Oh, No!

[SEC=UGA]

So very, very, very sad... And to think, I didn't even know this was happening!!!!

 

The rise of anti-Muslim sentiment in America has brought with it a wave of largely-unsubstantiated suggestions from conservative media commentators and politicians that America is at risk of falling under the sway of Sharia law.

 

First, a definition: Sharia law is strict Islamic law. It is designed to guide devout Muslims in their personal and professional dealings, and has been used by the Taliban and others to justify limits on women's rights and harsh punishments, including amputation and stoning. (It is open to interpretation, however; here's a helpful backgrounder from the Council on Foreign Relations.)

 

Last week, Nevada GOP Senate candidate Sharron Angle invoked Sharia law when asked about "Muslims wanting to take over the United States."

 

"They are building mosques all over the place," the questioner told Angle. "They want to build one near [ground zero]. And they seem to be getting their way. On a TV program just last night I saw that they are taking over a city in Michigan."

 

After stating that the "militant terrorist situation" in question "isn't a widespread thing," Angle said this: "First of all, Dearborn, Michigan, and Frankford, Texas are on American soil, and under Constitutional law. Not Sharia law. And I don't know how that happened in the United States."

 

"It seems to me there is something fundamentally wrong with allowing a foreign system of law to even take hold in any municipality or government situation in our United States," she added.

 

The statement drew a rebuke from Dearborn Mayor Jack O' Reilly, who said Angle "doesn't know what she's talking about." (As for Frankford, it reportedly doesn't exist, but is a former town annexed into Dallas 35 years ago.) The Dearborn claim may have been grounded in the arrest of four Christian evangelists for disorderly conduct at an Arab cultural festival in June, which some conservatives took as evidence that Sharia law had come to Michigan.

 

The notion that Sharia law is coming to America has been percolating in the conservative media for a while. Fox News' Sean Hannity suggested the arrest of the Christian missionaries in Dearborn reflected the possibility that "Sharia law is taking over in Dearborn," as did Fox News' Brian Kilmeade, who interviewed one of the men who was arrested.

 

At the Values Voters summit in September, Newt Gingrich said - to a standing ovation - that "[w]e should have a federal law that says Sharia law cannot be recognized by any court in the United States." He has also warned that jihadists are trying "to replace Western civilization with a radical imposition of Sharia."

 

To support his argument, Gingrich cites a 2009 judgment in New Jersey that a man had not sexually assaulted his wife because his behavior was "consistent with his practices." The decision was later overturned, and stands as "the one and only instance of stealth sharia that anyone has been able to find," according to the Washington Post's Eugene Robinson.

 

The outcry over Sharia law has been tied in large part to the controversy around the Islamic cultural center two blocks from the site of the Sept. 11 attacks, as well as other mosques around the country. In August, Dick Morris said on Fox News that the cultural center will be used to "train and recruit Sharia law advocates who become terrorists."

 

Meanwhile, a former county Republican Party chairman told the Washington Post that residents opposed to a proposed mosque in Tennessee are worried that "the Muslims coming in here will keep growing in numbers and override our system of law and impose Sharia law."

 

Protesters, left, and counterprotesters shout at each other during a July 14 demonstration about a planned mosque and Islamic center in Murfreesboro, Tenn. A suspicious fire was started at the mosque's construction site and police suspect that the fire was arson.

(Credit: AP Photo/Christopher Berkey)

 

On the Internet, which is awash in warnings about Sharia law, Pamela Geller of the influential conservative blog Atlas Shrugged warns of "creeping Sharia" in the United States.

 

"It's a drip, drip, drip, drip, drip. The mosque-ing of the workplace where you're imposing prayer times on union contracts, non-Muslim workers have to lengthen their day: it's wrong," she told the New York Times. "And in places like Greeley and in Marshall, in Colorado, the media doesn't report on it, but they've come to fisticuffs, there's been rioting."

 

Geller's comments prompted the Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg to write that "a Martian takeover of New Jersey is more likely than the imposition of a caliphate, or of Muslim law, on America." He added: "Only a true paranoid could look at America as it is today and see the creeping takeover of Islamist caliphate ideology."

 

But Geller is far from alone in suggesting that Sharia law is making inroads. In the right-leaning tabloid the New York Post this week, columnist Andrea Peyser warned readers that "[c]oming soon to a TV in your child's bedroom is a posse of righteous, Sharia-compliant Muslim superheroes."

 

Peyser quoted a column suggesting the show was designed to indoctrinate children and said it "has the seal of approval of a Sharia board."

 

On November 2nd, voters in Oklahoma - a state not exactly awash in Islamic activity - are expected to vote in favor of a "Save Our State" constitutional amendment forbidding the state's court's to consider Sharia or international law in making rulings.

