Tancredo proposes a promising bill on Islam

For the first time that I’m aware of, a U.S. legislator has made a proposal aimed at protecting America, not just from Islamic terrorism, and not just from Islamic extremism, but, at least in principle, from Islam itself.

In the wake of the news from Britain that Islamic sharia courts have been designated as arbitration tribunals so that their decisions will be enforceable by UK authorities, Rep. Tom Tancredo has proposed a law to lessen the chance of the same kind of thing happening here.

According to a September 18 story at Borderfire Report, Tancredo has said:

This is a case where truth is truly stranger than fiction. Today the British people are learning a hard lesson about the consequences of massive, unrestricted immigration.

When you have an immigration policy that allows for the importation of millions of radical Muslims, you are also importing their radical ideology—an ideology that is fundamentally hostile to the foundations of western democracy—such as gender equality, pluralism, and individual liberty. The best way to safeguard America against the importation of the destructive effects of this poisonous ideology is to prevent its purveyors from coming here in the first place.

Can you imagine any other mainstream politician or journalist in the Anglo-American world making the plain, direct connection between Islamic immigration into a country and the spread of Islamic ideology, law, and power in that country, as Tancredo has done here?

The article continues:

Tancredo’s bill, dubbed the “Jihad Prevention Act,” would bar the entry of foreign nationals who advocate Sharia law. In addition, the legislation would make the advocacy of Sharia law by radical Muslims already in the United States a deportable offense.

Tancredo pointed to the results of a recent poll conducted by the Centre for Social Cohesion as evidence that the U.S. should act to prevent the situation in Great Britain from replicating itself here in the United States. The poll found that some 40 percent of Muslim students in the United Kingdom support the introduction of Sharia law there, and 33 percent support the imposition of an Islamic Sharia-based government worldwide.

“We need to send a clear message that the only law we recognize here in America is the U.S. Constitution and the laws passed by our democratically elected representatives,” concluded Tancredo. “If you aren’t comfortable with that concept, you aren’t welcome in the United States.”

In principle, this is just right. Preventing the immigration of people who support sharia and deporting those who do has been proposed by serious Islam critics for some time. See, for example, my February 2007 draft statement, “What is to be done about Islam.”

But large questions remain. What are the actual provisions of the proposed Jihad Prevention Act? What does “advocacy of Sharia law” mean under the bill? How would it be determined that a Muslim applicant for a U.S. immigration visa or a Muslim resident alien had advocated sharia?

And here is a more fundamental question. If advocacy of and/or belief in sharia are grounds for barring an individual from the United States, then, given the fact that all Muslims are commanded by their religion to live under sharia and to expand sharia to non-Muslim lands when possible, and given that there is no way we can determine which Muslims will actually advocate sharia once they are here, or, for that matter, whether their children will advocate sharia once they are grown, isn’t it the case that by the logic of this law all Muslims should be kept from immigrating into the United States? Let us remember that Robert Spencer once advocated the screening of jihad-supporting Muslims from the U.S., then gave up the idea when he realized that there is no practicable way we can reliably distinguish between jihad-supporting Muslims and other Muslims. At that point Spencer began to speak about stopping all Muslim immigration.

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As a passing point, the Borderfire piece doesn’t tell us where Tancredo made the quoted statement, when he made it, or to whom; but that’s almost become standard operating procedure today, not just on the lawless Web, but in the mainstream news media as well. So I googled some text from the article and found that it came from Tancredos’s own website. It’s a news release from his office, which Borderline copied word for word without indicating where it came from. The Tancredo website also provides no further information on the Jihad Prevention act, but I will look into it this week.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at September 21, 2008 09:16 PM | Send