Another clueless mainstream media reporter allows himself to become a tool of Islamic supremacists. "Missouri legislators, wary of Islamic law, propose banning it," by Jason Noble for the Kansas City Star, March 14 (thanks to Block Ness):
JEFFERSON CITY | Missouri Reps. Paul Curtman and Don Wells agree there’s no evidence that state courts are judging cases based on Islamic principles or foreign laws.But that’s not stopping them from sponsoring legislation to ban the practice.
Bills introduced this year by the Republican lawmakers aim to prevent Missouri courts from applying laws from other countries or those based on Sharia, the Islamic religious law.
Wells maintains his measure is necessary because an oppressive and violent Islamic legal system is spreading across the world and could someday threaten Missouri.
Curtman’s bill, meanwhile, is less concerned with the encroachment of Islamic law, although its language is a near-exact copy of model legislation from a stridently anti-Muslim source.
Critics in the General Assembly, legal circles and the Muslim community call both measures bigoted and meaningless.
“This is an attack on Islam and clearly an Islamophobia bill,” said Jamilah Nasheed, a St. Louis Democrat who is Muslim. “It’s a bill that’s being pushed by ignorant people that know nothing about Islam.”
Unfortunately for Nasheed, we know all too well. Anyone can look at the Sharia states in the world today -- Saudi Arabia and Iran -- and see how oppressive they are. One need only consult manuals of Islamic law, such as the handy Reliance of the Traveller that even American reporters can read, to see that these oppressive features are part of Sharia itself, not some "hijacking" of it.
Similar measures have been considered in a handful of other states, including Oklahoma, where last November, 70 percent of voters approved a constitutional amendment banning the use of Sharia law in state courts. The amendment has since been challenged in federal court as unconstitutional.Missouri’s debate comes at a time of increasing scrutiny on Muslim Americans nationally and criticism that they’re being unfairly targeted. That discussion peaked last week with a high-profile congressional hearing examining radicalization in the American Muslim community.
The Missouri lawmakers’ bills differ slightly, as does the reasoning behind their introduction.
The constitutional amendment sponsored by Wells, a Cabool Republican, stipulates that Missouri courts “shall not look to the legal precepts of other nations or cultures” and specifically bars judicial consideration of Sharia law.
He introduced it last month with 106 co-sponsors — 66 percent of the House membership.
“Right now in the world, there is a big push for international law or Sharia law to be practiced and accepted,” Wells said.
This is problematic because Islamic law is “very oppressive for ladies” and mandates violent punishments for even minor crimes, he said, citing Internet research by himself and his legislative assistant.
Wells acknowledged that no such laws are applied or even considered in Missouri courts today, but he suggested they could creep into American law over a period of generations.
“I think it’s just absolutely a guarantee to my children and grandchildren that in the future they will live under the same laws that I grew up under,” he said.
Muslims and experts on Islam, however, said Wells’ suggestions represent a deep misunderstanding of the religion and the concept of Sharia law.
Sharia is not a specific legal code, but a set of interpretations of Islamic scripture, said John Bowen, a professor and expert on Islam at Washington University in St. Louis.
Bowen doesn't mention, of course, that the schools of Islamic jurisprudence agree on about 75% of these interpretations, and that that area of agreement includes the obligations Muslims have to wage war against unbelievers and subjugate them under the rule of Islamic law, as well as the rules mandating the oppression of women, including the beating of disobedient women, the devaluation of their inheritance rights and the value of their testimony in court, and more.
Majority-Muslim countries have applied those interpretations to varying degrees in their formal laws, he said, and Muslim communities in some Western nations have set up Sharia councils to deal with matters such as marriage or the settling of estates that have a religious component.
Irrelevant. The point of such laws as this proposed one is not to restrict Muslim religious practice, but to restrict the political, supremacist elements of Islam that are incompatible with Constitutional freedoms.
