Newt Gingrichās ardent admiration for Franklin Delano Roosevelt owes more to the latterās unflinching wartime leadership than his welfare-state policy prescriptions. This week, though, the former Speaker is also undoubtedly in accord with FDRās aphorism, āI ask you to judge me by the enemies I have made.ā To his great credit, Newt has made an enemy of CAIR. The Council on American-Islamic Relations, that is. The nationās best known cheerleader for radical Islam ā or, as Fox News compliantly puts it, āthe largest Muslim civil liberties group in the United Statesā ā has issued a blistering press release that labels Gingrich āone of the nationās worst promoters of anti-Muslim bigotry.ā The occasion for this outburst is the imminent Republican primary in South Carolina.Asked at a campaign appearance whether heād ever consider endorsing a Muslim for president, Gingrich sensibly answered that he would not rule it out ā āit would depend on whether [the hypothetical Muslim candidate] would commit in public to give up sharia.ā Naturally, the usual suspects are in full fury, with CAIR the loudest among them. Theyāve trotted out the rote response, dutifully echoed by Fox, that sharia, Islamās legal code, is simply a set of spiritual guidelines ā one that, in CAIRās portrayal, āteaches marital fidelity, generous charity, and a thirst for knowledge.ā Actually, it teaches polygamy, the underwriting of jihadist violence through ostensible charity, and the Islamization of knowledge. Donāt take my word for it. I refer you instead to a CAIR favorite, the International Institute of Islamic Thought. CAIR and IIIT are both Muslim Brotherhood affiliates long active in our country. Founded in the early Eighties, IIIT is a Virginia-based think tank dedicated to what it calls the āIslamization of knowledge,ā which is a āeuphemism,ā as the Hudson Instituteās Zeyno Baran puts it, āfor the rewriting of history to support Islamist narrativesā ā such as the claim that Spain is actually the rightful property of Muslims, to be renamed āal-Andalus,ā as it was known under jihadist conquest. CAIR, strategically based in Washington, was shrewdly designed to be an Islamist public-relations arm ā the Brotherhood realizing that the American media and government were suckers for agitators who style themselves as ācivil rightsā advocates. This was back in the mid-Nineties, when new criminal laws against supporting terrorists complicated the Brotherhoodās overt championing of Hamas. Both CAIR and IIIT were identified as Brotherhood satellites in the internal Brotherhood memoranda that proved critical in the Justice Departmentās successful Holy Land Foundation prosecution ā a case involving millions of dollars funneled to Hamas, and a case in which CAIR was cited as an unindicted co-conspirator. CAIR and the IIIT are so inter-bred that CAIRās advisory board has included Sayyid Syeed, a founder of, and director of āacademic outreachā for, IIIT ā in addition to being a founder of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA, another unindicted coconspirator in the HLF case) and a former president of the Muslim Students Association (MSA), the first building block of the Brotherhoodās American infrastructure. And late last year, just weeks before blasting Gingrich, CAIR presented a lifetime achievement award to Iqbal Unus, a top IIIT official, who was also a prime mover in the development of MSA and ISNA. CAIRās reverence for the IIIT is relevant because the Islamization think-tank is prominent among the endorsers of Reliance of the Traveller: A Classic Manual of Islamic Sacred Law. In fact, IIITās endorsement report is included in Reliance, vouching that this English translation of Umdat al-Salik ā an authoritative compendium of sharia composed by a renowned 14th-century Islamic jurist ā is accurate, faithful to Muslim doctrine, and highly successful in āits aim to imbue the consciousness of the non-Arabic-speaking Muslim with a sound understanding of Sacred Law.ā Thus, IIIT opined, āthere is no doubt that this translation is a valuable and important work, whether as a textbook for teaching Islamic jurisprudence to English speakers, or as a legal reference for use by scholars, educated laymen, and students in this [English] language.ā |