The following is from the NY Times:
Tennessee’s latest woes include high unemployment, continuing foreclosures and a battle over collective-bargaining rights for teachers. But when a Republican representative took the Statehouse floor during a recent hearing, he warned of a new threat to his constituents’ way of life: Islamic law.
The representative, a former fighter pilot named Rick Womick, said he had been studying the Koran. He declared that Shariah, the Islamic code that guides Muslim beliefs and actions, is not just an expression of faith but a political and legal system that seeks world domination. “Folks,” Mr. Womick, 53, said with a sudden pause, “this is not what I call ‘Do unto others what you’d have them do unto you.’ ”
Similar warnings are being issued across the country as Republican presidential candidates, elected officials and activists mobilize against what they describe as the menace of Islamic law in the United States.
Since last year, more than two dozen states have considered measures to restrict judges from consulting Shariah, or foreign and religious laws more generally. The statutes have been enacted in three states so far.
Voters in Oklahoma overwhelmingly approved a constitutional amendment last November that bans the use of Islamic law in court. And in June, Tennessee passed an antiterrorism law that, in its original iteration, would have empowered the attorney general to designate Islamic groups suspected of terror activity as “Shariah organizations.”
A confluence of factors has fueled the anti-Shariah movement, most notably the controversy over the proposed Islamic center near ground zero in New York, concerns about homegrown terrorism and the rise of the Tea Party. But the campaign’s air of grass-roots spontaneity, which has been carefully promoted by advocates, shrouds its more deliberate origins.
In fact, it is the product of an orchestrated drive that began five years ago in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, in the office of a little-known lawyer, David Yerushalmi, a 56-year-old Hasidic Jew with a history of controversial statements about race, immigration and Islam. Despite his lack of formal training in Islamic law, Mr. Yerushalmi has come to exercise a striking influence over American public discourse about Shariah.
Working with a cadre of conservative public-policy institutes and former military and intelligence officials, Mr. Yerushalmi has written privately financed reports, filed lawsuits against the government and drafted the model legislation that recently swept through the country — all with the effect of casting Shariah as one of the greatest threats to American freedom since the cold war.
The message has caught on. Among those now echoing Mr. Yerushalmi’s views are prominent Washington figures like R. James Woolsey, a former director of the C.I.A., and the Republican presidential candidates Newt Gingrich and Michele Bachmann, who this month signed a pledge to reject Islamic law, likening it to “totalitarian control.”
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11 Responses
He lives in Crown Heights.
WHY GIVE HIS NAME??????
DO u want the animals to go after him?????????
Take this article off line
y2r: This article is on the front page of the N.Y. Times today.
The legal complication is that the same law that would ban consulting Shariah, would also ban consulting Halacha. It would prohibit “get” laws. It would render a “heter iska” as being a void contract for being against public policy. It might prohibit any law the allows for a Bris Milah to be done by someone other than a licensed doctor. It would prohibit taking halacha into account in deciding whether, or how, to perform an autopsy. The real danger is that he is right that the First Amendment, which protects beliefs not actions, wouldn’t be an obstacle to such a law – but it wrong that it would be limited to selected aspects of Islamic law that can’t be enforced in the United States anyways.
Its on the front page of the New York Times
akuperma: Get laws are unconstitutional right off the bat. The state cant take into account a religious ritual.
All the “news” that’s fit for a chuckle.
Radical Islam is not the problem. It’s David Yerushalmi that’s behind all of our troubles with the underwear bombers, pulling the gentiles’ puppet strings with one hand, twisting his mustache with the other.
The NYT has invented a whole new, low genre: investigative fiction.
#6 – Of course the fact that something is a religious ritual is taken into account. Zoning rules that discriminate against religious riutals use of a building can be challenged on that ground. Institutionalized persons (such as patients, soldiers, prisoners, students in dorm) who want special foods have no right – but if they are asserting a religious right they need to be accomodated if reasonable. Taking off early on Friday or not working Saturday requires only a religious accomodationm, not a secular accomodation. Requiring a “get” or recognizing a marriage performed by a rabbi are all matters of religious rituals. If in order to ban “shariah” you prohibit the government from respecting religious law, it will have a profound impact on our community. If you ban “shariah” but not “halacha” or “canon” law, it would be discriminatory and would violate a host of constitutional prohibitions (separation, bill of attainder possibly, equal protection).
#6, you’re wrong. In a lot of states, family court judges are allowed to consider whether the divorcing husband and wife have both “removed religious barriers to remarriage” from their spouse when deciding on a financial settlement. Frum communities campaigned for these laws for years because of their ability to help agunos. However it is a clear case of American judges considering halacha in making legal decisions.
If the husband gives a “get” via a Reconstructionist or Reform “rabbi”, the court can’t do any more or demand he use an Orthodox rabbi, as the court cannot take into account religious differences and demand the husband perform the ritual with a specific denomination.
Hacham,
Actually what you’re suggesting would be blatantly unconstitutional if it was the law (which it isn’t). You can have a law recognizing that spouses should remove religious barriers to remarriage, but the law cannot dictate what those barriers are and are not.