In "Uncle Shariah" in the Washington Times, December 16, Frank Gaffney details why AIG's nationalization is so worrisome:
The insurance giant AIG has lately become the poster child for corporate risk-taking, mismanagement and greed. Its unimaginably large losses, rooted in insurance it extended to financial companies engaged in subprime mortgage-backed transactions, have destroyed both AIG's corporate reputation and balance sheet.Indeed, but for the fact that Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson - who during his days running Goldman Sachs had extensive ties to AIG - deemed the insurance firm "too large to fail," the company would surely have gone under by now. Instead, Mr. Paulson gave AIG well over $40 billion of the slush-fund Congress intended to bailout the financial sector (part of a total $150 billion the U.S. has sunk in AIG to date). As a result, you and I and our fellow taxpayers have been saddled with ownership of nearly 80 percent of this once high-flying and now-floundering global insurance enterprise.
Another result of AIG's nationalization is, if anything, even more worrisome."
It turns out that AIG has a subsidiary specializing in "takaful" - insurance products that are purportedly "Shariah-compliant." I say purportedly because - while they have been cynically deemed "pure" (halal) by Shariah advisers that AIG employed for the purpose of making such certifications - the Islamic code expressly prohibits business transactions that involve risk. Consequently, insurance products designed to hedge against risk are inherently "impure" or haram.
Whatever the status of AIG's "takaful" products under Islamic law, the U.S. government now has a vested interest in their financial success. Uncle Sam has become Uncle Shariah.
In so doing, Henry Paulson has acted in a manner that not only appears to smack of a conflict of interest and egregious disregard for the public's fiduciary interests. He also seems to have violated the Constitution.
The First Amendment of the Bill of Rights has long been interpreted as prohibiting the establishment of any national religion or conferring upon one religion a preference over others. By taking a massive stake in a company that explicitly promotes Islam's Shariah law, the U.S. government is acting at odds with both of these revered principles. [...]
Most Americans remain unaware of the menace posed by Shariah, let alone the extent to which it is being insinuated stealthily into our country. Happily, the latter is the subject of an excellent new book by the acclaimed scholar of Islam, Robert Spencer, entitled, "Stealth Jihad: How Radical Islam is Subverting America Without Guns or Bombs."...
Thanks for the hat-tip, Frank.
Read it all.
Who is watching over this mess? Is no Federal Agency independently looking out for our rights? Is not this a crime to deliberately choose to flaunt the Constitution and our forefathers ideas?
WAKE UP AMERICA!! before it is too late and we have lost everything.
FOX News is covering this story, God bless 'em. They're calling it "Islamic finance."
I do take issue with part of this article and one of the arguments against Sharia finance more generally:
The First Amendment of the Bill of Rights has long been interpreted as prohibiting the establishment of any national religion or conferring upon one religion a preference over others. By taking a massive stake in a company that explicitly promotes Islam's Shariah law, the U.S. government is acting at odds with both of these revered principles.
That is not the argument we need to be making. We cannot fight Islam as a religion. It isn't one and it should not be treated as one. Opposing Sharia finance and any other form it may morph into should be done on the basis of the fact that its interests are inimical to ours, that it is seditious, and that Sharia's focus is destroying us, not because Islam poses as a religion. That's opportunistic and hurts our efforts to fight Islamization. Islam must be fought as a seditious political ideology whose laws and customs invariably violate the laws the human rights of non-Muslims and the human and civil rights of women, and aims to destroy our nation.
Oh, snap! Gaffney told people about the Mattel doll on Fox 'n Friends too! Woot! Exclamation points!
I think the problem is partly the people in our goverment have no idea what shaeia is.