 

Backers of the law say they don't want the United States to go the way of the United Kingdom, where the archbishop of Canterbury generated an uproar more than two years ago by suggesting that British law make room for Sharia. British newspapers reported later that year that "the government has quietly sanctioned the powers for Sharia judges to rule on cases ranging from divorce and financial disputes to those involving domestic violence." (Tribunals grounded in Sharia law are only binding if both parties agreed to give the judges power to make rulings.)

 

As it turns out, U.S. courts "already recognize and enforce Sharia in everything from commercial contracts to divorce settlements, to wills and estates," as NPR reports.

 

The system in the U.S. is similar to Britain: Courts are open to honoring agreements made under Islamic (or Christian, or Jewish) law and worked out by religious tribunals - within reason. As Marc Stern of the American Jewish Committee told NPR, U.S. law supersedes religious agreements when those agreements are seen as grossly unfair. For example, when a Muslim husband in Maryland argued that he should be allowed to give his wife nothing when they divorced, citing Islamic law, the courts ruled that he did not have the right to do so.

 

All this isn't to say that there isn't the possibility that a greater Muslim presence in the United States won't have some impact on the law; Christian-backed blue laws, which limit the sale of alcohol on Sundays in order to foster religious observance, are a good example of such religious influence.

 

But considering that there are perhaps two million Muslims in the United States, a country with a population of more than 310 million, fears of an outbreak of Sharia law seem overblown at best. Even if there is somehow a serious push for the imposition of Sharia law - or any other religious law - it would quickly run up against the first amendment to the Constitution.

 

"Were not going to see hand chopping off, were not going to see retaliatory violence, we're not going to see underage marriages, were not going to see polygamous marriages," Clark Lombardi of the University of Washington Law School told NPR. "The U.S. courts simply wouldn't do it."

[BeeR]

No blind bias or oversimplifications being stirred up here.

[bpwallace49]

I blame the communist closet m00slim in the White House, no other alternative really . .

[Ursa Majoris]

Millions of blind frightened sheep believe this stuff, though. All people vote, even incredibly stupid ones.

[driveby]

Millions of blind frightened sheep believe this stuff, though. All people vote, even incredibly stupid ones.

You nailed it. Now lets get rid of him in 2012.

[westvirginia]

Millions of blind frightened sheep believe this stuff, though. All people vote, even incredibly stupid ones.

 

Like those that think the obamessiah will pay their mortgage and put gas in their car?

[Ursa Majoris]

Like those that think the obamessiah will pay their mortgage and put gas in their car?

That right there is up there with the stupid canard that Al Gore said he invented the Internet. Both comments have been twisted beyond words. Congratulations on passing your Fox News Reporter 101 class.

[redrumjuice]

That right there is up there with the stupid canard that Al Gore said he invented the Internet.

 

Who said this: "this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal"

[SEC=UGA]

Well, at least we're fighting back against our new Mooslim overlords:

 

South Carolina mosque defaced with bacon

 

From CNN South Carolina affiliate WMBF:

 

A national Muslim civil rights and advocacy group is calling on the FBI to investigate a message written in bacon at mosque in Florence.

 

Three chair members of the Islamic Center in Florence discovered the words "pig" and "chump" written in strips of bacon on the walkway along the mosque Sunday afternoon.

[TimC]

I blame the communist closet m00slim in the White House, no other alternative really . .

 

I got proof

[Delicious_bass]

Well, at least we're fighting back against our new Mooslim overlords:

[VincentVega]"Bacon tastes gooood. Pork chops taste gooood."[/VincentVega]

[bpwallace49]

[VincentVega]"Bacon tastes gooood. Pork chops taste gooood."[/VincentVega]

 

I thought of the exact same thing.

[driveby]

That right there is up there with the stupid canard that Al Gore said he invented the Internet. Both comments have been twisted beyond words. Congratulations on passing your Fox News Reporter 101 class.

 

I posted the link to the audio of the obama chick, Big John can probably dig it up.

 

I'm wondering if you guys are seriously still defending Obama and his policies or are your reflexively defensive diatribes just some residual bush-bashing bubbling to the surface and manifesting themselves as feeble, desperate and un-becoming attempts to salvage any remaining dignity, self-esteem and credibility you may have once had?

[Ursa Majoris]

 

I posted the link to the audio of the obama chick, Big John can probably dig it up.

 

I'm wondering if you guys are seriously still defending Obama and his policies or are your reflexively defensive diatribes just some residual bush-bashing bubbling to the surface and manifesting themselves as feeble, desperate and un-becoming attempts to salvage any remaining dignity, self-esteem and credibility you may have once had?

None of those things. The attitude to Obama is a subject for a separate thread. In this case, I'm just pointing out that this latest Republican propaganda urban legend is as BS as another famous one. $hit sticks if you throw enough of it. Consider me the guy in the Hazmat suit, hosing down at least some of the mendacious twisted $hit you guys love to throw around.

Edited October 14, 2010 by Ursa Majoris

[driveby]

None of those things. The attitude to Obama is a subject for a separate thread. In this case, I'm just pointing out that this latest Republican propaganda urban legend is as BS as another famous one. $hit sticks if you throw enough of it. Consider me the guy in the Hazmat suit, hosing down at least some of the mendacious twisted $hit you guys love to throw around.

