Image: Wikimedia CommonsAnd what a week it was:
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Arkansas has fallen. A bill introduced late last month by state senator Cecile Bledsoe to ban the use of foreign or religious law has apparently stalled in the legislature. Bledsoe told Arkansas News that her bill isn’t meant to target Islamic law, but rather all foreign law. This is a pretty standard defense and sounds very innocuous, so it’s worth explaining why it’s false: Bledsoe didn’t write the bill from scratch; as Little Rock’s KUAR reported, she had help from a group called the American Public Policy Alliance, an organization with a stated mission to “protect American citizens’ constitutional rights against the infiltration and incursion of foreign laws and foreign legal doctrines, especially Islamic Shariah Law.” (Here’s Bledsoe’s bill, and for comparison, here’s the APPA’s sample legislation).
As Oklahoma‘s famous case demonstrates, you can’t just explicitly single out a particular kind of religious law, and so the Public Policy Alliance doesn’t. But the only threat they talk about on their website is Islamic law. Meanwhile, David Yerushalmi, the New York City attorney who APPA hired to draft the sample language, is the head of an organization that proposes to ban Muslims from entering the United States, deport all Muslim non-citizens, and make it a felony to promote Islam. In other words, this is absolutely about Sharia. Just so we’re clear. (Neither Bledsoe nor the APPA has responded to multiple requests for comment).
- On that note, South Dakota legislators are weighing their own similarly vague constitutional amendment to ban judges from considering “the law of any foreign nation, or any foreign religious or moral code.” Because this is South Dakota, two of the bill’s five sponsors also co-sponsored legislation this week to make gun ownership mandatory for every adult.
- A 63-year-old Vietnam vet was arrested last weekend after threatening to blow up a mosque in Dearborn, Michigan. Roger Stockham, 63, has been charged with threatening to commit an act of terrorism, and possessing contraband fireworks. That’s where they get you.
- The Onion reports that terrorists are now deploying “patriotic, peaceful, decoy Muslims” to throw us off their scent—which, come to think of it, is pretty what Washington Times columnist Frank Gaffney has been saying all along.
- And finally, Glenn Beck examined the evidence and reported what the media simply refuses to acknowledge: Bill Ayers and the Muslim Brotherhood are in league. Not to nitpick, but how can the Mediterranean simultaneously be “on fire” and in the middle of a “snowball.” Shouldn’t the latter metaphor extinguish the former? Or has the Muslim Brotherhood rediscovered the lost secret formula for Greek fire?
