Frank Gaffney: Coalition to Stop Shariah

YOU TUBE: Al-Jazeera Reporter Asks about Shariah-Finance


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Gaffney: Treasury Submits to Shariah
WASHINGTON POST / Commentary: The U.S. Treasury Department is submitting to Shariah - the seditious religio-political-legal code authoritative Islam seeks to impose worldwide under a global theocracy.

As reported in this space last week, Deputy Secretary of the Treasury Robert Kimmitt set the stage with his recent visit to Saudi Arabia and other oil-rich Persian Gulf states. His stated purpose was to promote the recycling of petrodollars in the form of foreign investment here.

Evidently, the price demanded by his hosts is that the U.S. government get with the Islamist financial program. While in Riyadh, Mr. Kimmitt announced: "The U.S. government is currently studying the salient features of Islamic banking to ascertain how far it could be useful in fighting the ongoing world economic crisis."

"Islamic banking" is a euphemism for a practice better known as "Shariah-Compliant Finance (SFC)." And it turns out that this week the Treasury will be taking officials from various federal agencies literally to school on SFC.

The department is hosting a half-day course entitled "Islamic Finance 101" on Thursday at its headquarters building.

Treasury's self-described "seminar for the policy community" is co-sponsored with the leading academic promoters of Shariah and SCF in the United States: Harvard University Law School's Project on Islamic Finance. At the very least, the U.S. government evidently hopes to emulate Harvard's success in securing immense amounts of Wahhabi money in exchange for conforming to the Islamists' agenda. Like Harvard, Treasury seems utterly disinterested in what Shariah actually is, and portends.

Unfortunately, such submission - the literal meaning of "Islam" - is not likely to remain confined long to the Treasury or its sister agencies. Thanks to the extraordinary authority conferred on Treasury since September, backed by the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), the department is now in a position to impose its embrace of Shariah on the U.S. financial sector. The nationalization of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Treasury's purchase of - at last count - 17 banks and the ability to provide, or withhold, funds from its new slush-fund can translate into unprecedented coercive power.

Concerns in this regard are only heightened by the prominent role Assistant Treasury Secretary Neel Kashkari will be playing in "Islamic Finance 101." Mr. Kashkari, the official charged with administering the TARP fund, will provide welcoming remarks to participants. Presumably, in the process, he will convey the enthusiasm about Shariah-Compliant Finance that appears to be the current party line at Treasury. >>> Frank J Gaffney Jr | November 4, 2008

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Gaffney: The Jihadist Vote
THE WASHINGTON TIMES: Last week, Barack Obama's campaign was burned yet again for its dalliance with Islamists - those who embrace Islam's repressive theo-political-legal code known as Shariah and who are working for its triumph in the West in general and the United States in particular. The episode is but the latest indication that the Democratic candidate hopes to win the White House by relying, in part, on the Jihadist vote.

NBC reported Thursday that the Obama campaign's latest radical "Muslim outreach coordinator," Mouha Husaini, met last month in one of Washington's Northern Virginia suburbs - the heart of what has been dubbed the "Wahhabi Corridor" - with her predecessor, Mazen Asbahi (who had to resign this summer due to his own associations with Shariah). Even more problematic was the presence at the Springfield event of two prominent Muslim Brotherhood operatives: Mahdi Bray of the Muslim American Society (MAS) and Nihad Awad of the Council of American Islamic Relations (CAIR).

As I pointed out in a debate on Tuesday (transcript) with a man associated with both organizations and arguably the Bush administration's senior Muslim official, Suhail Khan, the Brotherhood is an instrument the Islamists have been using to foster a Fifth Column in America. Its stated purpose in this country is to "destroy Western civilization from within."

According to NBC, even other attendees expressed concern that the Obama campaign was reaching out to such "politically radioactive" individuals as Messrs. Bray and Awad.

Unfortunately, this is hardly the only association of this type. Others include the following:

-- A Federal Election Commission (FEC) employee has reportedly been warning for months about evidence that the Obama campaign has received as much as $200 million almost half of his total donations, in amounts less than $200. That is below the threshold for donor information Mr. Obama has chose to report to the FEC - unlike the Clinton and McCain campaigns which have reported all donor information.

Of the $200 million, between $30 million and $100 million are from the Mideast, Africa and other places Islamists are active. It is unclear whether - as seems likely - these funds come not only from Wahhabis, Muslim Brotherhood types and jihadists of other stripes but from non-U.S. citizens. Such contributions would be not only worrying but illegal.

Although the FEC has studiously ignored the problem to date, the matter finally appears to be the subject of a formal complaint by the Republican National Committee. Unfortunately, even if the commission finally bestirs itself to investigate the facts, it seems unlikely to render a finding before the jihadists' and others' votes are counted.

-- Another question yet to be resolved is whether Mr. Obama is a natural born citizen of the United States, a prerequisite pursuant to the U.S. Constitution. There is evidence Mr. Obama was born in Kenya rather than, as he claims, Hawaii. There is also a registration document for a school in Indonesia where the would-be president studied for four years, on which he was identified not only as a Muslim but as an Indonesian. If correct, the latter could give rise to another potential problem with respect to his eligibility to be president.

Curiously, Mr. Obama has, to date, failed to provide an authentic birth certificate which could clear up the matter. Gaffney: The Jihadist Vote >>> Frank Gaffney | October 14, 2008

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Security Teaching Moment
WASHINGTON TIMES: Lost amid the national distractions of a Super Bowl and Super Tuesday, the clock is running down on an immense sale of precision-guided munitions and other advanced weapons to Saudi Arabia and several of the smaller oil-rich Gulf States the Saudis dominate.