 

 

the text of the call

 

WOMAN: Uh yes…um… Y’all come to get the car? The car is not here. The car is in the shop and one part is at another shop. If y’all want it that bad, y’all can go pay that man to get it out and then pay the person to get the other part out. I mean, because y’all act like y’all couldn’t be patient. You knew that we was going to get it tookin’ care of. So if y’all want it that bad, y’all can go get it ya pay the man and the other man and you — we can we leave it as that. Cuz we not owin’ that much on the car. Y’all want to trip on it now, there… We only got, ahh — only a thousand or two thousand on it. So you know what? God bless y’all. Y’all can go pick up the car… So you know what? Give me a call back and I will give you the directions to where the man at, and I will let him know that y’all going to be paying him to get it out because y’all don’t be patient! We not rich like y’all. That’s one thing y’all going to have to understand. But one day — this year! — we will be, because we have Barack Obama! (slams down phone)

[Ursa Majoris]

 

the text of the call

Oh. I thought this was going to tell me that Obama was going to pay the mortgage and put gas in the lady's car at no charge to her, in other words support what WV said. My bad.

[driveby]

Oh. I thought this was going to tell me that Obama was going to pay the mortgage and put gas in the lady's car at no charge to her, in other words support what WV said. My bad.

Point to the Ursa debate team.

[Perchoutofwater]

That right there is up there with the stupid canard that Al Gore said he invented the Internet. Both comments have been twisted beyond words. Congratulations on passing your Fox News Reporter 101 class.

 

 

Of course I'm sure if I said the One nation rally was full of socialist and communists and even pointed out that the Communist Party USA was at the rally and given a place to peddle their propaganda by the event organizers, you'd say they really aren't communists. Your defense of this buffoon and those that support him is becoming hilarious. You've all but quit rationally arguing issues, and have lowered yourself to trying to besmear those with points of view that differ from yours. Come on Ursa you're better than that.

[Ursa Majoris]

Of course I'm sure if I said the One nation rally was full of socialist and communists and even pointed out that the Communist Party USA was at the rally and given a place to peddle their propaganda by the event organizers, you'd say they really aren't communists. Your defense of this buffoon and those that support him is becoming hilarious. You've all but quit rationally arguing issues, and have lowered yourself to trying to besmear those with points of view that differ from yours. Come on Ursa you're better than that.

Thank you.

 

What she ACTUALLY says is, "I won't have to worry about putting gas in my car, I won't have to worry about paying my mortgage, he's going to help me". You know , in the EXACT SAME WAY you think the Republicans are going to reduce your worries and help you. She thinks her general circumstances are going to be helped by the election of a president more sympathetic to her.

 

At no point is it possible for anyone who isn't stone deaf to believe she is saying that her mortgage and gas are going to be paid for her. That is flat out idiocy appealing only to the credulous - and those that actively wish that is what she'd said.

[driveby]

Thank you.

 

What she ACTUALLY says is, "I won't have to worry about putting gas in my car, I won't have to worry about paying my mortgage, he's going to help me". You know , in the EXACT SAME WAY you think the Republicans are going to reduce your worries and help you. She thinks her general circumstances are going to be helped by the election of a president more sympathetic to her.

 

At no point is it possible for anyone who isn't stone deaf to believe she is saying that her mortgage and gas are going to be paid for her. That is flat out idiocy appealing only to the credulous - and those that actively wish that is what she'd said.

2 technical points to the Ursa debate team. Well done.

[redrumjuice]

Who pays for husseins aunt's housing?

[westvirginia]

You know ursa, there was a reason I put the wink on the end. You are one crotchety old bastard lately. Is it the bitter disappointment in the incompetence of the obamessiah that's causing it, or just the knowledge that this election will bring with it a repudiation of his policies?

 

[westvirginia]

Who said this: "this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal"

 

Funny how they just ignore that. These people set themselves up as saviors, who are "going to fundamentally change amerikuh", and then are shocked that something is actually expected.

[untateve]

I got proof

 

Crap! Lady.Hawke was right!

[Ursa Majoris]

You know ursa, there was a reason I put the wink on the end. You are one crotchety old bastard lately. Is it the bitter disappointment in the incompetence of the obamessiah that's causing it, or just the knowledge that this election will bring with it a repudiation of his policies?

 

I don't think it's any of that. I just don't like the perpetuation of falsehood as received truth. Given the unrelenting blare from the right, this nonsense rapidly becomes truth. You only have to look at the fact that a third of Republican supporters think Obama is a Muslim to see the results. I am well aware that there is no chance of turning the tide of blaring ignorance but if only one person realized from my post that the "Obama chick" thing is yet another right wing lie, then it's worth it.

 

William James (1842-1910) The father of modern Psychology "There's nothing so absurd that if you repeat it often enough, people will believe it."