RUTHFULLY YOURS

My guest today is George Aaron, an alumnus and graduate of the 1976 class of the UCLA School of Law.  He practices Social Security disability law in Tarzana, California.  He is starting a public campaign for alumni to withhold donating money to the UCLA School of Law.

Glazov: George Aaron, thank you for taking the time out to talk about your public campaign.

Tell us about this effort you are starting to convince alumni to withhold donating money to the UCLA School of Law.  It is connected to Prof. Khaled Abou El Fadl, a champion of sharia law, presently being a law professor at your law school, yes?

Aaron: That is correct, Jamie.  I first found out about Dr. El Fadl when I read his story in a 2003 L.A. Times article.  The picture painted was of a “moderate” Muslim legal scholar courageously fighting the jihadis.  I bought the puff-piece profile hook, line, and sinker.  Later on, I read an article (containing 62 footnotes!) by Daniel Pipes, claiming that the professor was a stealth jihadist.  I read other devastating critiques by Pipes regarding the double-talking El Fadl, all meticulously footnoted, such as a 2003 essay entitled “Khaled Abou El Fadl’s Disastrous Interview.”

G: Tell us some more about Dr. Abou El Fadl and his “scholarship.”

A: Around December of 2010, I read an exposé by Pipes on El Fadl that made my blood boil.  Entitled “Answering Khaled Abou Fadl,” Pipes recounted the totally false smears El Fadl lobbed at his critics Steven Emerson and Robert Spencer (as detailed in “UCLA’s Professor of Fantasy” by Cinnamon Stillwell and Eric Golub) and opined that he should be “sacked” for his lies about Emerson and Spencer.  I read a withering critique of Dr. El Fadl’s arguments by the indomitable Andrew Bostom, a true scholar and walking encyclopedia on Sharia Islam.  The last straw was when I read Campus Watch’s May 2011 column “Pushing ‘Islamaphobia’ at UCLA” by Judith Greblya,” strongly critical of the deceptions, obfuscations, and meritless claims deployed by El Fadl in a lecture on sharia.

G: What was the upshot of this “last straw”?

A: I wrote to the dean of the law school, pointing out that Prof. El Fadl was assiduously whitewashing and soft-soaping Sharia Islam, that in so doing he [El Fadl] was committing academic/scholastic misfeasance and malfeasance, and that these well-documented improprieties should be rigorously looked into by the law school.  I pointed out that the belief system and values undergirding Sharia Islam are the antithesis of American/Western beliefs and fundamental values, and therefore Dr. Fadl’s scholarship relentlessly sanitizing sharia was “deceptive and dishonest.”

G: How did the dean respond?

A: She responded immediately by e-mail that considerations of “academic freedom” would be of no value “if a faculty member were to be sanctioned every time he or she expresses controversial ideas or makes statements with which people disagree or find fault.”  I wrote back that I was not upset about El Fadl’s championing of a retrograde, totalitarian, and fascistic legal system — it goes without saying he has every right to put that out in the free marketplace of ideas.  But it is one thing for a legal scholar to cause controversy and debate by taking an unpopular position; it is quite another when the scholar obfuscates rather than clarifies a subject of study by engaging in subpar scholarship and outright deception (known by the sharia as taqqiyah, a legal term of art meaning sacred lying or deception in the cause of Islam, which, by the way, has no cognate in any other legal system, secular or religious).  She never replied to my second e-mail.

G: What would you posit is the fundamental difference in the worldview of Sharia Islam and Western civilization?

A: Rabbi Hillel famously said that the whole of Jewish Law, the Torah, could be summed up by the Golden Rule.  Jesus said essentially the same thing a generation later, citing as authority the Torah (“The Law”) and the prophets.  From this flows all other Judeo-Christian/Western fundamental beliefs: the universal brotherhood of man (“Love thy neighbor as thyself”), the equality before God of all humankind, a God-given absolute moral code for all peoples (that is where the “ethical” comes into play in the phrase “ethical monotheism”), and freedom of ideas.  Also, since both the Jewish and Christian God loves the individual, individual rights, liberties, and freedoms are the natural and logical manifestation of this outlook.  That is why Thomas Jefferson used the word “self-evident” in the Declaration of Independence — to a people brought up on such teachings, it is obviously self-evident that all men are created equal and that they are endowed by the deity with “inalienable” rights.

