Sharia Law Comes to Texas: The Price of Philosophical Disarmament

Two young men prepare to be hanged while blindfolded

A form of Islamic law has taken force in Texas, right next door to Louisiana where Gov. Bobby Jindal has warned of Muslim immigrants who refuse to adopt Western culture.

An Islamic Tribunal of four attorneys is operating in Dallas where it issues voluntary rulings on civil disputes, Breitbart Texas reported Tuesday.

Taher El-badawi, one of the lawyers who call themselves “judges,” told the conservative website that the tribunal applies Shariah law to litigants who voluntarily accept their rulings on disputes involving family and business issues. [Source: Newsmax.com, Breitbart.com 1-27-15; also see TheWashingtonPost.com 1/28/15]

In the words of a reader of mine, “Islamic/Sharia law in Texas? WTF??”

Here’s the problem. Advocates of fundamentalist religion, which includes full integration of church and state, understand one thing that most others do not. They grasp that philosophical issues are not resolved in the middle. Most Americans say, “Well, that’s just too extreme. But it won’t happen in America anyway.”

Won’t it? It has already started.

Don’t be fooled by the nonsensical talk about “voluntary.” Since when did radical Islam ever do anything on a voluntary basis? All dictatorships start out as nominally “voluntary.” These aren’t the Amish. They’re not merely asking to be left alone. If they were, they wouldn’t be setting up courts in major American cities. There’s nothing voluntary about Sharia law. It’s meant to impose Islamic law (as fundamentalists understand it) on everyone. Once they establish their legitimacy in principle (as Texas has evidently permitted), the rest is only a matter of time.

If you’re one of those people who insists, “It can’t happen here,” then you have to ask yourself: What’s to stop it?

The proper and rational answer is: absolutes. An absolute commitment to reason, and an absolute commitment to individual rights, including the absolute standard that church and state must be separate. This absolute separation of church and state applies not only to politically incorrect religions, such as Christianity, but to politically correct ones as well. Yes, that means Islam.

The reason this is happening in Texas, or anywhere else in America, is because people are, by and large, philosophically disarmed. The fact that we’re talking about Texas here and not, say, San Francisco or New York City, proves just how deeply philosophically disarmed all of America now is.

“Philosophically disarmed” means mentally and intellectually adrift, without any firm principles — rational or irrational, religious or secular — to guide the operations of daily life, society and government. That’s where the advocates of Islam and Sharia law have got us. They do have a firm commitment to principle. It doesn’t matter that their principle is 100 percent faith-based, completely anti-scientific, anti-reasonable in every way. It doesn’t matter that their ideology can lead nowhere other than to death and destruction, including but not limited to economic and technological stagnation (followed by destruction), for the faithful and the infidels alike. They still have the upper hand, because they take a definite stand — while most of the rest of us do not.

I know to many it seems preposterous to worry about Sharia law being imposed on the American population, especially when most of the population isn’t Muslim. But that’s not the issue. The issue is force, politically speaking. And the philosophical issue is the widespread view that all approaches to life, society and government are morally equivalent. No one is better or worse than another. The ugly fruits of that deadly view are starting to blossom on the tree of tyranny, and looking the other way won’t change that fact.

On the one hand, American courts and American federal and local governments increasingly bend to the view that “no one point of view is the right one, and who’s to say what point of view is better than another?” Imagine if we said this about Nazis, or white supremacists. What if white supremacists wanted to have their own court system, which treated blacks or others under a different standard of law, without due process, from the one under which everyone else is treated? Do you think progressives (and others) would not — quite correctly — rush to condemn such a dualistic, two-tiered approach to justice? They surely would not claim, “Well, the white supremacist Nazis may be irrational and bigoted, but who are we to say they’re not entitled to their own form of courts? Who can really say which approach is better?”

