Avian Cloaca: Bousquet’s Sharia Metaphor
Foxman: Avian-Brained on Sharia
Abraham Foxman’s latest uninformed rant, “Shout down the Sharia myth makers,” re-affirms his nonpareil status as the most blindly agenda-driven and distressingly stupid organizational Jewish “leader.” The Anti-Defamation League (ADL)’s Foxman sprays defamatory charges–rooted in willful ignorance–against all those legitimately concerned with the ceaseless efforts of mainstream institutional American Islam to insinuate Sharia mores and jurisdiction into US society.
Foxman is the same hypocritical ignoramus who on June 10, 2005 gave the fundamentalist Muslim Prime Minister, and inveterate, if authentic, doctrinally-based Islamic Jew-hater, Recep Tayyip “Mas-Kom-Ya” Erdogan, the ADL’s “Courage to Care Award.” Two years later, in August, 2007, consistent with this travesty, borne of his dogmatic, uncritical Islamophilia, Foxman infuriated the heavily Armenian community of Watertown, MA (a Boston suburb whose 8,000 Armenian-Americans make up nearly 25 percent of the population). Local Armenians objected, rightfully, to Foxman’s denying the ugly established legacy of the World War I era Armenian genocide–a jihad genocide committed by the Muslim Turks under the direction of their Ottoman rulers. Thus while promoting an ADL campaign to combat bigotry and celebrate diversity in Watertown, “No Place for Hate,” Mr. Foxman and the ADL were simultaneously lobbying against legislation recognizing the Armenian genocide in the U.S. House (HR 106) and the Senate (SR 106), including the presentation of letters from the vestigial remnant dhimmi Jewish community of Turkey complemented by, “their own [i.e., the ADL’s] statement opposing the bill.”
Predictably, Foxman’s vicious, idiotic tirade ignores all evidence of Sharia encroachment in the US, from ominous polling data, to jihad funding trial revelations and the content of more banal Muslim litigation proceedings, mosque surveillance reports, analyses of Islamic education institutions and their Muslim schoolchildren’s textbooks, the issuance of obscurantist “fatwas” (Islamic legal rulings) by the Assembly of Muslim Jurists of America, and finally, an open declaration by one of America’s largest mainstream Muslims organizations, the Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA), in its 2010 ICNA Member’s Hand Book, calling for the (re-)creation of a global Muslim Caliphate, and the imposition of Sharia law in America. Salient details from these illustrative examples, include:
- Data (compiled here) from an April 2001 survey performed by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) revealing that 69% of American Muslims in America affirmed that it was “absolutely fundamental” or “very important” to have Salafi (i.e., fundamentalist Islamic) teachings at their mosques, while 67 % of respondents agreed with the statement “America is an immoral, corrupt society.” Another poll conducted in Detroit area mosques during 2003 found that 81% of the respondents endorsed the application of the Sharia where Muslims comprised a majority.
- An internal Muslim Brotherhood statement dated May 22, 1991, whose contents were revealed during the Texas Holy Land Foundation jihad-terrorism funding trial. Written by an acolyte of the Brotherhood’s major theoretician, lionized Qatari cleric, popular Al-Jazeera television personality, and head of the European Fatwa Council Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the document entitled “An Explanatory Memorandum On the General Strategic Goal for the Group In North America,” is indeed self-explanatory: The Ikhwan [Muslim Brotherhood] must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and “sabotaging” its miserable house by their hands and by the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.
