RUTHFULLY YOURS

Schmitz remains in steadfast denial about the liberty-crushing, dehumanizing nature of sharia: open-ended jihadism to subjugate the world to a totalitarian Islamic order; rejection of bedrock Western liberties — including freedom of conscience and speech — enforced by imprisonment, beating, or death; discriminatory relegation of non-Muslims to outcast, vulnerable pariahs, and even Muslim women to subservient chattel; and barbaric punishments which violate human dignity, such as amputation for theft, stoning for adultery, and lashing for alcohol consumption. Refusing to acknowledge sharia’s ugly, living essence, Schmitz instead makes a factually challenged, immoral equivalence between totalitarian Islamic law — a form of state governance — and modern Church canon law, which is deliberately confined to religious affairs, even glibly asserting, “Surely Catholics would love to see canon law cover the globe.”

In lieu of forthrightly acknowledging all the data that was presented about aggressive sharia encroachment in the U.S., and offering any reasoned challenges to this evidence, Schmitz maintains, falsely, that “the only concrete evidence Bostom offers is a study ‘Sharia Law and American State Courts.’” This tendentious claim is debunked by simply reading what I originally wrote. Schmitz continues to ignore: ominous polling data from U.S. Muslims; jihad-funding trial revelations, and the content of more banal Muslim litigation proceedings; mosque surveillance reports; analyses of Islamic educational institutions and their Muslim schoolchildren’s textbooks; the issuance of obscurantist “fatwas” (Islamic legal rulings) by the respected, mainstream Assembly of Muslim Jurists of America; and 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, which calls for the (re-)creation of a global Muslim Caliphate, and the imposition of sharia in America.

Matthew Schmitz’s shallow, non-sequitur argumentation is well marinated in cultural relativism. He demonstrates merely that it is far easier to spray groundless charges of bigotry at those who highlight and oppose sharia encroachment, rather than confront the inherent bigotry of sharia itself — even when, as David French notes, appositely,

Laws like the one passed in Kansas (text here) are in fact rather benign and provide minimal intrusion into the freedom of contract — operating, as a practical matter, only to prevent extreme outcomes that would potentially also violate common-law protections against contract terms that violate public policy.