...born with the gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad

The inimicability of sharia: I’ve written about the lawyer at my sister’s firm who’s working on sharia banking files and who has no trouble sleeping nights because he reasons he’s working only for “moderate” Muslims. Well, in the Toronto Sun, Salim Mansur emphasizes that there’s no such entity as “moderate” sharia. The way it’s conceptualized, sharia is an all or nothing proposition. Actually, scratch that. It’s an all or all proposition. No choices. No loopholes.  (Mohamed Elmasry, putting a positive, new-agey spin on old-agey totalitarianism, has called it "holistic".) And those kafirs endeavouring to entrench any aspect of the flawless law are deluding themselves if they think it isn’t doing us any harm.

Here’s Salim:

In How Democracies Perish published during the late Cold War years, Jean-Francois Revel, French political philosopher, offered a rich meditation that remains compelling in the post-9/11 world of Islamist terror and rampage against the West.

Revel wrote about the paradox of democracy when facing an internal enemy -- as were the communists with their totalitarian agenda -- since his "right to exist is written into the law itself."

This is how Revel explained the dilemma: "Democracy can defend itself only very feebly; its internal enemy has an easy time of it because he exploits the right to disagree that is inherent in democracy. His aim of destroying democracy itself, of actively seeking an absolute monopoly of power, is shrewdly hidden behind the citizen's legitimate right to oppose and criticize the system."

In the post-communist world of Islamist terror, democracy in the West also is threatened by the misguided view of those individuals indicating readiness to accommodate demands generally advanced by Muslim mosque-based organizations.

The most recent example of such misguided view is the opinion offered by Nicholas Phillips, the most senior judge in England and Wales, that Islamic law or Sharia could be introduced in Britain.

Lord Phillips' opinion concurred with that of Dr. Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury.

Neither of them, in offering their weighty opinions, took into account the reality of a large portion of immigrants, including many Muslims, making home in Britain after fleeing from Sharia-ruled countries of the Arab-Muslim world.

Lord's view

Lord Phillips expressed his views at a Muslim Centre in East London where a sprinkling of Islamists would have been present. He probably would not recognize an Islamist apart from a Muslim, nor -- giving him the benefit of doubt -- would he have been likely informed that the demand for Sharia in Britain and elsewhere in the West originates with Islamists deceptively indicating this is a commonly shared request of all Muslims.

Islamists residing in the West are agents of another totalitarian ideology -- Islamism -- that is more insidious than communism since it wears the mask of religion. Their push for Sharia is acceptable to individuals such as Lord Phillips and the Archbishop of Canterbury because, in upholding multiculturalism, they willingly suspend their critical faculties when it comes to dealing with other faiths and cultures, in particular Islam.

Sharia is a legal system derived from the Qur'an and the traditions of Prophet Muhammad, and devised by Muslim scholars more than a millennium ago to dictate just about every aspect of individual living and thinking.

It is a closed system disallowing any innovation based on a modern reading of Islam's sacred texts, and it is violently at odds with liberal-democratic values…

As a friend of mine quipped recently, letting in “a little” sharia is like being “a little” pregnant: down the line you know the baby is going to be born and demand to be fed.

Posted by: scaramouche at 10:15 | link | comments

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