Report Aiming to Prove ‘Creeping Shariah’ Theory Proves the Opposite
The relentless campaign to fool Americans into believing the nation’s 220-year-old rock-steady Constitution could be toppled any moment by Muslim extremists intent on imposing Islamic Shariah law grinds on.
One of the latest entries into this charade is a study released last month by Frank Gaffney’s doggedly anti-Muslim think tank, the Center for Security Policy, that purports to demonstrate “the extent to which Shariah law had in fact entered U.S. state courts.”
The key word in that phrase appears to be “entered” – cleverly implying a cause for alarm that doesn’t exist. The 633-page report, entitled “Shariah Law and American State Courts,” is little more than a collection of 50 cases in which Shariah law – the Islamic code of law and moral conduct – or the law of a Muslim nation played some role, regardless of the outcome. In almost all the cases, the courts followed long-standing principles of U.S. law. In a very small number of cases, erroneous rulings by trial judges were properly overturned on appeal. If anything, the report is a vigorous affirmation that the U.S. legal system is working quite well and as designed.
That’s not what the anti-Muslim Greek Chorus wants you to believe, however.
“The analysis finds that Shariah has been applied or formally recognized in state court decisions, in conflict with the Constitution and state public policy,” said attorney-to-the-Islamophobes David Yerushalmi, according to the JihadWatch website (run by fellow anti-Muslim propagandist Robert Spencer). That statement is flat wrong: Aside from the rare erroneous (and subsequently overturned) trial court ruling, the report doesn’t document any constitutional or public policy conflict whatsoever. It contains not a single instance of Shariah law trumping U.S. law in a case that survived appeal.
Read it all at SPLC’s HateWatch