But few, if any, places explicitly rely on the tenets of Islam to decide legal matters, said Bowen, who has traveled extensively studying Islam and is in London researching English Sharia councils.When individuals do raise religious issues in legal proceedings, courts are generally skittish, he said.
“There are cases where Muslims make reference to Sharia, but what the courts say is, ‘Look, we can’t act on Sharia any more than we can act on biblical law or orthodox Jewish law,’ ” Bowen said.
Jim Hacking, an attorney for the St. Louis chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, was blunter about the courts’ approach to religious law and the aims of lawmakers such as Wells.
“This is a complete and utter waste of time,” Hacking said. “There’s a little thing called the First Amendment that prohibits religion from being used as the basis for law.”
He added: “It’s a political stunt being done to fan the flames of intolerance, nothing more.”
The Kansas City Star doesn't mention, of course, that CAIR is an unindicted co-conspirator in a Hamas terror funding case -- so named by the Justice Department. CAIR operatives have repeatedly refused to denounce Hamas and Hizballah as terrorist groups. Several former CAIR officials have been convicted of various crimes related to jihad terror. CAIR's cofounder and longtime Board chairman (Omar Ahmad), as well as its chief spokesman (Honest Ibe Hooper), have made Islamic supremacist statements that were tantamount to saying they wanted to see Sharia in the United States.
The other bill under consideration takes a broader approach to the application of foreign laws to Missouri courts and contains no explicit reference to Sharia law.Exactly what it does, however, depends on whom you ask.
Curtman, a freshman Republican from Pacific who is sponsoring the bill, said it would prevent judges from “ambushing” people by ruling on cases using laws from outside the United States.
“The principle behind it is that our courts should only acknowledge our laws that are representative of our people,” Curtman said. “That’s just a good principle for a democracy in general.”
But the man who actually wrote the language of Curtman’s bill offers a substantially different interpretation of its intent.
Curtman’s bill is nearly identical to model legislation drafted by Arizona-based attorney David Yerushalmi. On Friday, Yerushalmi said his legislation specifies that state courts may not issue rulings based on foreign laws that deny rights granted by the state and under the U.S. Constitution.
Although Yerushalmi’s legislation makes no reference to Sharia, he is an outspoken critic of Islam.
On a network of websites featuring the draft bill that Curtman adopted, Yerushalmi offers a separate “anti-Sharia draft act” that states followers of Sharia pose “an imminent likelihood of violent jihad and acts of terrorism” and should be deported or sentenced to prison for up to 20 years.
Whatever its intent, Curtman’s law may be difficult to apply to the real world if it passes, said Dale Whitman, a professor emeritus and former dean of the University of Missouri School of Law.
A court would have to consider marital laws from another country, for example, if a couple who married elsewhere sought a divorce in a Missouri court.
“It just isn’t a very realistic thing to say” courts cannot consider foreign law, Whitman said.
“Honestly, I can’t figure out any rational reason to adopt such a statute.”
Indeed. Why move to oppose recourse to a legal system that denies the freedom of speech, mandates death for apostates, and discriminates against women and non-Muslims? There is simply no rational reason to oppose such a legal system.
I was wonderingm is this defenitly a State issue? federal government can not step in?
m
http://newstime.co.nz/sharia-law-punishment.html
Evil & brutal sharia law
http://newstime.co.nz/honor-killings-to-offspring-are-allowed-in-islam-to-sharia-law-o2-4-reliance-of-the-traveller.html
"Honor" killings are allowed by Sharia Law
(o2.4, ‘Umdat al-Salik o1.1-2.)
