Act For America:
They shouldn’t have even been here. Michael Cutler, a 30 year veteran of the Immigration and Naturalization Service explains the broken immigration system that failed to scrutinize the Boston Terror Attack suspects’ student visas and citizenship applications. Michael Cutler will be a featured speaker at ACT! for America’s National Conference & Legislative Briefing held June 19-21 in Washington DC.
Against the backdrop of the ten-year anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, a heightened interest in the role of Islam in American society and the subsequent clash of civilizations remains. Specifically, public concern continues to grow across the country about the use of Sharia Law, or Islamic Law, within American courts. As a result, well over a dozen state legislatures have introduced or passed legislation that prohibits or limits the use of Sharia Law or foreign law in state courts. These bills have taken two distinct forms: Sharia-specific and facially-neutral bills. Regardless of classification, these legislative efforts have triggered a number of constitutional concerns, with critics arguing that the bills violate the Establishment and Free Exercise Clauses of the First Amendment. Critics argue that the laws have a sectarian purpose and an effect of advancing one religion at the expense of another and thus fail the Supreme Court’s jurisprudential test. Moreover, these critics argue that the laws burden the practice of religious faith. Indeed, this debate has undeniably opened a Pandora’s Box of constitutional concerns. Meanwhile, the bills’ proponents vigorously reject the accusation that the bills are hostile to Muslims or religious freedoms. They argue that the bills are designed to proactively safeguard the secular constitutional role of government by prohibiting religious influence, specifically that of Sharia Law.
Pro-jihad demonstration in the UK. (Photo: © Reuters)
A BBC documentary with undercover footage inside Britain’s Islamic courts reveals the shocking discrimination some women are suffering. Sharia courts are putting women at risk of violence from abusive husbands, the Crown Prosecution Service has warned.
Secret filming that was done in some of the 85 councils operating in mosques and houses across the country has revealed that the courts, which are run by Sharia councils, rule in favor of men by giving them access to children even though they have been found to be abusive.
Sharia law has no formal place in any of Britain’s legal systems. However, the investigation found that courts in London were making rulings on domestic and marital issues according to Sharia law which appeared at odds with English family law. Although they are not legally binding, those who were subject to the rulings felt they had to follow them as a matter of religious belief, or because they felt under pressure from family and community to do so.
Read more at The Clarion Project
The 1996 Arbitration Act in the UK has led to the increasing legitimacy of Sharia courts. Over time, as rulings of these courts conflict with British law, attempts have been made to amend the Act to protect women’s rights. The most recent attempt is the Equality Bill proposed by Baroness Caroline Cox on n June 7, 2011: Mind the Gap: The Equality Bill and Sharia Arbitration in the United Kingdom (http://lawdigitalcommons.bc.edu)
We must learn from what is happening in Europe due to Islamization. Familiarize yourself with the American Laws for American Courts legislation making it’s way through the states. Let your representatives know you support it.
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On September 25, 1789, Congress passed the Bill of Rights, anchored by the very important First Amendment. Today, our cherished right of freedom of speech is under assault. The Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) wants to criminalize speech that “denigrates” Islam. Muslim Brotherhood connected organizations and their politically correct enablers regularly engage in name calling and character assassination to silence those who dare speak out about the threat of radical Islam.
This is why, on September 25, 2013, 224 years after the passage of the Bill of Rights, patriots across America will host events and educate the public about how freedom of speech is under attack – and what we all can do to protect it.
ACT! for America will announce how many “Freedom of Speech Day” events will take place and will advertise exact locations of each venue for those hosts who confirm to us that they want us to.
In this series of national webcasst, ACT! for America documents the growing worldwide clamor for suppression of speech perceived as “offensive” to Islam, and what ACT! for America is doing to combat this increasingly serious threat to the First Amendment:
Part One with Brigitte Gabriel and Guy Rodgers:
Part Two with Deborah Weiss:
Part Three with Guy Rodgers:
Sign ACT! for America’s letter opposing this threat to free speech!
