Once again, the rhetoric of Sharia taking over America has been exploited by Nevada Tea Party member Sharron Angle in her recent interview with the Mesquite Local News. You can listen to it here around 43 minutes in. “First of all, Dearborn, Michigan, and Frankford, Texas are on American soil, and under Constitutional law. Not Sharia law. And I don’t know how that happened in the United States. It seems to me there is something fundamentally wrong with allowing a foreign system of law to even take hold in any municipality or government situation in our United States.â€
Obviously Angle has never visited Borough Park, Brooklyn where thousands of Hasidic Jews live their lives according to the Talmudic Law, which also has its roots in the “foreign†Middle East. Likewise, Angle’s flawed logic could be used against Catholics, who follow Roman Catholic Law dictated by a “foreign†Pope who lives in Rome. The US allows abortion and divorce, which is contrary to Catholic “Sharia†(law). Many Catholics want to change US law to make it conform more to their own Sharia laws, particularly concerning abortion. Does this make Catholics “anti-American?†According to Angle’s logic it would. Sharia (meaning legislation in English) is simply the rules that govern the lives of Muslims from daily prayers and fasting to inheritance. Sharia does not – and never will – apply to non-Muslims. The idea that Islamic law will take over a secular country like the United States is absurd. If Catholics – who unlike Muslims have political power and influence in the country – can’t overturn Roe Vs. Wade, what makes Angle think that Islamic law can even have the slightest influence on American law?
Today, there is not a single Muslim country that completely follows Sharia – even Saudi Arabia. Apparently Angle hasn’t read much about the Middle East or she would know that Saudi Arabia has been under attack by extremists who point out that Saudi is a monarchy, which is not allowed in traditional Sharia. Similarly, Egypt’s penal code is secular and based on French law. Most of the Muslim world doesn’t follow financial Sharia laws, which forbid Reba or interest on loaned money. If pure Sharia doesn’t exist in the Muslim countries, on what planet are Angle, Newt Gringrich, David Horowitz, and Pamela Geller are living on to believe that Islamic law will magically take over the United States.
Such anti-Muslim neocons are feeding us lies and fears about Islam and its Sharia takeover. They and other right-wing conservatives, like Randall Terry of Operation Rescue, have been quoting out-of-context Quran verses, that tell Muslims to fight the infidels, without reading the entire Quran or learning about the historic circumstances of those verses. These verses apply only to non-believers in God, excluding Jews, Christians and those who believe in God. Such non-believers are described as those who spread destruction in the early phase of Islam, not 2400 years after. Furthermore, that particular verse is followed by cautionary words reminding Muslims that killing a soul is like killing humanity and saving one is like saving the entire mankind. Jihad against the non-believers is almost discouraged unless the lives of Muslims are at stake. Obviously Muslims are content with our freedom and democracy that they keep flocking to America, and some already are fighting fellow Muslims in Iraq and Afghanistan whom they see as the enemy of the U.S. But there are forces trying to divide us Americans. Perhaps we should look into the agenda of who’s funding Angle and other Islamophobic candidates from the Tea Party.