Sharia Islam teaches that the world is divided between the Muslims and the Kafirs.  “Kafir” is a sharia term of art with connotations far worse than the N-word in American usage.  Kafirs are infidel subhumans who are predestined for Jahunum (Hell) by Allah, per the Koran and the Sunna.  All Jews, Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, atheists, animists, pagans, and secular humanists are categorized as Kafirs.  They are nejis, an Arabic Sharia term of art meaning spiritually (and in Shia Islam, also physically) unclean and filthy.  Even “moderate” mainstream Islamic clerics teach this revolting doctrine.

Sharia Islam divides the world into Dar-al-Harb/The Domain of War and Dar al-Islam/The Domain of Islam, Bilad-al-Kufr/Lands of the Kafir and the Ummah/Islamic world community.  According to scholars such as Robert Spencer, there is no equivalent of the Golden Rule in Islam.  Thus, Sharia Islam espouses what we nowadays call “situational ethics” — if a course of action helps Islam, the end justifies the means.

According to Bill Warner, the ethical system of Sharia Islam is dualistic, as to how a person is treated depends on his being a Muslim or a Kafir.  There is one set of ethics for the Kafir, another for one’s fellow Muslim.  Deceit, violence, and force are okay to advance Islam, since good is what advances Islam, and evil is whatever resists Islam.

G: What threat do you think Prof. El Fadl represents?

A: First some background.  The 57-member Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) — and by the way, when have you heard of an international organization of Christian-majority states promoting a political agenda? — has been attempting to cancel the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, written by a French-Jewish lawyer, and replace it with the thoroughgoingly intolerant 1990 Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam, which is a monstrous anti-human rights manifesto based on mainstream Sharia Islam — not “radical” Islam, not “fundamentalist” Islam, mind you.  Then there is the worldwide “Insult Law,” which the OIC is pushing at the U.N., that would perforce end freedom of speech, ideas, and expression — the wellsprings of Western Enlightenment values — by implanting thought-control sharia legal norms into international law.

Per Daniel Pipes, Dr. El Fadl has been associated with an effort that is pushing an anti-blasphemy amendment to the U.S. Constitution.  According to the Constitutional Rights Foundation website, under “Blasphemy Salman Rushdie,” the proposed amendment reads: “The First Amendment shall not be interpreted to protect blasphemous speech. States shall be free to enact anti-blasphemy laws as long as they prohibit offensive speech against all religions.”  Such an amendment would of course destroy the American Bill of Rights.

G: Why aren’t Dr. El Fadl’s fellow law professors talking about any of this?

A: The brilliant liberal thinker Paul Berman wrote a thoughtful book that explains this: Flight of the Intellectuals. When it comes to Islamism, the intellectuals have failed Western civilization miserably.  Today all too many are tolerant of the intolerant.  They stand silent while a wolf in sheep’s clothing — under cover of a pervasive academic climate of political correctness, moral and cultural relativism, and stultifying careerism — spreads his poisonous piffle touting a Nazi-like (I don’t use this descriptive lightly) legal system amongst our law students and trusting laypersons via faux scholarship and smear tactics against those who call him out on his deceptive double-talk and attempt to set the record straight.

To the dean of the UCLA School of Law and to its esteemed law professors, I ask that you speak out on this subject.  That you stand up for the values of American and Western civilization, the same values that undergird the common law legal system, and that you confront the lies, deceptions, and doublespeak of Dr. El Fadl on behalf of Sharia Islam, a supremacist medieval-obscurantist belief system that has brought pain, misery, and darkness to the world for 1,400 years and counting (ask the Copts of Egypt).

“Qui tacet consentire” — Silence is consent, and your silence so far has been deafening.

G: George Aaron, thanks for sharing your time and best of luck in your campaign.