Oppose the Implementation of UN Resolution 16/18:
A Threat to Free Speech
The Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), an organization of 56 Muslim states and the Palestinian Authority, has been trying for more than a decade to win UN-wide support of a resolution that calls on nations to prohibit speech that allegedly “defames” religion.
However, the evidence is clear that the OIC is concerned primarily about any speech it views as being critical of Islam, what it calls “Islamophobia.”
In the past, the United States has opposed such resolutions, correctly asserting that they are contrary to our First Amendment right of free speech.
In 2011, at the U.S.’s request, the OIC drafted a new resolution that would supposedly balance America’s constitutional protection of free speech with OIC concerns about “Islamophobia.” This resolution passed, with U.S. backing.
This new resolution, UN Resolution 16/18, no longer uses language such as “defamation,” but instead uses European-style hate speech language that has been used to criminalize speech critical of Islam in countries such as Austria and the Netherlands.
The OIC is now aggressively working to implement its definition of the resolution. Its position is clearly spelled out in a February 18, 2013, article in the Saudi Gazette entitled “OIC gears up to get denigration of religions criminalized.”
Given that the OIC is now pushing for nations to criminalize speech that it views as “Islamophobic,” we, the undersigned, call on our legislators to pass resolutions opposing the implementation of UN Resolution 16/18 as both unnecessary and a threat to America’s constitutional protection of free speech.
It is not possible to wage an effective war against an international terror network while simultaneously foreclosing the possibility that American traitors will be killed in military operations.
By Andrew C. McCarthy:
If a plane full of 200 American citizens is hijacked by foreign jihadists, the law does not tell us whether the president should shoot down the plane or let it be plowed into a skyscraper and kill 3,000 American citizens. It is the kind of excruciating decision that war makes necessary. Legal niceties do not tell us how to resolve it.
That is the problem with our debate over the treatment of U.S. nationals who join the enemy’s forces in wartime — most urgently, over the targeted killing of our fellow citizens. We want the legal answer. But the legal answer is not going to help us. Under the Constitution, Americans who join the enemy may lawfully be treated like the enemy, which includes being attacked with lethal force. That, however, tells us only the outer limits of what is permissible. It does not tell us what we need to know: What should we do?
The government’s war powers must be boundless, at least in theory. We must be able to marshal all our might to repel any conceivable existential threat. Yet the Constitution, the sole legitimate source of the government’s power to levy war, is, quintessentially, the citizen’s protection against aggression by that same government. Thus, the tension between government’s war powers and the citizen’s fundamental rights is a conundrum. It simply cannot be resolved with finality.
Neither side of our debate is satisfied with that. We want fixed rules. But fixed rules work only if they answer every conceivable hypothetical. So the debate lurches inexorably to worst-case scenarios.
Read more at National Review
— Andrew C. McCarthy is a senior fellow at the National Review Institute and the executive director of the Philadelphia Freedom Center. He is the author, most recently, of Spring Fever: The Illusion of Islamic Democracy, which is published by Encounter Books.
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Muslim Mob Protest the anti-Islam film in Germany: (Photo Reuters)
by: Karen Lugo
The United States faces mounting pressure from the 57-member Organization of Islamic Cooperation to comply with demands for “legislation against incitement to religious hatred, violence, discrimination on the basis of religion, in particular for Muslims.”
The response to both marauding rioters and fatwa-driven heads of Islamic states must be a confident and unequivocal defense of First Amendment guarantees as enshrined in the Bill of Rights and confirmed by America’s highest Court.
Just a year and a half ago the Supreme Court considered whether there should be a special free speech “funeral exception” to protect military families from demonstrators shouting epithets such as, “Thank God for dead soldiers” as these families bury their fallen daughters and sons. The near-unanimous ruling affirmed the full spectrum of public debate, including speech as “distasteful” as the Phelps cult’s hateful jeers. This decision, denying the Snyder family compensation for emotional pain, was a bitter pill for many to swallow, but the Court properly refused to react to pain “by punishing the speaker.”
The current talk of caving in to murderous Islamists and censoring the latest speaker, or filmmaker, is in direct violation of the same First Amendment free speech protections that applied to the funeral demonstrators. If it is safe to presume that military families who are confronted with vile demonstrators will not react violently, why the desperation to placate the offended party when thuggery is part of the equation?
