What I Learned at the Tea Party

In the endgame of Election 2010, speculation abounds concerning the impact the Tea Party movement will have. All over America, politicians, pollsters and pundits are frantically trying to predict the repercussions that will flow from the engagement of these folks – whom Democrats tend to portray as knuckle-dragging cranks, incipient militiamen or racists and bigots and whom many Republicans view with apprehension as unreliable allies.

The “smart set” – especially the typical Washington insiders – would have us believe that the priorities of the Tea Party movement, and therefore its political impact, will be confined to instituting a measure of fiscal conservatism and beating back the challenge posed to our constitutional form of government by Barack Obama’s budget bloat and socialist agenda.

Heaven knows, Mr. Obama’s pursuit of the sort of revolutionary national transformation (“fundamental change”) called for by his mentor, Saul Alinsky, justify countervailing action on that score. And there is no doubt that Team Obama’s radical domestic agenda has transformed millions of our ordinary Americans into citizen activists under the Tea Party banner.

But is that all there is to the Tea Party team? Could it be that such manifestly patriotic Americans are indifferent to other threats to our Constitution, freedoms and way of life – some of them a by-product of Obama foreign and defense policies that are making the world an ever-more dangerous place?

My acute curiosity on this point was such that when I was invited to address two Tea Party meetings in Houston last week, I jumped at the chance. After all, it was an opportunity to take stock firsthand about this potentially transformative political phenomenon, the people that are powering it and the nature of their priorities.

Accordingly, in my remarks before the King Street Patriots and the Tea Party Patriots PAC, I explored how those activists felt about an altogether different, but no less real, menace to the U.S. Constitution: shariah, the totalitarian politico-military-legal doctrine the authorities of Islam say must be applied worldwide.

It is a testament to the widely underestimated intelligence of the Tea Partiers that many in the crowd were already familiar with the term. They recognized it as the law of such garden-spots as Saudi Arabia, Iran, Somalia, Sudan and the parts of Afghanistan and Pakistan where the Taliban rule. They were familiar with its most horrific practices: The brutalization of women, who are treated as property or chattel; the murder of people who dare to leave Islam – known as “apostates”; the execution of homosexuals; the death by stoning of alleged adulterers; and the amputations of feet and hands of those charged with petty crimes.

Many also knew of the unsavory choices shariah offers Christians or Jews: (1) convert to shariah; (2) accept the status of dhimmis – members of an inferior class who are discriminated against, punitively taxed and whose lives can be forfeit at the whim of their Muslim overlords or (3) death. “Infidels” of other faiths have only the first and third options. The Tea Partiers expressed no interest in having to accept such choices.

It is one thing to be aware of the brutality shariah entails. It is altogether another to appreciate the inroads being made to bring shariah to America. The more they learned of the latter, the more animated the Tea Partiers became.

For example, they were alarmed to learn of the incremental concessions that are insidiously insinuating shariah’s practices and obligations into this country. These include: footbaths and prayer rooms being installed for Muslim-only use at taxpayer expense in public buildings; cab drivers in Minnesota allowed to deny service to passengers with seeing-eye dogs or alcohol on the grounds that that made them haram, or “impure” under Shariah; and U.S. companies pressured to give Muslim workers time off for prayers or to forgo traditional American holidays like Labor Day, in favor of making Eid, the feast breaking the Ramadan fast, a paid day- off.

Then, there is Shariah-Compliant Finance (SCF). I told the Tea Partiers that the first clue there is something wrong with SCF is its first word. What makes a transaction shariah-compliant is, in the end not so much whether it involves “interest” (paid or charged), gambling, pork, tobacco or Western defense – although they are all considered haram.

Rather, it comes down to a decision by shariah advisors – recognized Islamic scholars or authorities who invariably believe shariah must rule the world and who are retained to bless financial deals or arrangements as compliant. The Tea Partiers clearly appreciated that putting such individuals in a position to guide the flow of capital and credit in America’s markets is a mortal danger – especially since, in the process, their industry is legitimating shariah and helping to bring it here.

That point was underscored by one particularly chilling fact: As taxpayers, each and every one of us actually owns the largest purveyor of shariah-compliant insurance products in the world – AIG. The constitutionality of this arrangement is being tested in federal court in Michigan on the grounds that the U.S. government’s 79% stake in a corporate behemoth that is actively promoting shariah through its SCF insurance line violates the required separation of church and state.

Such ominous inroads are being made here by shariah, thanks in part to the successful suppression of our awareness of what this seditious doctrine is, let alone how it is metastasizing. I shared with my audiences stunning evidence of the extent to which even our government has been kept from appreciating the true nature of the threat we are facing.

“The Disappearing Language of Terror” (click for a larger size. Suitable for printing.)

As demonstrated in the chart above, ever since the 9/11 Commission prompted complaints that it had given offense to Muslims by describing the central role Islam, shariah and the jihad it commands played in the attacks of September 11, 2001, those responsible for our national and homeland security have eschewed such terms. The effect has been a distinct dumbing-down of our awareness of – let alone effective counteraction against – our shariah-adherent foes.

How has the enemy achieved such stunning information dominance? I shared with the Tea Partiers several examples of successful influence operations run against federal agencies by various promoters of shariah. Thanks to reports broken here at Big Peace by Patrick Poole, we have discovered that the U.S. government has repeatedly engaged in “Muslim outreach” with the likes of Hamas operatives Kefah Mustapha and Hatem Abudayyeh, al Qaeda-linked imams Anwar al-Awlaki and Anwar Hajjaj and myriad individuals tied to the Muslim Brotherhood – an organization whose mission is “to destroy Western civilization from within.”

I shared with the Houston Tea Party activists one other ominous threat to our Constitution and freedoms that has been engineered by these and other champions of shariah: U.S. co-sponsorship in September 2009 of a United Nation’s Human Rights Council resolution introduced by the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC). If the OIC has its way, the upshot of this resolution will ultimately be to require UN member nations to prohibit and criminalize expression that defames Islam or otherwise gives offense to Muslims. So much for the First Amendment.

If my experience in Houston is any guide, the Tea Party movement is every bit as outraged about such efforts to insinuate the totalitarian ideology of shariah into America as they manifestly are about the better-known assaults on freedom from socialist encroachment on our economy and society under the Obama administration. They absolutely got it that shariah is not about faith, and as such must be protected by our Constitution. Rather, it is about power – a seditious political movement that will destroy that Constitution, and America itself, if allowed to do so.

In this pivotal election and in the years to come, Tea Partiers have an incredibly important role to play in both awakening the rest of the country to these and other national security threats and in electing leaders who will understand and counter them. For that to happen, the movement is going to have to become better informed and more visibly engaged on these issues.

With a little luck and a lot of hard work, Tea Partiers elsewhere around this country will be exposed to the sorts of information their comrades in Houston and I discussed last week. They will take aboard Shariah: The Threat to America, the extraordinary dot-connecting threat-assessment just published by a team of highly regarded experts sponsored by the Center for Security Policy. And then they will act in ways that will result in the pursuit once again of the time-tested philosophy of “peace through strength“- vice today’s practice by President Obama of appeasement, diminishing of this country and submission – and that will keep America shariah-free.