Marc Sheppard

Steal a loaf of bread and one or both of your upper extremities will be hacked off at the wrist. Are you a married woman who’s just suffered the brutality of gang-rape? Well, you’ll either find four males your attackers were stupid enough to allow to bear witness to the crime, or find yourself guilty of adultery—a fate far worse than anything you suffered during the actual assault. Adulterers are wrapped head-to-toe mummy style, buried in sand up to their chests, and slowly and brutally stoned to death by their neighbors.

Welcome to the merciless world of Islamic Sharia Law, where religious “scholars” sit as judges and juries. This medieval system of “justice” oversees countless stonings, beheadings, crucifixions, and often-fatal floggings in Islamic theocracies each year. But the system is not confined to those lands only.

A growing number of countries with Muslim majorities are, while maintaining secular constitutions and penal codes, imposing religious law for family and civil matters. Less harsh than complete Sharia, indeed; yet this bifurcation creates what amounts to an Unequal Rights Amendment to the law. Women are treated as property, existing under the total command of, and fear of legal beatings from, their typically polygamous husbands or fathers.

To be sure, the greatest direct threat to western civilization emanates from the fanatical Muslims we currently face in the war on terror. Yet, of equal or, perhaps, greater menace are growing attempts by so-called “moderate” Muslim leaders to create dichotomous legal systems within non-Muslim countries.

Nowhere is this more rampant than Europe. According to a very disturbing February 2006 ICM opinion poll, 40% of British Muslims want Sharia law introduced into parts of the country. The dread of “home-grown” terrorism originating from their own soil last month provided Muslim leaders a unique blackmail opportunity to further those wishes.

Following the recently defused airline bomb terror plot, Dr. Syed Aziz Pasha, the Secretary General of the Union of Muslim Organizations in the UK and Ireland met with British government officials. During the talks, the Muslim leader had the gall to suggest that the introduction of Sharia Law, together with special bank holidays for Muslim religious festivals, would help to “combat terror” in Britain. The Daily Mail reported his extortive reasoning on August 15, 2006: “If you give us religious rights, we will be in a better position to convince young people that they are being treated equally along with other citizens.”

Thankfully, a week later, according to BBC News, Communities Secretary Ruth Kelly stated that “the government was opposed to any form of law contrary to British civil law, such as Sharia law.”

Earlier this year, Australia was faced with similar demands from radical Islamic clerics. During a February national television interview, Treasurer Peter Costello responded: “if you want a country which has Sharia law or a theocratic state, then Australia is not for you.”

Score one for our Anglosphere allies in the British Commonwealth. But this was merely a single battle in the global war. How are other countries responding when put to similar tests? To the leaders of those nations, here are but a few recent reminders of what Sharia has meant to civilized society:

• In Bangladesh, seven Islamic members of the Jamaatul Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB) were sentenced to death last year for the murder of two judges. One of the militants, Abdur Rahman, the head of this banned Islamic group, whose goal is the introduction of Sharia law into the country, stated that the murders were carried out “on the instructions of God.”

• The imposition of Sharia Law in 1983 in Sudan, where 70% of the population is Muslim, is regarded as a catalyst for the 20 year-long civil war which is at the heart of the current genocide in Darfur.

• In Mogadishu, fighters loyal to Somalia’s Islamic Courts will soon be uniformed to enforce strict Sharia law upon the entire land. Earlier this year these same militiamen killed two people at the screening of a World Cup soccer broadcast banned because it violated their strict interpretation of Islamic law.

• At the Amsterdam trial of Mohammed Bouyeri, the killer of filmmaker Theo van Gogh, the defendant told the court that Sharia law commanded that he “cut off the head of anyone who insults Allah and his prophet.”

Recently, in Canada, there has been intense public sparring over proposals to permit Sharia religious arbitration in civil disputes.

And, although Muslim immigrants to the U.S are perhaps better assimilated than anywhere else on the planet, one can’t ignore the words attributed to Council on American–Islamic Relations (CAIR) founder Omar M. Ahmad by the San Ramon Valley Herald on July 4, 1988, “Islam isn’t in America to be equal to any other faith, but to become dominant. The Koran, the Muslim book of scripture, should be the highest authority in America, and Islam the only accepted religion on Earth.”

Portentous declarations, indeed, particularly when coming from the chairman of one of the nation’s most influential Islamic civic organizations. Nevertheless, while we do battle with “radical” Muslim “extremists” abroad, and prepare to do the same at home, we continue to completely ignore the tangential threat imposed by their “moderate” confidantes.

This is excerpted from an article in The American Thinker of September 15.