Sharia Creep in the USA

Thursday, March 6th, 2008 12:59 pm by Neal

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How will the Muslims take over the West?

A couple of strategies (besides outright jihad) come to mind: For one, there’s the Demographic Timebomb that is already exploding in Europe. For the details on this strategy, see Mark Steyn’s wonderful tome, “America Alone: The End Of The World As We Know It.” A strategy already evolving in Europe, Canada, Australia, America and elsewhere is sharia creep which Roger Kimball has also called soft jihad:

Traditional jihad is waged with scimitars and their contemporary equivalents, e.g., stolen Boeing 767s, which make handy instruments of mass homicide. Soft jihad is a quieter affair: it uses and abuses the language and the principles of democratic liberalism not to secure the institutions and attitudes that make freedom possible but, on the contrary, to undermine that freedom and pave the way for self-righteous, theocratic intolerance.

Robert Spencer has also written on sharia creep at DhimmiWatch:

I think we may be getting through to a very small number of people, but Muslim Brotherhood front organizations in the U.S. are still making tremendous headway by portraying these Sharia-creep initiatives as simple matters of civil rights, and playing on fears among public officials, and the public at large, of being seen as racist and bigoted.

It is getting worse, because there is a concerted effort by the MSA’s [Muslim Student Associations — ed] on various campuses and other groups to push Muslim accommodation issues aggressively, but this effort is relatively new. We didn’t see it on this scale ten or even five years ago. I think it is a natural outgrowth of the post-9/11 anxiety on the part of government and media not to appear ‘Islamophobic.’ As long as that continues to be a matter for concern, there will be continued accommodation of Muslim practices and Islamic distinctiveness, which only aids and abets the Islamic supremacist agenda.

That MSA’s on college campuses would push sharia, as Spencer notes, should come as no surprise to anyone following the pathetic state of academia. The immune system of leftist, American universities has been severely compromised by oppressive political correctness and a festering multiculturalism, and the disease of sharia has infested the weakened host and is spreading throughout the sickened bodies of American academia.

Mark Steyn (there’s that name again) highlights a recent example from Harvard:

A while back I mentioned Harvard’s decision to ban men from its pool and fitness center six times a week in the interests of “accommodating” Muslim women. Our pal Michael Graham picks up the theme:

“In the old days, Harvard would have laughed if some Catholic or evangelical mother urged “girls-only” campus workouts in the name of modesty. Today, Harvard happily implements Sharia swim times in the name of Mohammed.

At Harvard, that’s called progress.”

Well put. And thus “progress” comes full circle. In Minneapolis last year, the airport licensing authority, faced with a mainly Muslim crew of cab drivers refusing to carry the blind, persons with six-packs of Bud, slatternly women, etc, proposed instituting two types of taxis with differently colored lights, one of which would indicate the driver was prepared to carry members of identity groups that offend Islam. Forty years ago, advocating separate drinking fountains made you a racist. Today, advocating separate taxi cabs or separate swimming sessions makes you a multiculturalist.

Every society has culturally self-segregating groups – the Amish and whatnot. But they’re usually in small numbers somewhere out on the edge of the map. In Europe and Canada, the self-segregating group happens to be the principal source of population growth, which presents a profound challenge to societal cohesion. America does not face the same scale of problem, but nevertheless “sharia creep” ought to be resisted before it becomes remorseless. The rest of Michael’s column goes on to explain why that doesn’t happen: at Harvard and elsewhere, bigshot Saudi princes waving gazillion-dollar checks are in effect buying silence about one of the central questions of the day – Islam’s relationship with the west.

Know thine enemy.

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UPDATES:

Scott at powerline has writes on Harvard banning men from the pool and has this quote from a dodgy, Harvard spokesman (courtesy the Michael Graham column):

When I asked Harvard spokesman Bob Mitchell about this new Sharia-friendly policy, he denied that they were banning anyone. “No, no,” he told me, “we’re permitting women to work out in an environment that accommodates their religion.”

By banning all men from the facility, right?

“It’s not ‘banning,’” he insisted. “We’re allowing, we’re accommodating people.”

That, my friends, is classic Doublespeak. They’re “accommodating people” by banning men. Such is the intellectual status of Harvard.

Meanwhile, that Mark Steyn character has this excerpt from a John Howard speech:

If the butter of common national values is spread too thinly it will disappear altogether…

It is not only their intrinsic worth that should be staunchly defended. It is also because radical Islam senses – correctly – that there is a soft underbelly of cultural self-doubt in certain Western societies.

There are too many in our midst who think, deep down, that it is really “our fault” and if only we entered into some kind of federal cultural compact, with our critics, the challenges would disappear.

Perhaps it was this sentiment which led the Archbishop of Canterbury to make the extraordinary comment several weeks ago, that in Britain some accommodation with aspects of Sharia law was inevitable.

It is fundamental to the continued unity and purpose of a democratic nation state that there not only be respect for the rule of law but the state have but one body of law, to which all are accountable.

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