On Thursday night, May 21, the Texas state senate passed a bill that would prevent any international law from being used in Texas civil courts in deciding disputes. Radio station WOAI characterized the bill as an “anti-sharia” bill, but state Senator Donna Campbell said that her bill doesn’t mention sharia law at all, just that it guarantees that no law from “foreign courts” would be used to override American law in settling civil matters.
When pressed for clarification about just which such laws she was concerned about, and could she provide an example, she whiffed: “No foreign law [specifically].… This just provides a context for judicial discretion … that we don’t trump Texas law, American law, with a foreign law regarding family law.”
Whether Campbell knew it or not, her bill, if signed into law by Texas Governor Greg Abbott, would make Texas the next in line among nine other states to have enacted similar statutes: Tennessee, Louisiana, Arizona, Kansas, Oklahoma, North Carolina, Washington, Alabama, and Florida.
She might have more properly and accurately responded by referring to the recently updated study “Shariah in American Courts: The Expanding Incursion of Islamic Law in the U.S. Legal System” by the Center for Security Policy. It documents 146 cases in 32 states in which a party involved in litigation asked the court to have the matter resolved using sharia law instead of state or federal statutes.
Or she could have enlisted the support of the American Public Policy Alliance (APPA), which details how 10 American families have had their rights either threatened or abrogated altogether in court rulings that invoked sharia law.
One of those cases would have proved her point: Joohi Q. Hosain v. Anwar Malik, decided in two Maryland courts in 1996. Wrote the judge for the Court of Special Appeals of Maryland:
Appellant mother challenged an order of the Circuit Court for Baltimore County … which declined to assume jurisdiction in the matter and granted comity [official recognition of another court’s ruling] to various Pakistani court orders that granted sole unrestricted custody of the child to the appellee father….
The judgment of the Circuit Court declining jurisdiction … affirmed.
APPA provided the sources for the nine other cases in which courts either deferred to foreign courts or threatened to do so.
Campbell could have expanded her defense of the bill by noting the remarkable recovery of plans by the Muslim Brotherhood to use any means at hand to insinuate it into the American system of jurisprudence.
The discovery was published by the Center for Security Policy:
In August of 2004, an alert Maryland Transportation Authority Police officer observed a woman wearing traditional Islamic garb videotaping the support structures of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, and conducted a traffic stop. The driver was Ismail Elbarasse and detained on an outstanding material witness warrant issued in Chicago in connection with fundraising for Hamas.
The FBI’s Washington Field Office subsequently executed a search warrant on Elbarasse’s residence in Annandale, Virginia. In the basement of his home, a hidden sub-basement was found; it revealed over 80 banker boxes of the archives of the Muslim Brotherhood in North America.
One of the most important of these documents made public to date was entered into evidence during the Holy Land Foundation trial. It amounted to the Muslim Brotherhood’s strategic plan for the United States and was entitled, “An Explanatory Memorandum: On the General Strategic Goal for the Group in North America.”
The Explanatory Memorandum was written in 1991 by a member of the Board of Directors for the Muslim Brotherhood in North America and senior Hamas leader named Mohammed Akram. It had been approved by the Brotherhood’s Shura Council and Organizational Conference and was meant for internal review by the Brothers’ leadership in Egypt.
It was certainly not intended for public consumption, particularly in the targeted society: the United States.
Frank Gaffney, the center’s founder and driving force behind it since 1988, called that discovery “arguably the single most important vehicle for understanding a secretive organization and should, therefore, be required reading for policy-makers and the public alike.”
Here’s the key descriptor of the purpose of the Muslim Brotherhood from that remarkable discovery:
The process of settlement is a “Civilization-Jihadist Process” with all the word means. The Ikhwan [Muslim Brotherhood] must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand jihad in eliminating and destroying Western civilization from within and “sabotaging” its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.
Gaffney explained why his center has focused on exposing this plan:
The Center has undertaken several campaigns to expose the threat to America from Shariah. American civil and political society is under systematic, sustained and seditious assault — a “Stealth Jihad” — by adherents to Shariah.…
These entities seek to install Shariah law as a parallel legal and political system in the United States, constituting a separate governance system for the Muslim community with respect to family law, civil society, media and political discourse, finance and homeland security.
The Barabas Fund, an international Christian aid agency, expanded upon the differences that are key to understanding the threat to the United States:
Shariah law tries to describe in detail all possible human acts, dividing them into permitted and prohibited.… This vast compendium regulates all matters of devotional life, worship, ritual purity, marriage and inheritance, criminal offenses, commerce and personal conduct….
[It] teaches that Sharia, as God’s revealed law, perfect and eternal, is binding on individuals, society and state in all its details….
[Its] mandates [for non-compliance] are extremely harsh [and] they infringe on many modern principles of human rights, religious freedom, and equality before the law….
Discrimination on the basis of religion is fundamental….
[It] discriminates on the basis of gender.
Campbell’s weak response to questions about the purposes of her law notwithstanding, if Governor Abbott signs it into law, her bill will help Texas protect itself and its citizens against the incursion, the infiltration and the insinuation of sharia law into its system of jurisprudence, just as similar laws are doing in an increasing number of other states.
Photo: David Shankbone
A graduate of an Ivy League school and a former investment advisor, Bob is a regular contributor to The New American magazine and blogs frequently at www.LightFromTheRight.com, primarily on economics and politics.