".. ignorant people that know nothing about Islam"
We are not ignorant and we know a lot about Islam. Is this not Sharia Law, the Law of Muhammad, the Law of Islam?
http://crossmuslims.blogspot.com/2011/01/sharia-law-vs-english-law-pdf.html
Opponents of these bills, in each State, are objecting that no such usage of sharia or foreign law is currently the practice. So we should wait for it to start to become the custom in the courts before we decide to stop it. I'm not a lawyer, but I know the power of precedent in U.S. courts. Precedent seems to almost abrogate constitutionality, I guess because a judge's ruling in a case is thought to represent a valid interpretation of some part of a State, or the federal, Constitution, and it's supposed to stand that way so other judges in other cases can rule similarly based on it. And it grows like a snowball, and it's not easy to turn it back and remove the original faulty rulings. The opponents of these anti-sharia bills tell the public to wait until it might be too late, but so far I've not seen public discussion about the problem in that.
Several months ago I was all for the banning of Sharia as proposed by Oklahoma and then by other states. However, I didn't factor in at first that special kind of extra stupidity that characterizes modern liberal thought. You know, such things as political correctness, multiculturalism, feeling ashamed of your own Western culture, making excuses for lesser cultures, having a take on the Constitution which results in reductio ad absurdum arguments time and time again, tolerance to a suicidal degree and the whole negative nine yards.
So, I've concluded that the better approach to thwarting all the rot, stupidity and evil that's in Sharia is to deal with one provision after another of this putrid law code, otherwise the damn liberal lawyers and judges, not to mention your standard ivory-tower academic, will have a very good chance of nixing anti-Sharia legislation this, that or the other way.
States should pass legislation making illegal specific provisions of Sharia (without mentioning this damn word), such as amputation for theft, death for converting to another religion, death for criticizing any religion (for the purpose of getting at Islam since it's the turd in the religious punch bowl) and females having less clout in a court of law than males. Then, the gooey, Islam-is-a-religion-of-peace-and-tolerance crowd will have a much more difficult time of overturning such legislation. After all, it's OK to compromise on strategy as long as you don't compromise on principle. Besides, everyone with half a brain (admittedly this will excuse a good portion of the population) will know what's going on and it will be all the more delicious to watch liberals and Muslims in hysterics as they're beaten at their own game.
"Sharia is not a specific legal code, but a set of interpretations of Islamic scripture, said John Bowen, a professor and expert on Islam at Washington University in St. Louis."
Ah yes. Our old friend John Bowen, who falsely attributed a quote to Robert, and who thinks Islamization of Europe is a good thing. (Also see my comments in that thread looking into Bowen's other statements about sharia)
http://www.jihadwatch.org/2010/01/the-left-islam-hate-and-projection.html
“There are cases where Muslims make reference to Sharia, but what the courts say is, ‘Look, we can’t act on Sharia any more than we can act on biblical law or orthodox Jewish law,’ ” Bowen said."
This is the strange reasoning of Bowen and many others who defend sharia. On the one hand, they pooh-pooh the idea that it is going to be implemented in the West. Meanwhile, they are talking about examples of where it is already implemented to some degree in the West. If they are trying to defend this on the grounds that some courts won't implement it, or won't implement the harsh elements, then why do they have a problem with this move to ban sharia? In short, their (stated) position is incoherent. (Bowen, though, does have a heavy investment in promoting sharia, since that's the topic of his research, and his funding is for research on sharia, and as an anthropologist he has to also be an Islam apologist of sorts so that he won't have problems with the Muslims with whom he works. Whatever strange things have gone on in the mind of Bowen to get him to this point, his social, personal, financial, and ideological investments are so extensive at this point that not only would it be difficult for him to extricate himself from this mess, but he probably wouldn't want to do so).
Damn! Now I can't be a lurker anymore.
You're on the right track but still a little off.
Everything you mention is already illegal.
What we need here is the liberals favorite ENHANCED PENALTIES!
Like getting a stiffer penalty than regular murder if it was done because the murdered criticized a religion.
Wellington,
A version of what you suggest was tried in Herouxville, Quebec. As I recall, the town tried to ban or denounce or declare unwelcome things like stoning for adultery, honor killings, etc. Then Quebec's and Canada's mainstream media organizations flew into a rage over this and sent "journalists" to accuse the mayor and people of the town of being racists, bigots, etc. But I think most of the public was on the side of Herouxville.