Interestingly, it’s progressive types who seem most ferociously defensive of Islam. These progressives are the same ones who criticize conservative Christians for not being overly friendly to the idea of gay marriage. But fundamentalist Islam advocates literal enslavement and subjugation of women, and the death penalty for homosexuals. Why does progressivism take flight when we’re talking about a politically correct religion? If I’m wrong about this, then where are the progressives — the gay rights advocates, the feminists — when it comes time to nip this Sharia law ascension in the bud? All we’ve got is … silence. Bill Maher is one exception, but he has been metaphorically booed off the stage by his progressive fellows for even suggesting such a thing.

If you don’t believe me, then take it straight from the mullah’s mouth. Sharia law “judge” Taher El-badawi continues:

“While participation in the tribunal is voluntary, a married couple cannot be considered divorced by the Islamic community unless it is granted by the tribunal.”

He conceded that Islamic law treats men and women unequally. A man can come directly to the tribunal for a divorce, but a woman seeking to end her marriage must go to a religious leader, or imam, who will bring her case for divorce to the tribunal, he said.

El-badawi added that litigants who are dissatisfied with the rulings of the tribunal can take their cases to Texas civil courts. But, the Islamic Tribunal warns on its website that American justice is expensive.

Oh, choosing American justice over Sharia law is expensive all right. The cost could be your head, quite literally.

There’s nothing in the current laws of Texas or the United States to prevent people from adopting conservative attitudes about marriage. The law entitles you to divorce if you wish to do so, but if you prefer to defer to your husband, or your religion, you have every Constitutional right to do so. This is what advocates of Sharia law cannot stand. They want Islamic women held to the standard of their religion under the law, eradicating the individual rights of women who might wish to disobey those religious laws, or even leave the religion. Feminists, where the hell are you when we need you?

This is just a taste of what Sharia law has in store for Texas, and the rest of the civilized, secularized Western world which, up until now, has taken certain legal standards for granted.

Want some more evidence? Still think it can’t happen here? Consider this story [reported at Newsmax.com 8-17-13] from The Wall Street Journal back in 2013:

A federal judge has struck down as unconstitutional an Oklahoma state amendment banning Sharia law.

The ruling was issued Thursday by U.S. District Court Judge Vicki Miles-LaGrange, who said the Oklahoma law discriminated against religion, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Voters in Oklahoma had passed in 2010 an amendment to the state’s constitution banning Sharia law by more than 70 percent of the vote. The need for the amendment arose out of concern that Islamic Sharia law is making its way into U.S. courtrooms and could be used in place of U.S. law with defendants who are Muslim.

Previously, the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals had upheld a temporary injunction against the Oklahoma law.

“Having carefully reviewed the parties’ submissions, and for the same reasons set forth by the Tenth Circuit, the Court finds that defendants have failed to assert a compelling state interest, and have, therefore, failed to satisfy strict scrutiny,” the judge wrote. “It is abundantly clear that the primary purpose of the amendment was to specifically target and outlaw Sharia law.”

Notice how the federal court takes it for granted that Sharia law is on equal footing with “regular” law — you know, the kind based on the U.S. Constitution rather than the premises of a bloody theocracy. It’s too astonishing to contemplate, the savagery sometimes contained in the most reasonable-seeming of statements or rulings by outwardly reasonable and intelligent people.

I wouldn’t be worried, were it not for the fact that our courts, Presidents, Senators and academic intellectuals — not to mention the mainstream of the American people — are philosophically disarmed. We tiptoe on eggshells and constantly try to demonstrate how nonjudgmental and tolerant we are of everything. We refuse to defend any of our liberties in theory, much less in practice, even when it comes to the timid violations (compared to Islamofascists) of our own elected officials. Is it any wonder the people who seek religiously based totalitarianism respond to this weakness by setting up shop in the land founded by the ideas of Jefferson, Franklin, Adams and Madison?

The radical fundamentalists seeking to undermine the most basic roots of our justice system are here to tell us: “You’re in favor of tolerance? OK, then. Tolerate this.”

We were given a republic, but we’re in the process of losing it. And it all starts with philosophical disarmament. Only a philosophical awakening will give us the courage — and the means — to restore it.

 

 

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