOD EXPLAINS THE CALIPHATE
With Europe setting the precedent for how shariah can be slowly integrated into society, let’s turn our attention back to America.
Earlier in this chapter I mentioned the trouble that the Holy Land Foundation found itself in, but it’s worth looking at that trial in more detail. Known as the “Holy Land Foundation Trial,” the case concluded with five defendants being convicted of all (108) counts of raising funds in America to support Hamas, a State Department–listed terrorist organization and an arm of the Muslim Brotherhood, under the guise of charity.
One of the documents entered into evidence during the trial had been found in the Elbarasses’ subbasement in 2004. It is the Muslim Brotherhood’s strategic plan for North America, titled “An Explanatory Memorandum: On the General Strategic Goal for the Group.” The author was Mohammad Akram (aka Mohammad Adlouni), a member of the board of directors for the Brotherhood in America and a senior leader in Hamas.
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Crazy Caliphate Conspiracy Critic: Bill Kristol
When Glenn Beck rants about the caliphate taking over the Middle East from Morocco to the Philippines, and lists (invents?) the connections between caliphate-promoters and the American left, he brings to mind no one so much as Robert Welch and the John Birch Society. He’s marginalizing himself, just as his predecessors did back in the early 1960s.
—WILLIAM KRISTOL, EDITOR OF THE WEEKLY STANDARD
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The document, which clearly establishes the mission of the Brotherhood in North America, was approved by the Brotherhood’s Shura Council and Organizational Conference in 1987 and said, in part:
Understanding the Role of the Muslim Brotherhood in North America
The process of settlement is a “Civilization-Jihadist Process” with all the word means [sic]. The Ikwan (Brotherhood) must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand jihad in eliminating and destroying the western civilization from within and “sabotaging” it’s [sic ] miserable house by their (our) hands and the hands of the believers (Muslims) so that it is eliminated and God’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.
“[The Islamic State starts] by reforming the individual, followed by building the family, the society and the government, and then the rightly guided Caliphate, and finally [achieving] mastership of the world—a mastership of guidance, instruction, truth and justice.”
—Mohammed Badie, General Guide of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood
The HLF trial resulted in a list of unindicted co-conspirators that numbered over 250 people and organizations, meaning that there was enough evidence to bring them to trial. (U.S. attorney general Holder has chosen not to proceed.) In essence, this demonstrated a web of networks that were either fronts for the Brotherhood or supporters of them.
While the vast majority of Islamic organizations in America were listed as unindicted co-conspirators, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), two of the largest American Muslim organizations, were right at the top of the list. Yet these groups, along with the rest of the co-conspirators, are still operating in America today. Worse, there is little to no mainstream critique of those groups and so they still enjoy tremendous influence with the U.S. government, the U.S. media, and among Muslims. This is in spite of the fact that, in 2009, the assistant director of the FBI specifically outlined in a letter to Senator Jon Kyl that “the FBI suspended all formal contacts between CAIR and the FBI” because of their connection to Hamas.
ARAB SPRING AND THE MEANING OF THE WORD “FREEDOM”
The Arab Spring has been celebrated by many as the fuse that will eventually ignite real freedom in the Middle East. The threat from Islamist groups like the Brotherhood in Egypt was generally discounted because the Brotherhood pledged that they would not seek the presiden
cy—and why wouldn’t we just take them at their word?
In what came as a surprise to no one who understands their true motivation, the Brotherhood eventually broke their pledge and nominated Khairat el-Shater, their chief strategist and financier (and the very person who’d made the pledge that the Brotherhood wouldn’t seek the presidency), for president. In explaining the flip-flop, Mahamed el-Morsi, president of the Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party, said, “We decided that Egypt now needs a candidate from us to bear this responsibility [of combating ‘threats to the revolution’]. We have no desire at all to monopolize power.” Well, that’s a relief! And we should definitely believe him because, well, he promised.
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Can’t Make Up Their Minds
It’s amazing how our own government can contradict itself. On the one hand you have the U.S. Justice Department writing in a response to a federal court brief that “from its founding by Muslim Brotherhood leaders, CAIR conspired with other affiliates of the Muslim Brotherhood to support terrorists.” On the other hand, you have many government leaders across the country still actively meeting with these groups to make sure they are not offended by our tactics.