That said, I am inclined to agree with your suggestion, though I would propose it as a one package deal, listing all the harsh and barbaric elements of sharia.
Wellington, sir, the blade of your mind is honed. . how can I put it. . exceeding sharp.
I think Bhoppy tags the best reason for the passage of this Mo. legislation and similar legislation proposed in several states.
It only takes one bad case to set the precedent for others to follow. The most hideous of all sharia based decisions so far that I have read was rendered last summer in NJ when a trial court did not issue a restraining order against a muslim husband from sexually abusing his wife. The decision was reversed on appeal. THE DECISION COULD HAVE JUST AS EASILY BEEN UPHELD by the same Judge. Just because there have been no explicit appellate decisions based on the more offensive sharia practices does not mean there never will be one.
This bill should be considered strong preventative medicine.
At what point does a state decide to vaccinate the general public from a known harmful, deathly contagion? Is the reason not to order inoculations before it poses a danger because infections and death are not yet widespread?
The Missouri legislation does not ban sharia; it bans decisions, including most importantly, decisions or judgments issued in a sharia law jurisdiction that violate basic public policy of the state and deny basic constitutional rights. This is what makes it different from the OK statute. Comity and choice of law legal doctrines permit foreign judgments to be given legal recognition. With this bill as stated law of the land, a divorce and custody award based on "Pakistani law" (aka sharia law) would not have to be recognized by pointing out the unequal rights given to women under sharia (eg. her testimony about his adultery requires more witnesses than her). There is an actual Maryland case based on similar facts. The wife didn't appear for her divorce hearing and husband won by default and tried to use that judgement to retrieve his children- why would she show up for a hearing if the cards are so stacked against her to start? Under this law she could use the statute to prevent the state court from recognizing the Pakistan judgment.
These type cases are not so widespread- but we all know about creeping sharia- give 'em and inch- they take a mile.
There are excellent resources online that explain the need for state laws and the best explanations come from David Yuralshulmi.
Allowing Judges to decide on a case by case basis ( as suggested by Wellington) lets Judges decide what is the best public policy for the state. Declaring public policy is the legislature's obligation. This law lets the legislature do that.
These anti-sharia bills are only skirmishes in the larger battle. Unfortunately, many, if not all of these statutes will eventually run head first into the First amendment, and guess which law will prevail? Muslim litigants have been using our own First amendment as a sword to slowly eat away at the constitution in many of the accommodation sharia type cases. It is my opinion that, unfortunately, they may continue to be successful and we will be left with the real possibility of needing a Constitutional amendment to clarify and segregate political Islam from religious Islam.
Missouri latest state to consider banning Sharia
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And the "Show Me" state weighs in! Yay!
More:
Bills introduced this year by the Republican lawmakers aim to prevent Missouri courts from applying laws from other countries or those based on Sharia, the Islamic religious law.
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I'm glad it mentions Sharia by name. It's not as though there is a big push to impose, for instance, the Napoleonic Code here (nor, of course, that that would be anywhere near as harmful).
More:
Majority-Muslim countries have applied those interpretations to varying degrees in their formal laws, he said, and Muslim communities in some Western nations have set up Sharia councils to deal with matters such as marriage or the settling of estates that have a religious component.
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Even this "soft" end of Shari'ah is rife with unequal treatment of women and girls in marriage, custody, and inheritance.
More:
Sharia is not a specific legal code, but a set of interpretations of Islamic scripture, said John Bowen, a professor and expert on Islam at Washington University in St. Louis.
Bowen doesn't mention, of course, that the schools of Islamic jurisprudence agree on about 75% of these interpretations
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And the same nasty laws keep popping up wherever aspects of Shari'ah are imposed—in Malaysia, or Indonesia, or Egypt, or Nigeria, or Pakistan, or Saudi Arabia, or Iran.
