Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich was asked yesterday whether he would support a Muslim for president. His answer may have been one of the most important teaching moments of the long and difficult campaign season.
Speaker Gingrich responding by saying it depends on whether the candidate was “a modern person who happens to worship Allah.” Or “a person who belonged to any kind of belief in sharia, any kind of effort to impose that on the rest of us.” He rightly concluded by saying that the former would not be a threat while the latter would be a “mortal threat.”
Newt is absolutely right in making such a distinction. The danger we currently face from the so-called Muslim world arises not from the fact that people are Muslim, but from the extent to which they adhere to the totalitarian, supremacist Islamic doctrine of sharia.
Gingrich also repeated his earlier call for federal legislation to ensure that sharia is not practiced in U.S. courts. An appellate-court ruling last week in connection with an amendment to the Oklahoma state constitution would seem to preclude such an initiative.
In fact, legislation that would prevent any foreign laws — including sharia — from being practiced in state courts if they conflict with U.S. constitutional rights or state pubic policy has been enacted in Tennessee, Louisiana, and Arizona. In none of the three cases has the constitutionality of this statute, known as American Laws for American Courts (ALAC), been challenged. ALAC is under consideration in roughly another 20 state legislatures.
Some have argued that there is no need for such legislation. There is. A Center for Security Policy study of a microcosm of American jurisprudence — 50 state appellate-level cases — established that there have been at least 27 cases in 23 states where sharia law was applied. A pro-sharia group, ShariaInAmerica.com, found many more such cases.
Unfortunately, those seeking to insinuate sharia into this country are doing so not just in our courts, but it is being promoted in schools, mosques.
Sharia has become an increasingly significant force in American capitalism, thanks to the embrace by Wall Street and the U.S. government of so-called Sharia-Compliant Finance. Indeed, this country’s taxpayers now own the largest purveyor of sharia-compliant insurance products in the world: AIG.
Sharia is the impetus behind multinational diplomatic efforts to accommodate sharia blasphemy prohibitions on expression that offends Muslims.
Newt Gingrich has rendered a real public service not shying away from this issue on the campaign trail.