Some commentators rationalize that Islamists, according to arbitrary blasphemy protestations, can be expected to “act out.” They therefore claim that the Brandenburg rule, as it excludes expressions “likely to incite or produce imminent lawless action” from the zone of protected speech, should apply to speakers who offend Muslims. This generalized approach, however, ignores the instruction provided by the Supreme Court in Brandenburg when it clarified the standard as akin to “preparing a group for violent action and steeling it to such action.” The Court was careful not to convey a vague and easily manipulated “likely to incite” standard.
Also lost in this desperate attempt to tamp down the tantrums is the absurd premise that legal culpability for a bad act can be shifted to a third party. For example, if the threatened riots had resulted from Seattle cartoonist Molly Norris’s suggestion about an “everybody draw Mohammed day,” she would have been in the impossible position of defending against the legally contorted charge that she may or may not reasonably have known that she was saying something sufficiently offensive to incite mob mania. The potential for upping-the-ante if feigned offenses can be leveraged into crimes would only be limited by Islamist inventiveness.
Unseemly haste to placate the violent mobs on their terms reveals just how desperate leaders are to put off a reckoning until another day. What we forestall along with the inevitable confrontation, nevertheless, is the audacity that accrues to the thugs as American pundits and politicians focus on censoring the filmmaker.
One of the hard lessons from the pre-school sandbox is that bullies thrive on weakness. Yet Obama hopes to escape this truth as his administration desperately pressures Youtube to ban the video, and spends $70,000 of taxpayers’ money to run public service disclaimers in Urdu. Youtube has responded that the clip is not in violation of community terms of use — although Youtube did comply with censorship requests from Libya and Egypt. Pakistanis reacted to the Obama administration’s public relations entreaties with a national day of rampage, killing at least twenty.
In Great Britain a debate over historian Tom Holland’s documentary Islam: The Untold Story scheduled for two days after the Cairo and Benghazi attacks was canceled. France recognized Charlie Hebdo‘s right to publish risqué cartoons of Mohammed but did shut down twenty embassies in Muslim countries for fear of riots.
As constitutional law professor and blogger Eugene Volokh writes, caving in to bullies only accelerates the rate and scale of their ambitions. After performing a straightforward cause-and-effect analysis, Volokh concluded that it would “actually be safer — not just better for First Amendment principles, but actually safer for Americans — to hold the line now, and make clear that American speech is protected.”
Read more at Radical Islam
Karen Lugo is Co-Director, Claremont Institute Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence.
The Republican National Convention adopted an amendment in the spirit of American Laws for American Courts (ALAC) legislation to their platform
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By Andrew Bostom:
Reports (at “Live” wire , repeated at Salon) are quoting Kansas Republican Secretary of State Kris Kobach to the effect that the GOP platform has adopted an amendment which addresses Sharia encroachment. Kobach stated,
We see it from the top where the United States Supreme Court has repeatedly quoted foreign law in interpreting our U.S. constitution and it’s actually coming in at the bottom as well, it’s being raised as an argument in courts around the country. We actually put a provision affecting Kansas statute this year and I think it’s important for us to say foreign sources of law should not be used as part of common law decisions or statutory interpretations by judges in the lower state courts as well.
…I’m not aware of any court that’s accepted the argument, but in cases involving either spousal abuse or assault or other crimes against persons, sometimes defenses are raised that are based in Sharia law
Despite the predictable sneering and distressing ignorance which frames these reports by two agitprop “journalists,” and Kobach’s own noble, if incomplete assessment of the profundity of the problem, this is very welcome news.
Kobach referred to Kansas’s recently passed law-a version of American Laws for American Courts (ALAC) legislation-which should remind us all that the earliest of these laws (now also passed in Tennessee, Arizona, and Louisiana) have been in effect for several years without being challenged, let alone overturned. David Yerushalmi recently provided a very clear, didactic example of the need for ALAC-style laws, which corrects Kobach’s assessment about courts not having accepted Sharia-based arguments.
