MARILYN PENN: STEALTHILY ORCHESTRATING A PRO-ISLAMIC STANCE
Stealthily Orchestrating a Pro-Islamic Stance Marilyn Penn
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.10084/pub_detail.asp
“A stout man who wears antique wire-rimmed glasses and a thick, white-streaked beard, Mr. Yerushalmi has a seemingly inexhaustible appetite for the arguments his work provokes.”
Andrea Elliott, “Behind An Anti-Sharia Push” NYTimes 7/31/11 on David Yerushalmi
“A bearish man with a soft bearded face, Mr. Shata struck his congregants as an odd blend of things. He was erudite yet funny, authoritative at the mosque’s wooden pulpit and boyishly charming between prayers.”
Andrea Elliott, “A Muslim Leader in Brooklyn, Reconciling 2 Worlds” NYTimes 7/22/10 on Reda Shata
Just one year apart, these two articles by Andrea Elliott capsulize the attitudes of the reporter and the Times towards orthodox Jews and fundamentalist Muslims. David Yerushalmi, a lawyer who fears the creeping encroachment of Sharia into American jurisprudence is pictured pejoratively as an authoritarian provocateur: he’s fat, hirsute, wears austere glasses and like all stereotypical Jews, loves to argue. Sheikh Reda Shata, on the other hand, is a loveable teddy whose corpulence is “bearish,” whose beard is soft and who has the one thing no Imam has ever been accused of having before – a sense of humor. Ms. Elliott goes on: “David Yerushalmi, a 56 year old Hasidic Jew with a history of controversial statements about race, immigration and Islam…has come to exercise a striking influence over American public discourse about Shariah.”
Ms. Elliott dismisses the need to worry about such matters, despite the fact that there is a growing Muslim population in America. Her concerns have been allayed by interviewing Islamic scholars and consulting a study conducted by the Abu Dhabi Gallup Center. Really? Perhaps more germane would be a look across the pond to England where we can observe that as of 2008, Sharia law has indeed been officially incorporated into the British system. The government has allowed Muslim judges to rule on cases involving finance, divorce and domestic violence through a network of five Sharia courts that exist with the same authority as county courts or High Court. In cases involving domestic violence, Sharia law favors men; in issues of inheritance Sharia law favors men – is this what we want for Muslim/American women?
Back to Ms. Elliott’s nuanced portrait of Sheikh Reda Shata, a man who arrived in the States a year after 9/11 from a stint as Imam in Stuttgart. He settled in Brooklyn and assumed the role of Imam at the Islamic Society of Bay Ridge. “For hundreds of Muslims, the Bay Ridge Mosque has become a courthouse more welcoming than the one downtown,” Ms. Elliott reported in 2010, yet in 2011 she would have us believe that the opposite is true – that most Muslim-Americans prefer the American Justice system and that concern about Sharia law is strictly the province of hawkish conservatives and lunatic tea partiers. At the time of her interview with the Imam which took place eight years after he had arrived in America, a translator was necessary as the Imam spoke very little English. Ms. Elliott offered no comment about this apparent refusal to assimilate into his adopted country though many would interpret this as an obvious preference for living an insulated life, governed strictly by Islamic custom and law. Many would also wonder how Ms. Elliott could tell that the Imam was “funny” as humor is one of the first things to get lost in translation.
From its coverage of the Ground Zero Mosque to its recent reportage of the illusory Arab Spring, the Times has let its bias flame out in broad strokes. It refuses to acknowledge that jihad poses a significant threat to western civilization – despite daily front page stories of the current massacres of Africans by Muslim thugs, and of continued terrorist acts in Asia, the Middle East, Europe and the United States by Muslim jihadists, referred to indiscriminately as militants. The Times would have us believe that there is more to fear from a law-abiding lawyer who seeks to make people aware of the importance of ensuring that our justice system remains exclusively based on our own constitution than in the colonies that breed Muslim separatism and radicalism. The picture in today’s Times of the Egyptian woman cloaked in a black burka just months after the paper assured us that the Muslim Brotherhood represented a tiny, unthreatening fraction of the Egyptian population, tells us more about reality than anything in Andrea Elliott’s lengthy screed about David Yerushalmi’s irrational fear about Sharia. All we have to do is focus on that photo to decide for ourselves where the greater threat to our culture lies.
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