Today, Clare Lopez— a senior fellow at the Center for Security Policy, former employee of the CIA, Team B II member, and new Big Peace contributor— released both a video and essay in response to some criticism of the Team B II Report, Shariah: The Threat to America. While the response addresses specific comments made by a professor of religion, Ebrahim Moosa from a recent Duke University webcast, the video and essay could be said to speak to nearly all criticisms of the report to date: ad hominem, generalization, and obfuscation. Often, there’s a good bit of taqiyya thrown into the mix.
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Clare Lopez further unpacks all this in her essay:
On 22 November 2010, Ebrahim Moosa, a South African-born associate professor of Islamic Studies in the Duke University Department of Religion, recorded one of a series of video interviews for the “Office Hours at Duke University” program. Posted to You Tube, the video consists of a set of questions and answers; the questions, some from an interactive online audience, were posed by James Todd, a former software salesman with a B.A. in physics from Duke who currently serves as Senior Writer and Multimedia Producer with the Duke News Staff. The answers came primarily from Professor Moosa with call-in participation by Professor Hina Azam, a Duke University graduate school graduate who is now an Assistant Professor of Islamic Studies at the University of Texas, Austin.
About two-thirds of the way into the video, interviewer James Todd relayed to Moosa a question that came into the program via email about the Center for Security Policy’s study, Shariah: The Threat to America, released in September 2010 and published in paperback book form a month later. The question-and the Center’s report-obviously struck a nerve with Prof. Moosa, as he launched into a rambling fifteen-minute response that is striking in the main for its studied attempt to avoid tackling any of the report’s specific assertions about Islamic law or the threat it poses to American national security. Instead, Prof. Moosa alternated between vaguely-worded accusations about “miscommunication,” “willful distortion”, and a “flawed foundation”, and thuggish threats about getting “your nose bloodied,” “badly injured,” or landing “up in a lot of trouble.”
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