Toward Victory in the War of Ideas: Educating America About Shariah

The mainstream media has begun to notice the millions of Americans concerned with the anti-Constitutional character of Shariah, or Islamic law. Predictably, they’re intent on smearing these people, and cooking up sinister Koch Brothers-like figures they intimate are pulling the strings. It began with a New York Times article on my colleagues David Yerushalmi and Frank Gaffney and, predictably, volleyed over to the ideologically simpatico NPR, where Times reporter Andrea Elliott spent sixteen minutes trying to explain the strange phenomenon to Fresh Air’s audience.

At the American Thinker today, David Yerushalmi responds to the New York Times‘ font-page story, “The Man Behind the Anti-Shariah Movement,” in his inimitable style. In addition to the larger issues, he addresses the use of out-of-context quotes by ideological bloggers in an effort to smear him.

Yerushalmi’s article is a must-read, especially for the background he provides into this interesting story of how to fight the war of ideas successfully, changing the terms of the debate through a nation-wide educational campaign (and certain to be seized up by ThinkProgress and others as proof of some nefarious ‘conspiracy’):

As Ms. Elliot points out in her story and in her interview with NPR, Frank Gaffney’s Center for Security Policy was, along with others in this effort, able to take a failed national security policy and policy discourse, which treated Islamic-inspired jihad as some kind of ultimate perversion of Islam lacking dogmatic and normative grounding, into a serious discussion of classical and still extant authoritative Islamic law — sharia — as the threat doctrine motivating jihadists from all over the globe. Determining what doctrine drives your enemy, especially one that can explain both the recruitment capabilities of your enemy and how he is able to bridge cultural, language, and nationality differences, and even intra-religious sect animosities, to come together to fight the West as the common enemy is the second step to defeating the enemy. The first step, of course, is being able to articulate who the enemy is beyond the intentionally vague nomenclature of “terrorist” or “extremist.”

Yerushalmi has a brilliant question to pose to the ACLU, the mainstream media reporters, the leftist bloggers, and anyone skeptical about the problem of Shariah in the US:

if Muslims in Muslim countries overwhelmingly support the imposition of sharia as law to govern an Islamic political order, and if Muslims in Muslim countries overwhelmingly support the imposition of sharia criminal law, such as capital punishment for apostasy and blasphemy, and even assuming Ms. Elliot is correct that Muslim Americans have somehow created a very different Islam from what their brethren in the Muslim world believe, how does she know or even assume that this distinction between American Islam and genuine Muslim Islam will continue?

As they say, read the whole thing…