Oppression of women, unequal marriage and family law, curtailing of freedom of speech, unequal treatment for non-Muslims, "blasphemy laws", draconian punishments for "immodest dress" and petty theft, even amputations and *stonings*.
Jamilah Nasheed, by the way, appears to have at least some involvement with the brutish New Black Panthers, who were involved in voter intimidation during the last national election here.
"Why has Missouri House Leadership aligned with the New Black Panthers?"
http://rebootcongress.blogspot.com/2011/02/why-has-missouri-house-leadership.html
Wellington's suggestion makes sense, yet it has an inherent weakness. What one legislature might do, another can undo in a subsequent session. All it takes is shifting majorities.
Constitutional amendments on the other hand can be seen as having greater strength b/c of the difficulties in undoing a constitutional change once set into place.
In the case of these barbarian Sharia provisions, would a state's people be willing to clutter its state constitution with a hodge-podge of provisions, against stoning (esp. when that constitution might have an 8th Am analog on cruel & unusual), or against the inferior treatment of women (again esp. when the state is under due process requirements or the equal protection of the laws), and so forth.
Sharia has SO many reprehensible aspects. A constitutional amendment for each one of them without mentioning the Sharia word?
Wellington,
I agree, spell out the evil deeds that are prohibited.
And, declare "honor killings" to be a terrorist attack and subject to harsher sentencing. It is intended to terrorize the living.
Bhobby wrote:
I'm not a lawyer, but I know the power of precedent in U.S. courts. Precedent seems to almost abrogate constitutionality...
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Good post, Bhobby. "Precedent" does indeed carry enormous weight in US courts—too much, I often think.
You are right that it is absolutely key to prevent Shari'ah law from gaining precedent in the United States. If these laws are seen as prophylactic, that is all to the good.
Nip rumblings of Shari'ah law in the bud, before the less gaudy—and hence superficially more palatable—tenets of this vile code can gain precedent in *any* US courts.
"and is in London researching English Sharia councils."
So much for English law..Are they English or evil?
Perhaps the ONLY good thing that can come out of shirley-charlie-you-jest-ya "law" for women is willful suicide-by-rape and torture..Ban it.Stop it.Kill it. Nip it in the bud..Like yesterday. And PLEASE do not lamely hand the ultimate decision over to some lame-brained lefty red brigade anti-fa baadengrupp nation of islam biased judge!
Meanwhile back at the Ranch..
http://gatesofvienna.blogspot.com/2011/03/muslim-immigration-into-uk-part-four.html
Consider Hell, let's get it done!! Isn't it so stupid that States have to do this when the Federal government should have said 'no way' in the first damn place!!!! America is made up of many different cultures, if THEY come here & cannot conform to the ruls that have been working for centuries, the go the hell home here you belong!
Thank you for your reply. Constitutional amendments to state constitutions are ordinarily very difficult to attain. Much more difficult than getting ordinary legislation through. I understand your point that what one legislature passes another can undo but I think it highly unlikely that if a state legislature DID pass a law against, say, amputation for theft, a future legislature would actually negate this with a law saying that amputation is OK. In fact, it would be a fine spectator sport watching such an attempt. No, I'll be satisfied with legislation against many specific provisions of Sharia. I believe that would be enough.
I know how this reads BUT Ishmeal WAS sent away, any one seen him? He's found America. The BIG question is, how will he settle in America. America has always opened her arms to exiles, Islam is no different then any other exile. Islam how are you going to settle here? I know how simple this reads, but, alot of people are DYING to find out.
michael
I agree. After taking pre-law courses, it is obvious to me that the more detailed statutes are...such as you have proposed...are easier to get into law and easier for the courts to uphold when challenged by lawyers and defendants.
After all, there are other laws that specify certain activities that some consider religious, that have made it successfully into the law code and have been upheld when challenged...such as taking certain hallucinogens, handling of snakes, sacrifice, etc.
