GAFFNEY: Kagan’s Shariah problem

OPINION:

The author of the New York Times best-seller “The Grand Jihad,” Andrew C. McCarthy, has put the Senate Judiciary Committee on notice: There is a serious problem with the nomination of Elena Kagan to a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court: “As dean [of the Harvard Law School] she became the champion of Shariah.”

Shariah is the name given by the authorities of Islam to the barbaric, totalitarian and supremacist code that its adherents seek to impose on all of us. It calls for the murder of homosexuals, the mistreatment of women, the flogging and stoning of those accused of adultery, the killing of apostates and girls who defile their family’s “honor” by dating non-Muslims or wearing pants or makeup, etc.

Shariah is no less toxic when it comes to the sorts of democratic government and civil liberties guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution. According to this legal code of Saudi Arabia and Iran, only Allah can make laws, and only a theocrat can properly administer them, ultimately on a global basis.

In order to realize that utterly political agenda of world domination, Shariah obliges its adherents to engage in jihad - which that noted Islamic authority, President Obama’s homeland security and counterterrorism adviser, John Brennan, tells us is “a legitimate tenet of Islam.” Indeed, it is. And according to Shariah, those who are not in a position to engage in the violent form of jihad favored by al Qaeda, the Taliban, Jamaat Islamia, etc., are required to engage in the nonviolent form known as “civilizational jihad,” or dawa.

JihadWatch.org’s director, author Robert Spencer, has helpfully coined a term to describe the latter: He calls it “stealth jihad” because it is being waged assiduously and largely covertly against the West, including the United States, by the Muslim Brotherhood. Some in the U.S. government confuse the Brotherhood with being “moderate” because it ostensibly eschews violence. Its aim, however, is exactly the same as al Qaeda’s - the restoration of the caliphate and the worldwide imposition of Shariah.

Importantly, Muslims who share this goal but are not up to waging jihad themselves are expected to provide financial resources via zakat (or tithing) to those who are. Fully four of the eight specified causes to which Shariah says such philanthropy can be assigned involve direct or indirect support for the jihadists. One of our time’s pre-eminent Islamic scholars and chief ideologue for the Muslim Brotherhood, Sheik Yusef al-Qaradawi, has called such tithing “jihad with money.”

That is where Elena Kagan’s enabling of the penetration of Shariah into our capital markets through the Harvard Law School’s Islamic Finance Project comes in. The purpose of that project is, according to an excellent essay by Mr. McCarthy, “Elena Kagan’s ’Don’t Ask Don’t Tell’ Shariah Policy,” published last week in National Review Online “to promote Shariah compliance in the U.S. financial sector.”

This is accomplished via legal support to an industry known as Shariah-compliant finance (SCF). It was invented in the mid-20th century by Brotherhood operatives as a means of facilitating and underwriting the penetration of Shariah into Western societies by mainlining it into their capitalist bloodstreams.

Mr. McCarthy notes: “Kagan and other apologists for Shariah-Compliant Finance would absolve themselves from the real-world consequences of their allegedly well-intentioned diversity fetish. But legitimizing any aspect of Shariah is the endorsement of all of it. … There is no cut-and-dried separation of Shariah brutality from the tidy, white-collar world of financial transactions.”

Against this backdrop, another Kagan connection to Shariah looms large. My colleague Christine Brim observed in a post at Andrew Breitbart’s awesome new national security Web portal, BigPeace.com: During her time as Harvard Law’s dean, Ms. Kagan twice (once in absentia, the other time in person) awarded the school’s Medal of Freedom to the controversial chief justice of Pakistan, Iftikhar Chaudhry. Today, according to Ms. Brim, the thus-legitimated Justice Chaudhry is engaged in a “power grab … to impose Shariah law across Pakistan’s government.”

As a new ad by the Center for Security Policy asks, “If Kagan tolerates promoting the injustice of Shariah law on the campus of Harvard, what kind of injustice will she tolerate in America during a lifetime on the Supreme Court?”

This is the sort of question one would have hoped senators would explore thoroughly before voting on her nomination, most immediately in the Senate Judiciary Committee Tuesday. Unfortunately, that has not happened in the hearings to date.

At a minimum, if confirmed, Ms. Kagan should be required to recuse herself from dealing with any matters coming before the court involving Shariah. One headed that way involves a federal lawsuit brought by David Yerushalmi and the Thomas More Law Center on behalf of an Iraq war veteran who thinks the constitutional separation of church and state is violated by U.S. government ownership of the world’s largest purveyor of Shariah-compliant financial products (the very thing Ms. Kagan’s Islamic Finance Project promotes at Harvard): AIG.

Ms. Kagan’s association with and enabling of Shariah is flatly at odds with the Constitution’s stipulation that it is the supreme law of the land. If she thinks otherwise - or is willing to jeopardize our freedoms by helping a toxic rival legal code take hold here - we had better know it now, not after she gets on the Supreme Court for the rest of her life.

Frank J. Gaffney Jr. is president of the Center for Security Policy, a columnist for The Washington Times, featured contributor to BigPeace.com and host of the syndicated program “Secure Freedom Radio,” heard in Washington weeknights at 9 p.m. on WTNT 570 AM.