Yersuhlami described in brief an appellate court decision from Maryland, cited in a Center for Security Policy Study, where
…the court enforced a Pakistani Sharia court’s judgment of custody in favor of the father even though the mother had argued that she was not provided due process because had she gone to Pakistan to contest the case, she could have been subject to capital punishment for having a new relationship with a man not sanctioned by sharia.
The salient facts of the case, and appellate court ruling, were summarized by Yerushalmi as follows:
The Maryland appellate court ruled that since the woman could not prove she’d be executed had she gone to Pakistan to litigate custody in the Pakistan Sharia Court, which is a national-state court in Pakistan, her failure to go to Pakistan and take the risk of execution precluded her from making the void as against public policy argument. ALAC would have provided the Maryland appellate court the legislative clarity to have reversed the lower court’s outrageous decision.
Here are the Maryland appellate court’s own words, cited by Yerushalmi:
Additionally, appellant [the mother] asserts that the Pakistani custody orders were founded on principles of law repugnant to Maryland public policy because the Pakistani courts allegedly “penalized the mother for not appearing without considering the affect of her admission to adultery on her ability to return to Pakistan.” In this regard, appellant points out that if convicted under Pakistani criminal law, her penalty could be public whipping or death by stoning. Although Dr. Malik [the expert] opined that appellant would be arrested for adultery if she returned to Pakistan for the custody proceedings, he also conceded that punishment for adultery was extremely unlikely and that proving the crime was extremely difficult. Given this testimony, the circuit court was not clearly erroneous in not considering the effect of whether appellant’s admission to adultery [under sharia] was “repugnant” to Maryland public policy in its failure to find that the Pakistani courts punished her for not appearing.”}
Let me summarize for the (hope against hope) edification of the “Live” wire , and Salon, agitprop journalists, the liberty-crushing, dehumanizing nature of Sharia: open-ended jihadism to subjugate the world to a totalitarian Islamic order; rejection of bedrock Western liberties-including freedom of conscience and speech-enforced by imprisonment, beating, or death; discriminatory relegation of non-Muslims to outcast, vulnerable pariahs, and even Muslim women to subservient chattel; and barbaric punishments which violate human dignity, such as amputation for theft, stoning for adultery, and lashing for alcohol consumption.
I would also point out how the two agitpropjournalists steadfastly ignore: ominous polling data from US Muslims; jihad funding trial revelations and the content of more banal Muslim litigation proceedings; mosque surveillance reports; analyses of Islamic education institutions and their Muslim schoolchildren’s textbooks; the issuance of obscurantist “fatwas” (Islamic legal rulings) by the respected, mainstream Assembly of Muslim Jurists of America; and an open declaration by one of America’s largest mainstream Muslim organizations, the Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA), in its 2010 ICNA Member’s Hand Book, which calls for the (re-)creation of a global Muslim Caliphate, and the imposition of Sharia in America.
Notwithstanding the Assembly of Muslim Jurists of America’s (AMJA’s) mainstream acceptance, including uncritical endorsement of its seventh annual American conference in Houston (October 15-18, 2010) to train American imams, AMJA has issued rulings which sanction the killing of apostates (here), “blasphemers” (including non-Muslims guilty of this “crime”; here), or adulterers (by stoning to death, here), and condone marital rape. Even more ominously, another Arabic-language fatwa from AMJA’s Dr. Salah Al-Sawy leaves open the possibility for offensive jihad against America and the West, as soon as Muslims are strong enough to do so. When asked whether “the Islamic missionary effort in the West … [was] to the point where it could take advantage of offensive jihad,” Al-Sawy ruled:
The Islamic community does not possess the strength to engage in offensive jihad at this time. With our current capabilities, we are aspiring toward defensive jihad, and to improve our position with regards to jurisprudence at this stage. But there is a different discussion for each situation. Allah Almighty knows best.
Just six months ago (3/14/12), Translating Jihad put what one might wish to deem as these circumscribed, “purely Islamic” rulings, in a more disturbing-and entirely unacceptable, seditious context. AMJA’s own words make plain the organization’s long term commitment to superseding the US legal code with its antithesis, a Sharia-based system.
