Imagine if cops raided your home on the tip that you were a Christian living in a Muslim land, hijacked your bible, arrested you for having literature considered illegal, and then threatened to plant drugs on you to amplify the charges. And imagine if they whisked you off before a judge who refused to hear your case because you broke the law by being a Christian, and then slapped you with a fine and a warning not to leave town.
The scenario became a ghastly reality last month for four Protestants living in the Central Asian Muslim-majority nation of Turkmenistan, where they discovered firsthand the horrors of living under shariah law.
Think it can’t happen here? Think again.
For more than 200 years, hundreds of thousands of brave men and women have died to protect the American way of life so that you and I can enjoy Judeo-Christian-based liberties unavailable anywhere on earth. But how long America continues its carefree existence depends largely on how it will stop extremist agendas from creeping into its courts — a grim fate recognized astutely by Tennessee, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Texas, and Arizona, which have adopted “American Laws for American Courts,” an initiative banning unconstitutional foreign laws from being applied in courts. Shariah law tops the shady list, according to the Center for Security Policy, insinuating itself in cases here and hoodwinking trial court judges into excusing criminal behavior.
Take the 2010 case of a New Jersey couple from Morocco in which the pregnant woman was beaten and raped by her husband and then refused a restraining order by the judge who deemed the appalling incident in keeping with foreign shariah law. The grim case, culled from a modest sampling of appellate published cases, is among 50 others from 23 states detailed in the watchdog group’s 2011 report, Shariah Law and shariahinamericancourts.com“>American State Courts: An Assessment of State Appellate Court Cases. Consider the Maryland mother who lost a child custody battle because the judge upheld Pakistan’s shariah law, and the Michigan trial judge who accepted a Talaq divorce — an Islamic decree nisi in which the husband divorces his wife without her permission by just saying “I divorce you” three times.
The baffling rulings dovetail with the pro-Muslim agendas of adversarial groups such as the Council on American-Islamic Relations which articles.cnn.com/2012-01-10/justice/justice_oklahoma-shariah_1_rex-duncan-oklahoma-amendment-shariah-law?_s=PM:JUSTICE“>has mounted a smear campaign to challenge the initiative for being anti-Islamic, despite its own dark reputation. The rabble-rousing organization was identified as a Muslim Brotherhood front group and named an unindicted co-conspirator in the largest terrorism financing conviction in U.S. history. Moreover, the Department of Homeland Security refuses to deal with it, and our own Sen. Charles Schumer (D) describes it as an organization “which we know has ties to terrorism.”
Every state should adopt American Laws for American Courts because it protects all of us from being victimized by unethical and corrupt foreign laws. The horse has already bolted in the United Kingdom. where more than 80 shariah courts operate legally, ushering in the era of neighborhood shariah law zones to stop people from drinking, smoking, and listening to music, among other perceived immoralities.
Think it can’t happen here? Think again.
Sabruzzo@cngocal.com
Shavana Abruzzo's column appears every Friday on BrooklynDaily.com. She can be reached at sabruzzo@cnglocal.com.
