Center for Security Policy's Effort to Oppose Shariah Acknowledged by New York Times

On Sunday July 31, 20011, the front page of the New York Times featured a lengthy article- “The Man Behind the Anti-Shariah Movement”- that recounted the Center for Security Policy‘s successful four-year educational campaign to educate the public on the anti-semitic, totalitarian, misogynistic doctrine of Shariah law (Islamic law), and Shariah’s threat to America’s national security and liberties.

This detailed New York Times article validates the success of the Center’s groundbreaking effort, started in 2007, to inform the public, media and policymakers about the growing threat of Islamic Shariah doctrine. There is a growing awareness across grassroots America that Shariah is a threat to our Constitution and way of life. With our team of policy experts on national security, Shariah law and the Constitutional law, the Center has published books on the terrorism-funding risks of Shariah Compliant Finance, the risks to our national security in Shariah: The Threat to America, and the risks to our liberties in the study of fifty “Shariah-compliant” state court decisions.

The front-page article illustrates some of the great successes of the Center’s work to educate this fast-growing popular movement, attracting Tea Party Constitutionalists, pro-family conservatives, civil libertarians, feminists, legal experts and religious leaders.

Here are the key quotes from “Behind the Anti-Shariah Movement”:

[Center for Security Policy General Counsel David] Yerushalmi began writing “American Laws for American Courts,” a model statute that would prevent state judges from considering foreign laws or rulings that violate constitutional rights in the United States. The law was intended to appeal not just to the growing anti-Shariah movement, but also to a broader constituency that had long opposed the influence of foreign laws in the United States. ….Anti-Shariah organizers are pressing ahead with plans to introduce versions of Mr. Yerushalmi’s legislation in half a dozen new states, while reviving measures that were tabled in others. …many of the statutes are worded neutrally enough that they might withstand constitutional scrutiny while still limiting the way courts handle cases involving Muslims, other religious communities or foreign and international laws.

[Center for Security Policy President Frank] Gaffney swiftly drummed up interest in the law, holding conference calls with activists and tapping a network of Tea Party and Christian groups as well as ACT for America, which has 170,000 members and describes itself as “opposed to the authoritarian values of radical Islam.” The group emerged as a “force multiplier,” Mr. Gaffney said, fanning out across the country to promote the law. The American Public Policy Alliance, a nonprofit organization formed that year by a political consultant based in Michigan, began recruiting dozens of lawyers to act as legislative sponsors…

A recent report by the Center for Security Policy, a research institute based in Washington for which Mr. Yerushalmi is general counsel, identified 50 state appellate cases, mostly over the last three decades. The report offers these cases as proof that the United States is vulnerable to the encroachment of Islamic law.

The message has caught on. Among those now echoing Mr. Yerushalmi’s views are prominent Washington figures like R. James Woolsey, a former director of the C.I.A., and the Republican presidential candidates Newt Gingrich and Michele Bachmann, who this month signed a pledge to reject Islamic law, likening it to “totalitarian control.”

In the spring of 2008, Mr. Gaffney arranged meetings with officials at the Treasury Department, including Robert M. Kimmitt, then the deputy secretary, and Stuart A. Levey, then the under secretary for terrorism and financial intelligence. Mr. Yerushalmi warned them about what he characterized as the lack of transparency and other dangers of Shariah-compliant finance.

Mr. Yerushalmi argues that the problem lies with America’s Muslim institutions and their link to Islamist groups overseas. As a primary example, he and others cite a memorandum that surfaced in the federal prosecution of the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development, a Muslim charity based in Texas whose leaders were convicted in 2008 of sending funds to Hamas. The 1991 document outlined a strategy for the Muslim Brotherhood in the United States that involved “eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within.” Critics emphasize a page listing 29 Muslim American groups as “our organizations and the organizations of our friends.”

Also last fall, Mr. Gaffney’s organization released Shariah: The Threat to America, a 172-page report whose lead author was Mr. Yerushalmi and whose signatories included Mr. Woolsey and other former intelligence officials.

The movement against shariah in the United States is primarily educational, providing answers to the questions many in the press seem committed to obscuring. In the Middle East, it’s clear that proponents of shariah see it as opposed to secular, constitutional government, as it is in places like Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Sudan. While it covered last week’s massive demonstrations demanding strict shariah governance in Egypt, the Times is silent on what shariah actually is.

Our coalitions have presented literally hundreds of briefings, meetings, conferences, essays and seminars in over thirty states, with many more visits scheduled. The result is salutary: Americans are beginning to understand the threat of shariah law, and even better, to understand the strengths of their own Constitution to protect the rights of free speech, the right to free association and to freely exercise or leave a religion, the right to bear arms, the right to due process and equal protection under the law for women and children. All those rights are threatened under the consensus decisions of Shariah legal authorities.

Thanks are due to the New York Times for highlighting the Center for Security Policy’s accomplishments in educating Americans about the threat of shariah laws and its doctrines to our Constitutional liberties.