Read more at American Thinker
David Yerushalmi
AFLC Co-Founder and Senior Counsel David Yerushalmi is featured in a PBS report entitled “Shariah Controversy,” which highlights “the debate over banning U.S. courts from considering Islamic law in their decision-making.” As you know, Yerushalmi is the principal author of the American Laws for American Courts (ALAC) model legislation, which was enacted into law by several states and is pending in many others. This legislation, crafted especially for states, is an effort to insulate state courts from the growing tendency to embrace constitutionally offensive foreign laws, including sharia.
Surprisingly, the PBS report is relatively balanced; but it includes an interesting quip from Rabbi David Saperstein, director and chief legal counsel for the leftwing Union for Reform Judaism’s Religious Action Center. Saperstein also delivered an invocation at the 2008 Democratic National Convention shortly before Barack Obama accepted the nomination as the Democrat presidential candidate. In the report, Saperstein claims that the efforts to enact ALAC legislation is “un-American at the deepest and most profound level.”
David Saperstein is very much like the ubiquitous reform rabbi who speaks as though he is giving a sermon and his sermons always sound like a diatribe from a humanist. Words like “un-American”, “deep”, “profound” are sure to be in tow. From an orthodox perspective, one must ask a “reform” Jew, “What about what you claim to be Jewish is in fact Jewish? Where in the world is the source for this nonsense that all peoples and cultures are of equal merit?” All of Judaism is about discerning between the holy and the profane. By reducing everything to the holy one has reduced everything to the profane.
Superficially articulate spokesmen like Saperstein rely upon the inability or unwillingness of most of their fellow travelers to think past three levels of argument. This allows the following syllogism:
As Loewenberg has pointed out, based in part on the works of Klein, Voegelin, and Strauss, this is the destruction of Western thought or what has been understood as the natural tension between Reason (Athens) and Revelation (Jerusalem) in Western Philosophy.
Once you’ve arrived here, there are only two bases for political order. We have come to this understanding — the Founders did — from Hobbes and Locke. If all but science (not science as in theory but as in mathesis universalis) is but meaningless and fully interchangeable opinion (A=B, B=C, … X=X1, therefore on any given day, A=X1), a political society seeking to choose the right political order may be “required” to agree that A=T or tyranny in its active phase. That is, if there is no basis for truth, and there is only personal “taste” or unprovable opinion, the way for society to agree on order is by one opinion being enforced through power.
The other approach to political order is through “procedure” or “process”. This has been AFLC Advisory Board Member and bestselling author Andrew C. McCarthy’s contribution to the contemporary discussion. Because there can be no truth, there can only be valid elections or “due process”. Thus, a “fair” election is one where you vote and merely count the votes accurately. The result on that day at that place becomes the truth for that time and that place. But, that truth is entirely relative and temporal and there is no basis to invest it with any lasting constitutional claim of truth.
Thus, the living constitution of the progressives, the Progressive Truth of Time-History-Progress itself, this then is the only transcendence available to man. If that rings of Hegel, there is a reason for that.
It follows, then, that there can be no moral truth or superiority to a Judeo-Christian value of the individual over the collective because there can be no truth other than progress. This “progress” is what “Rabbi” Saperstein means when he refers to what is “American” at the “most profound level”. For the Progressive, ”profundity” is the deep truth that there is no truth.
Now, we see the perfect storm — or opportunity — for the Left to join the sharia faithful in their destruction of the Judeo-Christian West. For the Progressive, the hatred of a Judeo-Christian moral or political truth is of necessity the last barrier to the syllogism noted above. For the Sharia-Muslim faithful, Judaism simply and Christianity in political society operate to literally deny the truth of the Koran and the “Law”. As long as the value and the integrity of the individual reigns supreme over the collectiveUmma, the Ulema will not be able to argue that A=T, as in the tyranny of sharia.
It is this anti-philosophic “goal” of the destruction of Western philosophy which so neatly allies Progressives and the Sharia Faithful. Their allied raison d’etre is the destruction of Western political order based upon the Judeo-Christian tension between Reason and Revelation, where both give way but neither concedes nor demands a totalitarian dominance in matters political. And, at the core of this tension and recognition (i.e., “tolerance” proper) between Reason and Revelation is the respect we accord the individual over the collective.