- The “Sharia and Violence in American Mosques” (Kedar M, Yerushalmi D. The Middle East Quarterly, Summer 2011, Vol. 18, No. 3, pp. 59-72) studied 100 mosques randomly selected across the U.S. testing the hypothesis that Sharia adherence within mosques (including, among many other factors, gender separation, clothing, male facial hair, jewelry, strictness on alignment shoulder-to-shoulder during prayer, etc.) would correlate with incitement to jihadism. This key summary finding was highlighted by the authors: …51 percent of mosques had texts that either advocated the use of violence in the pursuit of a Shari’a-based political order or advocated violent jihad as a duty that should be of paramount importance to a Muslim; 30 percent had only texts that were moderately supportive of violence like the Tafsir Ibn Kathir and Fiqh as-Sunna; 19 percent had no violent texts at all. Thus 81% of this statistical sample representative of US mosques were deemed as moderately (30%) to highly (51%) supportive of promulgating jihad violence to impose Shari’a
- A provisional inquiry “Shariah Law and American State Courts” evaluated 50 Appellate Court cases from 23 states that involved conflicts between Shariah (Islamic law) and American state law. Examples of American judges accepting “input” from Sharia in rendering judgments, included an odious, widely publicized New Jersey ruling that upheld Sharia-sanctioned marital rape. Appellate court intervention was required to reverse this ruling in July 2010–Western legal norms prevailing over the Sharia–with the presiding judge soberly concluding that the Muslim husband’s “…conduct in engaging in nonconsensual sexual intercourse was unquestionably knowing, regardless of his view that his [Islamic] religion permitted him to act as he did.” Completely ignored at the time of these New Jersey proceedings was the fact that marital rape is not recognized as criminal, i.e., it is sanctioned, by a fatwa of the Assembly of Muslim Jurists of America! (see below)
- Investigations of textbooks widely used in the New York city area Islamic schools, as well as the Islamic Saudi Academy of Fairfax Virginia which discovered the inculcation of Sharia supremacism, including sacralized disparagement and hatred of non-Muslims, especially Jews. When questioned for the March, 30 2003 NY Daily News story on New York area Islamic school textbooks, Yahiya Emerick, head of a Queens-based nonprofit curriculum development project for the Islamic Foundation of North America, defended the language in these books, denying they were inflammatory. Emerick opined, Islam, like any belief system, believes its program is better than others. I don’t feel embarrassed to say that…[The books] are directed to kids in a Muslim educational environment. They must learn and appreciate there are differences between what they have and what other religions teach. It’s telling kids that we have our own tradition.
- The Assembly of Muslim Jurists of America (AMJA), whose mission statement maintains the organization was, “…founded to provide guidance for Muslims living in North America…AMJA is a religious organization that does not exploit religion to achieve any political ends, but instead provides practical solutions within the guidelines of Islam and the nation’s laws to the various challenges experienced by Muslim communities…”, is accepted as such by the mainstream American Muslim community. Notwithstanding this mainstream acceptance, including uncritical endorsement of its recent seventh annual American conference in Houston (October 15-18, 2010) to train American imams, AMJA has issued rulings which sanction the killing of apostates, “blasphemers” (including non-Muslims guilty of this “crime”), or adulterers (by stoning to death), condone female genital mutilation, marital rape, and polygamy, and even endorse the possibility for offensive jihad against the US, as soon as Muslims are strong enough to wage it.
- Finally, as reported by the Investigative Project on Terrorism, the Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA), one of the largest mainstream U.S. Muslim organizations, in its 2010 ICNA Member’s Hand Book, openly acknowledges being the American branch of a global jihadist phenomenon referred to as the ‘Islamic Movement.’ The 2010 Hand Book observes, that branches of this movement “…are active in various parts of the world to achieve the same objectives. It is our obligation as Muslims to engage in the same noble cause here in North America.” These efforts will culminate in the (re-)creation of a transnational Islamic superstate, the Caliphate, under the Sharia.…the united Muslim Ummah [community] in a united Islamic state, governed by an elected khalifah in accordance with the laws of shari’ah.
Forty-five years ago, G.-H. Bousquet elucidated the quintessential nature of the Sharia, and why Muslims seek, endlessly, to impose this system upon all of humanity. Georges Henri (G.-H.) Bousquet (1900-1978), was one of the greatest and most widely published 20th century specialists on Islamic Law. From 1932 to 1956 Bousquet taught North African sociology at the Faculty of Law in Algeria. His major legal writings include Precis elemantaire de droit muslmane (1936-1940), Du droit musulman et de son application effective dans le monde (1949), Justice francais et coutumes kabiles (1950), and L’Ethique sexuelle de l’Islam (1966).