(U.S.) Lawsuit Filed to Stop AIG's Sharia Businesses
--- Lawsuit Filed Against Treasury Dept: Stop AIG Bailout Financing Terrorism
http://www.thomasmore.org/qry/page.taf?id=19
--- SANE's David Yerushalmi joins Thomas More Law Center to sue USG for its support of Shariah
http://www.saneworks.us/SANEs-David-Yerushalmi-joins-Thomas-More-Law-Center-to-sue-USG-for-its-support-of-Shariah-newsblog-2346.htm
--- PDF of Legal Complain to Department of Treasury: Murray v Paulson et al
http://www.thomasmore.org/downloads/sb_thomasmore/DepartmentoftheTreasury-Complaint.pdf
http://www.saneworks.us/uploads/news/applications/35.pdf
Related Reports:
Jeffrey Imm articles on Sharia Finance:
http://www.unitedstatesaction.com/immscf.html
--- End U.S. Ownership of Sharia Business Now Petition - nearly 5,600 Signatures as of today!
http://www.petitiononline.com/stopaig/petition.html
December 4, 2008 - AIG Defies U.S. Taxpayers by Promoting Sharia in America
http://anti-jihad.org/blog/2008/12/aig-defies-us-taxpayers/
http://www.unitedstatesaction.com/blog/imm-articles/118.html
-- Source Documents
http://www.unitedstatesaction.com/blog/imm-articles/sources_aig_dec.html
Frank Gaffney could not be more correct in his evaluation. Any company like AIG that has received Federal funding,let alone FDIC Insurance coverage on accounts cannot and should not be subject to any imposition of sharia that is the most threatening part of the Islamic Religion. Unfortunatly AIG and other large companies have huge international stakes that do not always subscribe to our living document, The Constitution of The United States.
One of the problems with , American International Group (AIG) is that it is doing business in more than 130 countries, it is the 18 Th. largest company in the world, according Forbes Global 2000 list. AIG specializes in life and property-casualty products for industrial, personal and commercial insurance, but what should concern millions of Americans is that it is one of the top retirement financial services providers in the United States. Hardly a year ago this so-called A+ rated company claimed consolidated assets of over one trillion dollars..
Unfortunately, losses associated with the U.S. mortgage market pummeled AIG stocks in September 2008, forcing federal officials to authorize up to $122.8 billion in taxpayer-backed loans that must be repaid before the 2011 at an interest rate of up to 14 percent. The federal government received preferred stocks equal to a 79.9 percent stake in AIG as loan collateral.
So here we have a company that has been doing business with sharia institutions for years in the Middle east. The question is? Even though this is a company based in New York,it still does business in 130 countries throughout the world and since these countries have a serious investment stake in solvency of AIG they should also help with bail out money and that may be where the rub comes in when dealing with Muslim Countries and their Sharia financial laws that are based in the Islamic Religion. Obviously AIG has been a player in Sharia for decades as well as other financial practices that are used in other countries.
Every US citizen needs to forward Mr. Gafney's article to their US Congressional representative and 2 senators asap and to others who will contact their congressional reps.
This needs to get out into the populace and quickly while the issue of the bailout is in the news.
Also contact Sue Myrick's anti-jihad caucus and http://senateconservatives.com/ to let them know how you feel. The senate conservatives have quite a bit on the bailout so that might be a good place to start.
Let's be clear. AIG (and many others) interest is strictly monetary. If we break our dependency on oil, Islamic countries won't have nearly as much money and AIG and the others will lose interest in sharia-compliant financing. Simple.
Headline:
US President George W. Bush said in an interview Tuesday he was forced to sacrifice free market principles to save the economy from "collapse."
"I've abandoned free-market principles to save the free-market system," Bush told CNN television, saying he had made the decision "to make sure the economy doesn't collapse."
...
"I am sorry..."
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"I feel a sense of obligation to my successor..."
Link
"I think the problem is partly the people in our goverment have no idea what Sharia is."
spcbat
With very few exceptions, I have never seen a truly intelligent bureacrat. And those intelligent few, get discusted and leave. Sharia probably looks good to the rest of them.
I thank Frank Gaffney.
""I think the problem is partly the people in our goverment have no idea what Sharia is.""
They really aren't, and considering some of the statements that came from D.C. immediately following 9-11, it scares me to think that those geniuses down there do not really know the enemy. In many ways, they still don't. We need to remove our oil interests out of the Middle East once and for all.