Unless two-thirds majorities in both houses of Congress adopt resolutions of disapproval by Feb. 14, these transactions will proceed. All other things being equal, it is a safe bet the Saudis will augment their already vast arsenal with these new American arms.

After all, many in official Washington recognize the growing aggressiveness of Iran is a threat to U.S. interests in the region — from Iraq to Israel to the flow of oil through the Persian Gulf. Even before Bush administration efforts to prevent Tehran's Islamofascist mullahs from obtaining nuclear weapons were undone by a politicized National Intelligence Estimate, the step of up-arming rival nations was an obvious move. In the aftermath of that NIE, it became the only game in town.

Thanks moreover to the Saudis' considerable influence in U.S. corridors of power — cultivated over many years and at a cost of untold millions of dollars spent on lavish retainers, trips and other inducements for politicians, former officials and lawyer-lobbyists — the latest weapon sale has been greased like one of the Gulfies' petrodollar-powered "sovereign wealth" acquisitions. Apart from 100 or so mostly Democratic congressmen who have declared their opposition to such further arming of the Saudis, scarcely a discouraging word has been heard about the whole matter.

President Bush's latest sop to the Saudis nonetheless provides something valuable — what educators call a "teaching moment."

The notion that the United States' vital interests will be served by providing the Saudis and their minions with billions of dollars in additional arms fundamentally rests on the proposition that Saudi Arabia is indeed a "reliable ally." Would anybody in their right mind propose such sales if we had reason to believe they might be used against us — either by the original owners or by a successor government? Presumably not. Security teaching moment >>> By Frank J. Gaffney Jr.

Mark Alexander (Paperback)
Mark Alexander (Hardback)

Globaloney
DEFENDING AMERICA FOR KNOWLEDGE AND ACTION (DAFKA): There is something surreal about the spectacle of President Bush touring the Persian Gulf. It calls to mind the signature line of Mad Magazine's mascot, Alfred E. Neuman: "What, me worry?"

Mr. Bush's trip is, after all, premised on the notion that the Arab leaders he is courting there are reliable allies. Such a proposition should be subjected to the closest of critical scrutiny by Congress, the press and the American electorate since a number of highly debatable, and increasingly portentous, policies are predicated on this assumption. These include:

--Saudi Arabia and the other, smaller desert principalities are "moderates" who are as opposed as we to the totalitarian political agenda of fanatical ideologues such as Osama bin Laden.

--The Gulfies share our concern about the rising power of Iran and therefore can be counted upon to join us in countering that region's would-be Islamofascist superpower. It follows not only that we can safely provide these autocracies with an array of advanced weapons, but we must do so.

--The Arab regimes in the Persian Gulf will help broker a peace between Palestinians and Israelis — if only the United States pressures the Jewish State to make territorial and other concessions that may imperil the latter.

--And the willingness of the Gulf's potentates to recycle the immense wealth they have accumulated in recent years — primarily through oil sales at exorbitantly inflated prices — to purchase big stakes in U.S. companies and capital markets is a welcome development. Such investment is to be encouraged, and those who say otherwise should be condemned as "Chicken Little xenophobes" in the words of former General Electric Chairman Jack Welch and his wife, Suzy.

In fact, the Welch tag-team used a Jan. 21 Business Week column to admonish a letter-writer worried about Arab and other sovereign wealth funds buying up American corporations: "In trying times, U.S. companies always attract opportunistic, activist shareholders. Sometimes they look like Carl Icahn or Nelson Peltz. Sometimes they look like shiny-faced hedge fund managers just out of Wharton or Harvard Business School. And sometimes — like now — they look Chinese or Saudi or whatever. It doesn't matter. They're all after the same thing: the opportunities in America's capitalistic market."

Unfortunately, this confidence in the inexorable forces of "globalization" is as misplaced in the case of the so-called "pro-Western" Arab states as are the other assumptions driving American policy towards the region at the moment. Globaloney >>> By Frank Gaffney (from The Washington Times)

Mark Alexander (Paperback)
Mark Alexander (Hardback)

Frank Gaffney Jr: Shariah’s Trojan Horse
TOWNHALL.COM: Suddenly, a new national debate is beginning about the national security, economic and other implications of Persian Gulf potentates using their petrodollars to buy up strategic American assets. Most recently, the Emir of Dubai’s purchase at fire-sale prices of 4.9 percent of the largest U.S. bank, Citigroup, has caused a level of unease not seen since he tried to buy his way into a large number of this country’s port facilities.

Almost completely unremarked thus far has been a parallel – and in many ways far more insidious – effort to penetrate, influence and dominate America’s capital markets: so-called “Shariah finance.” Some estimates suggest that there are approaching $1 trillion now being invested around the world under this rubric. If present trends continue, all other things being equal, such funds may grow to many times that amount within a few years.

Shariah is, of course, the term used by adherents to the totalitarian ideology practiced by the Saudi Wahhabis, the Iranian mullahs and the Taliban to describe the all-encompassing theocratic code they use to justify repressive rule at home and to extend their dominance elsewhere. While it is often depicted by its promoters as Koranic in character, in fact, it is largely man-made, the product of dictates and rulings by caliphs and scholars over many centuries.

For non-Muslims, Shariah is best known for its sanction for the brutalization of women, homosexuals and Jews. Beheadings, amputations, flagellation and stoning are among the prescribed punishments for those who transgress this barbaric code, punishments plucked from primitive tribal practices in the Arabian deserts dating back to medieval times. Shariah’s Trojan Horse >>> By Frank J. Gaffney Jr.

Frank Gaffney Jr. is the founder and president of the Center for Security Policy and author of War Footing: 10 Steps America Must Take to Prevail in the War for the Free World (Hardcover)

Mark Alexander (Hardback)
Mark Alexander (Paperback)