Bousquet, in his seminal L’Ethique sexuelle de l’Islam (“The Sexual Ethics of Islam”), extracted below, highlights the “doubly totalitarian” nature of Islam–its eternal quest to impose a universal ruling order by jihad warfare–and the permanently stunted “evolution” of that “order”, i.e., Islamic Law, the Sharia. Analogous to the undifferentiated cloaca*, which accounts for it being a “casuistic hodegepodge,” Islam’s Sharia is a retrogressive development compared to the evolution of clear distinctions between “ritual, the law, moral doctrine, good customs in society, etc” within Western European Christendom, and utterly incompatible with modern Western conceptions of universal human rights. [*The cloaca, in zoological anatomy is the posterior orifice that serves as the joint opening for both the intestinal and urinary tracts of certain animal species. Also known as the anal beak, the word cloaca derives from Latin, meaning “sewer.” All birds, reptiles, and amphibians possess this combined excretory opening, from which they eliminate both urine and feces, unlike placental mammals, who possess two separate orifices for evacuation.]
[Islam’s doubly totalitarian nature] “By force of arms at first, the Muslims had acquired a good part of the civilized world and had created quite strong states, yet without realizing their ideal–the first totalitarian aspect of this religion: to conquer the entire world in order to subject it to a single authority. Moreover–and this gives it a second totalitarian aspect–it constitutes a great theoretical ensemble: the Muslim Law (Sharia), whose study is the science of fiqh [jurisprudence], all of which has the goal of regulating even down to the smallest details the whole life of the believer and the Muslim community.”
[Sharia as an undifferentiated, “cloacal” system] “This Law [Islamic Law] is a hodgepodge: we find measures in which we recognize moral precepts, juridical rules, indications of a ritual order, but all these norms that we judge essentially different are treated in the same spirit – casuistically, it may be said – by the Doctors of law, that is to say, by the real representatives of Islam, a religion without priests. The distinctions we make, they do not, for all the rules expounded there manifest, in all their details, the actual state of things, the ideal desired by God, for the Doctors have deduced, starting from the Koran and Tradition, and in an infallible way, the ensemble of rules that the Muslim community ought to follow to obey His inscrutable Will. These norms, considered as definitive by the Doctors for more than a millennium, embrace the whole life of the believer as an individual and of the Community, dealing with (I mention at random): sharing, ritual Prayer, the invitation to a wedding feast, the way of satisfying natural needs, judicature, the use of toothpicks, competitions in archery, safe conduct to give to certain unbelievers, the interdiction for a man to wear rings of gold or silver, retaliation, the way to treat animals, the interdiction on eating pork, care of children, etc., etc. Thus there is in Islam an undifferentiated whole, where modern Europeans distinguish clearly among ritual, the law, moral doctrine, good customs in society, etc. This distinction has even long existed in Christianity: no Catholic would confuse the way of saying mass with moral theology, or with canon law, or the polite way to greet an ecclesiastic, etc. If I may make an indelicate comparison (I would take a loftier example but I cannot think of one so striking): one finds among mammals a bladder, a vagina, and a rectum, whereas birds and reptiles have only an undifferentiated organ, the cloaca, corresponding to a previous stage of evolution. Similarly, divine law, the Sharia, has remained at a stage of evolution more primitive than Christianity. Thus one grasps all the dangers and misunderstandings committed when starting from our concepts to deal with things that do not exist in Islam. We would laugh at a naturalist who spoke of the vagina or the bladder of a bird, but we commit just as inexcusable a mistake when we speak, as of clearly distinct things, about moral doctrine, or about the law or theory of Islam. The Doctors of Law had no idea of these concepts. Similarly there is for them only a single tribunal, with a single judge and universal authority; it is thus inadmissible in Islam to speak of a tribunal for children, of a Court of Appeal, of a Public Minister, of a Court of Assizes [former periodic criminal court in England and Wales, replaced by permanent Crown Court in 1971], and so forth. Apply this example to everything that deals with the Law and you will understand the errors into which one falls by transposing our own ideas into the Muslim world by making distinctions where there is no reason to [emphasis added], by creating European categories where they do not exist.
The contemporary “errors” being committed by Abraham Foxman–a malign buffoon–in word and deed–pose an unacceptable danger to the fabric of US society.