How Sharia Kills Free Speech

Posted on March 16, 2013 by creeping

via Andrew G. Bostom’s How Sharia Kills Free Speech.

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Predictably, the mainstream media outlets reporting this latest example of Al Qaeda’s so-called “anti-Islamic radicalism” (across the political spectrum, from the rather odious blame-the-victim Atlantic account, to the factual, if short shrift assessment of The Weekly Standard), failed to connect these threats to an earlier, more egregious action by a prominent Muslim nation: the Egyptian state security court’s November 28, 2012 verdict, which sentenced to death seven expatriate Coptic Egyptians, including Morris Sadek, as well as American pastor Terry Jones, for “blaspheming” Islam-i.e., the same Sadek and Jones targeted subsequently by the Al-Qaeda “Inspire” layout. Egyptian Judge Saif al Nasr Soliman stated plainly when the ruling was issued,

The accused persons were convicted of insulting the Islamic religion through participating in producing and offering a movie that insults Islam and its prophet.

The late November, 2012, an Egyptian court verdict reaffirms mainstream, institutional Islam’s Sharia (Islamic law)-based lethal punishment for speech critical of the Muslim creed. More disturbing, however, is the abject failure of contemporary Western media, academic, and political elites to accurately convey that reality — a living, liberty-crushing doctrinal and historical legacy I will elaborate herein.

Arthur Tritton’s pioneering 1930 study of the fate of non-Muslim “dhimmis” vanquished by jihad (as per Koran 9:29; see pp. 217-35), and living under the Sharia, included this brief overview of how blasphemy law was applied to them:

[F]our things put a dhimmi outside the pale of the law; blasphemy of God, His book, His religion, or His Prophet… Shafii [d. 820, founder of the Shafiite school of Sunni Islamic jurisprudence] said that one who repented of having insulted the Prophet might be pardoned and restored to his privileges. Ibn Taimiya [d. 1328, a jurist of the Hanbali school of Sunni Islamic jurisprudence] taught that the death penalty could not be evaded.

Nearly three decades later (circa 1958), Antoine Fattal (d. 1987), an esteemed Lebanese Law Professor and Islamic scholar, wrote Le Statut legal des non-Musulmans en pays d’Islam. Fattal’s treatise remains one of the seminal works characterizing what Bat Ye’or subsequently termed, “dhimmitude,” the restrictive, deliberately humiliating sociopolitical conditions imposed upon non-Muslims within Islamic societies. Extracts from Fattal’s meticulous study (translation by Nidra Poller and Ibn Warraq) of the relevant foundational Islamic texts, and jurisprudence, summarize these classical formulations of the treatment of “blasphemers,” according to the Sharia, confirming Tritton’s 1930 observations.

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Months before Al Qaeda’s Inspire magazine “death list” was published, violent Muslim reactions to the amateurish “Innocence of Muslims” video, which, as noted above, simply highlighted the darker aspects of Muhammad’s sacralized biography, exposed how international and domestic Islamic agendas have openly converged with vehement calls for universal application of Islamic blasphemy law. This demand to abrogate Western freedom of expression was reiterated in a parade of speeches by Muslim leaders at the UN General Assembly. During his own speech to the UN General Assembly Tuesday, 9/25/12) President Obama himself ominously proclaimed,

The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam.

Mr. Obama thus declared himself as an accomplice — witless, or cynically willing — to the Organization of Islamic Cooperation’s relentless campaign to impose universal Sharia-compliant blasphemy law, and the destruction of America’s bedrock freedom, freedom of speech.

The U.S. Muslim community echoed such admonitions, for example during a large demonstration in Dearborn, Michigan, and in a press release by the Islamic Circle of North America. And the results of polling data collected by Wenzel Strategies during October 22 to 26, 2012, from 600 U.S. Muslims, further indicate widespread support among American votaries of Islam for this fundamental rejection of freedom expression, as guaranteed under the U.S. Constitution. The first amendment states, plainly,

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press;

When asked, “Do you believe that criticism of Islam or Muhammad should be permitted under the Constitution’s First Amendment?, 58% replied “no,” while only 42% affirmed this most basic manifestation of freedom of speech, i.e., to criticize religious, or any other dogma. Indeed, oblivious to U.S. constitutional law, as opposed to Islam’s Sharia, a largely concordant 45% of respondents agreed ” …that those who criticize or parody Islam in the U.S. should face criminal charges,” while 38% did not, and 17% were “unsure”. Moreover, fully 12% of this Muslim sample even admitted they believed in application of the draconian, Sharia-based punishment for the non-existent crime of “blasphemy” in the U.S. code, answering affirmatively, ” …that Americans who criticize or parody Islam should be put to death.”

Why is Sharia-compliant abnegation of free speech — diametrically opposed to U.S. Constitutional law — so prevalent among U.S. Muslims? The inescapable conclusion is that mainstream institutional Islam within the U.S. inculcates this liberty-crushing mentality.

Read it all at American Thinker.

Posted on 16 Mar 13 by Creeping Sharia