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The reason American Laws for American Courts legislation is needed is because in most states there is no statute that articulates public policy on the issue of foreign laws in state courts. Up to now, judges have been left to “make law” in these cases. It is the proper role of the legislative branch to set public policy in such cases, which is what American Laws for American Courts has now accomplished in Kansas.
By Rep. Peggy Mast
Recently my American Laws for American Courts legislation that Governor Brownback signed into law in May has come under unfounded criticism and fraudulent attacks from poorly researched articles that have contained numerous inaccuracies.
Critics have mischaracterized the law we passed in Kansas to protect the individual constitutional rights of our citizens against foreign laws and foreign legal doctrines to such an extent that I am left wondering whether these critics have actually read the law they have been attacking.
In particular, some incorrectly tie our new American Laws for American Courts law in Kansas to the infamous and counterproductive anti-Shariah constitutional amendment passed in Oklahoma back in 2010, which has been struck down in federal court.
My bill was closely modeled on the model “American Laws for American Courts” legislation promoted by the American Public Policy Alliance (APPA) (http://publicpolicyalliance.org/?page_id=38).
Unlike the Oklahoma amendment, this legislation has never been challenged in court since being signed into law more than two years ago in Louisiana and Tennessee and is, as APPA legal scholar Stephen Gele says, “perfectly constitutional.”
For instance, Chicago Tribune columnist Steve Chapman’s research was so sloppy that he completely mischaracterized American Laws for American Courts as forbidding “courts from applying Islamic Shariah law in any case.”
This is simply wrong.
Other critics have also stated that American Laws for American Courts prohibits state courts from basing decisions on any foreign laws or other legal codes.
Once again, this is simply wrong.
One of the particular critics of ALAC lists as one of his accomplishments: “obtaining the dismissal of a lawsuit filed in the US in favor of a parallel proceeding in Germany.” He was actually fighting on behalf of foreign jurisdiction when the foreign jurisdiction would not guarantee US constitutional rights. How objective is that?
It is true that American Laws for American Courts was crafted to protect Americans’ constitutional rights against the infiltration of foreign law. As such it is NOT a blanket ban on any foreign law or foreign legal doctrine, including Shariah.
American Laws for American Courts protects Americans from the application of foreign laws when the application of a foreign law would result in the violation of a right guaranteed by the constitution of the state or of the United States, including but not limited to due process, freedom of religion, speech, or press, and any right of privacy or marriage as specifically defined by the constitution of the state.
There is no mention of Shariah in the legislation simply because the legislation was not designed to target Shariah.
So why are Muslim Brotherhood front groups such as HAMAS-tied CAIR and the Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA) so vehemently opposed to American Laws for American Courts?
Because they know that out of all the foreign laws and foreign legal doctrines that have shown up in US court cases, legal systems based on Shariah are the ones which most commonly run afoul of US constitutional rights. Now that states are taking action to prevent these occurrences, pro-Shariah forces are howling mad.
But they can’t challenge American Laws for American Courts in court because all the law does is reinforce US constitutional rights. What could be unconstitutional about that?
This brings us to another point that the critics have failed to uncover: Shariah law can and has appeared in court cases in the United States-and has even been upheld by activist judges in US state courts in clear violation of individual constitutional rights.
Last year, the Center for Security Policy conducted a preliminary survey of state court cases in which one or both parties to a dispute attempted to invoke Shariah law. The Center published the results in a study entitled Shariah Law and American State Courts.
The study details 50 sample cases in which parties invoked Shariah, including 15 trial court cases and 12 appellate court cases in which Shariah was actually applied. Importantly, frequently, Shariah manifested itself not as Shariah, but as Pakistani law, Saudi law, Egyptian law or some other foreign law that is based on Shariah.
Read more: Family Security Matters
Representative Peggy Mast is a Republican member of the Kansas House of Representatives, representing the 76th district. She has served since 1997 and is currently the Assistant Majority Leader.
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