Policy recommendations on Islam by Gaffney et al.

The report, “Shariah: The Threat to America,” published last September by Frank Gaffney’s Center for Security Policy (and available online in pdf) ends with some policy recommendations that go a step or two beyond the usual ho-hum of the conservative anti-jihad establishment. The authors state that advocating sharia rule in the U.S. is sedition and should be prosecuted as such, and that people who adhere to sharia should not be allowed to immigrate to the U.S. Unfortunately for Gaffney and his co-authors, even Robert Spencer, back in June 2007, admitted that his then-pet scheme of screening potential immigrants for jihadist beliefs was impracticable, because there was no way for American officials to determine who was really a jihadist and who wasn’t. The same would apply to sharia believers. So Gaffney and his fellow authors are three years behind Spencer, who himself has not exactly been a model of consistency on the issue, having called (at the time he dropped the screening idea) for the exclusion of all immigration from Muslim countries, and then dropping that position like a stone.

This is from the report’s conclusion:

While detailed recommendations for adopting a more prudential and effective strategy for surviving shariah’s onslaught are beyond the scope of this study, several policy and programmatic changes are clearly in order. These include:

- U.S. policy-makers, financiers, businessmen, judges, journalists, community leaders and the public at large must be equipped with an accurate understanding of the nature of shariah and the necessity of keeping America shariah-free. At a minimum, this will entail resisting—rather than acquiescing to—the concerted efforts now being made to allow that alien and barbaric legal code to become established in this country as an alternate, parallel system to the Constitution and the laws enacted pursuant to it. Arguably, this is already in effect for those who have taken an oath to “support and defend” the Constitution, because the requirement is subsumed in that oath. [LA replies: If the ruling belief system of Islam is “alien and barbaric,” doesn’t it follow that all Muslims should be excluded from the U.S.?]

- U.S. government agencies and organizations should cease their outreach to Muslim communities through Muslim Brotherhood fronts whose mission is to destroy our country from within as such practices are both reckless and counterproductive. Indeed, these activities serve to legitimate, protect and expand the influence of our enemies. They conduce to no successful legal outcome that cannot be better advanced via aggressive prosecution of terrorists, terrorfunders and other lawbreakers. It also discourages patriotic Muslims from providing actual assistance to the U.S. government lest they be marked for ostracism or worse by the Brothers and other shariah-adherent members of their communities.

- In keeping with Article VI of the Constitution, extend bans currently in effect that bar members of hate groups such as the Ku Klux Klan from holding positions of trust in federal, state, or local governments or the armed forces of the United States to those who espouse or support shariah. Instead, every effort should be made to identify and empower Muslims who are willing publicly to denounce shariah.

- Practices that promote shariah—notably, shariah-compliant finance and the establishment or promotion in public spaces or with public funds of facilities and activities that give preferential treatment to shariah’s adherents—are incompatible with the Constitution and the freedoms it enshrines and must be proscribed.

- Sedition is prohibited by law in the United States. To the extent that imams and mosques are being used to advocate shariah in America, they are promoting seditious activity and should be warned that they will not be immune from prosecution.

- Textbooks used in both secular educational systems and Islamic schools must not promote shariah, its tenets, or the notion that America must submit to its dictates.

- Compounds and communities that seek to segregate themselves on the basis of shariah law, apply it alongside or in lieu of the law of the land or otherwise establish themselves as “no-go” zones for law enforcement and other authorities must be thwarted in such efforts. In this connection, assertion of claims to territory around mosques should be proscribed.

- Immigration of those who adhere to shariah must be precluded, as was previously done with adherents to the seditious ideology of communism.

Also, in the report’s introduction, the authors happily break with the despicable neocon / Bernard Lewis position that our safety depends on Muslims becoming moderate and democratic, with the obvious implication that we cannot do anything to protect ourselves:

[W]e have an obligation to protect our nation and our way of life regardless of the ultimate resolution of Islam’s internal strife. We can do a far better job of empowering non-shariah-adherent Muslims, who are our natural allies, but we cannot win for them—they have to do that for themselves. Irrespective of whether they succeed in the formidable task of delegitimizing shariah globally, we must face it down in the United States, throughout the West and wherever on earth it launches violent or ideological offensives against us.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at January 07, 2011 10:32 AM | Send