Since the law of the US Constitution does not allow states to enforce laws that specify death for a rapist...even of those who would rape a child...according to a recent ruling by the Supreme Court on a Louisiana State law, it should be easier to get a law against stoning for being raped, dating, leaving a religion, etc. to proceed successfully. It does not seem necessary to have the word for Islamic law anywhere in the bill being proposed. That would certainly make it harder for those in favor of sharia to say they want to stone a young girl who has been dating, has been raped or didn't keep a scarf over her face, or to kill one who has decided to make a religious choice....to leave, join or give up religious beliefs propounded by another...without the permission of her/his family or isolated community. And to point out that it discriminates against them...well, that seems to be self-defeating...pointing out that they wish to use stoning, amputation,whipping, etc. for things others do everyday without such punishment....in the case of being raped or leaving religion...not punished at all.
"iamsent" wrote:
America has always opened her arms to exiles, Islam is no different then any other exile.
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The first part of this is true; the second is not. While certain individual Muslims may come to America in good faith, *Islam* does not. Islam wants to replace just American law with the brutality of Shari'ah.
As you have seen lately from all this welcome resistance from more and more states, that isn't going to go over well here.
Just to back you up on that, re Islam not coming to America in good faith.
A book that every politician in the Western world - and beyond it, in South Korea, India, the Pacific island nations, Latin America, the Caribbean - should read.
Apostate from Islam Sam Solomon and Elias Al Maqdisi's "Modern Trojan Horse: The Islamic Doctrine of Immigration" (2009).
Here's the review, at 'American Thinker':
http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/08/the_hijra.html
Excerpt:
"Within the past few decades, mosques have increasingly dotted the landscapes of American and European cities and towns, with mega mosques often overshadowing adjacent, centuries-old churches in predominantly Christian regions. Islamic schools or academies and a host of Muslim organizations have become omnipresent across the West.
"Meanwhile, Americans and Europeans have made countless accommodations to Muslim demands...
"Little do they realize that this strategic pattern of demands is part of an insidious, 1,400-year-old proscription for Muslims that originates in the Koran and the Sunnah, the deeds of Mohammed.
"It is the Hijra or doctrine of immigration.
"Modeled by Mohammed's migration from Mecca to Medina, this immigration is not to a romanticized melting pot wherein newcomers gratefully search for opportunities for a better life in liberty and freely offer their talents and loyalty to benefit their new homeland.
"This is immigration for Islamic expansionism employing ethnic separatism to gain special status and privileges within the host country. Hijra is immigration designed to subvert and subdue non-Muslim societies and pave the way for eventual, total Islamization."
A good book to read alongside 'Modern Trojan Horse' is Patrick Sookhdeo's 'Faith, Power and Territory', or his earlier book, "Islam in Britain', which essentially document the progress of the strategy that Solomon and Al-Maqdisi describe, as it has been applied and is being applied in the UK.
Hard to understand why so few in the West have taken the time to understand that we're dealing with a culture with everything we abhor fully sanctioned by Mohammed's "god of the universe." We clap ourselves on the back when some Muslim state adopts a constitution - and adds the Koran to it, which overrules everything at odds with itself in said constitution. We think we're "winning hearts and minds" when a Muslim community turns on Al-Qaeda, clueless that Al-Qaeda has used a child or female to carry a bomb - contrary to Islamic law.
We project our values on the Muslim world and wonder why we're wrong so often. Objective truth about Islam is easily available through Islamic doctrine and universal Islamic law: Sharia, a condensation, extrapolation and codification of Islam’s divine, eternal, universal, perfect, unchanging holy writ: Allah’s Koran and Mohammed’s Sunna (most trusted biography and “traditions’‘) by Islam’s finest scholars. Sharia has been Islam’s normative and official interpretation of Islamic doctrine for over a thousand years; it is the basis for the religious, political and cultural life of all Muslims - and it can never be moderated or amended; at best, it has been selectively enforced.
Everything else about Islam is either subjective or taqiyya (Divine deceit). Best current source for objective, fully verifiable information on Islam: www.politicalislam