RUTHFULLY YOURS

Lost in the controversy over Ben Carson’s remarks on Sharia and a Muslim President was the fact that a recent poll bears out his concerns.

Investigative journalist Paul Sperry reported during the Carson brouhaha that “Muslims living in the U.S….just this June told Polling Co. they preferred having ‘the choice of being governed according to Shariah,’ or Islamic law.” He also noted “the 60% of Muslim-Americans under 30 who told Pew Research they’re more loyal to Islam than America.”

Many key Muslim leaders in the U.S. have said the same thing. “Islam isn’t in America to be equal to any other faith, but to become dominant. The Koran should be the highest authority in America, and Islam the only accepted religion on earth.” So said the cofounder and longtime Board chairman of the Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), Omar Ahmad, back in 1998. He has since denied saying this, but the original reporter stands by her story.

Ahmed’s longtime colleague, Hamas-linked CAIR spokesman Ibrahim Hooper, said in 1993: “I wouldn’t want to create the impression that I wouldn’t like the government of the United States to be Islamic sometime in the future.”

Another prominent Muslim leader in the U.S., Siraj Wahhaj, said back in 2002: “If only Muslims were clever politically, they could take over the United States and replace its constitutional government with a caliphate.”

Younger Muslims have expressed the same sentiments. “We reject the U.N., reject America, reject all law and order. Don’t lobby Congress or protest because we don’t recognize Congress. The only relationship you should have with America is to topple it. . . . Eventually there will be a Muslim in the White House dictating the laws of Shariah.” That was Muhammad Faheed, a young Muslim leader at a Muslim Students Association meeting at Queensborough Community College in 2003.

Some may object that none of these quotes are newer than twelve years old. One wonders, then, what transformation in Islam in the United States has taken place over the last twelve years to make it likely that these men have changed their views.

Others may suggest that these men don’t speak for the vast majority of Muslims. If that is so, however, then where is the Muslim group that equals the power and influence of Hamas-linked CAIR while eschewing jihad violence, Islamic supremacism, and any desire to impose Sharia in the United States now or in the future? Where is the Muslim student group that rivals the Muslim Students Association in the number of campuses on which it has chapters (the MSA has hundreds, all over the country) while rejecting all attachment to the aspects of Sharia that are incompatible with U.S. law, such as its denial of the freedom of speech and of the equality of rights of women and non-Muslims?

And there are others as well. Sperry quotes Muzammil Siddiqi, the chairman of the Fiqh Council of North America and the North American Islamic Trust: “As Muslims, we should participate in the system to safeguard our interests and try to bring gradual change, (but) we must not forget that Allah’s rules have to be established in all lands, and all our efforts should lead to that direction.”

Sperry also quotes the Imam Zaid Shakir, co-founder of Zaytuna College in Berkeley, California, has said: “If we put a nationwide infrastructure in place and marshaled our resources, we’d take over this country in a very short time….What a great victory it will be for Islam to have this country in the fold and ranks of the Muslims.”

Really, what did you expect? Islam has been supremacist, authoritarian, and expansionist since its inception. U.S. Muslims are not from some sect that rejects all that. Yet a considerable portion of U.S. domestic and foreign policy is based on the assumption that Islam in the U.S. will be different: that Muslims here believe differently from those elsewhere, and do not accept the doctrines of violence against and subjugation of unbelievers that have characterized Islam throughout its history.

But on what is that assumption based? Nothing but wishful thinking. And future generations of non-Muslims will pay the price.