Ismail Belghar, a 36-year-old Muslim man living in
Australia, assaulted, abducted, and nearly killed his sister-in-law. The
victim, a 25-year-old Moroccan named Canan Kokden, had dared to take her older
sister, Mrs. B, to the beach without Belghar’s permission. This heinous
effrontery was amplified, Belghar later recounted for police, when Mrs. B
thereupon “displayed her body,” sustaining the shoulder sunburn that tipped him
off.
To Australians, this may have been, well, just a day at
the beach. For Belghar, though, it was an “abhorrent” offense against sharia,
Islam’s legal code and comprehensive societal framework.
The telltale burn is also starting to show on the West’s
shoulders, our courts of law. Australia has not changed Belghar, but the
Belghars are changing Australia.
Innately, Islam is not moderate — just ask Recep Tayyip
Erdogan, Turkey’s prime minister, who rejects as “ugly and offensive” the very
term “moderate Islam.” Instead, Islam can be moderated, but only by a culture
that is self-confident and self-assertive. Alas, that is no longer Western
culture. So, the more Muslims immigrate, the less the West is moderating Islam.
It is Islam that leaves its mark.
In the usual endearing family way, Belghar telephoned his
sister-in-law to convey that he was a tad rankled: “You slut, how dare you take
my wife to the beach!” Afterwards, happening upon Ms. Kokden at a shopping mall
in New South Wales, he angrily confronted her, slapped her face, and dragged
her to the railing of an over-ground parking lot. As he seemed ready to hurl
her to the traffic below, her brother (Kokden’s chaperone at the mall) finally
stirred himself to intervene, tackling the assailant. Belghar was charged with
attempted murder, among other crimes.
As night follows day, Belghar’s defense counsel argued
that his client could not get a fair trial because Australians are too
Islamophobic: Once informed about the nature of the allegations and the fact
that he is a Muslim, jurors would surely leap to the crazy, bigoted conclusion
that Belghar was probably guilty of this “honor beating” — which, in fact, he
was. Just as he was, precisely, motivated by his Islamic beliefs.
Enter the jurist assigned to the case, the
pitch-perfectly named Ronald Solomon. He ruled that, yes, Belghar would be
compelled to stand trial, but also that the case would have to be decided by a
factfinder Judge Solomon could trust. No doubt you’ll be stunned to learn that
this reasonable, objective, and culturally sensitive factfinder turned out to
be . . . Judge Solomon himself. After all, ordinary citizens with nothing but
their common sense to fall back on lack the juridical acumen needed to weigh
what Solomon gently called Belghar’s “attitude,” “based on a religious or
cultural bias,” that he had absolute authority over his wife.
This Solomon was splitting not just the baby but the
country. As the Australian government contended on appeal, if the judge were
correct, an entirely separate system of due process would be required just for
Muslims. Every Islamic defendant would be entitled to evade the judgment of the
community — that judgment being the whole point of having a judicial system.
Muslims would instead get their own system, bringing to bear not the judgment
of the community but that of trained lawyers, specially attuned to Islam’s
various eccentricities.
This is the dream, of course. Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi,
the renowned Muslim Brotherhood jurist and “Arab Spring” maestro, brags that
Islam will “conquer” the West. He maintains, however, that the conquest will be
achieved not by force of arms but by dawa — Islam’s hyper-aggressive
proselytism that pushes on every cultural cylinder. While the ultimate goal is
to impose sharia standards on a society, “an immense barrier” can be
“traversed,” Qaradawi instructs, if Western nations can be “convinced . . . of
our right to live according to our faith — ideologically, legislatively, and
ethically.”
There are two very effective ways to go about this. The
first is voluntary apartheid: Muslims move into neighborhoods and, once there is
a critical mass, live ostentatiously and defiantly by their own mores. Life
becomes sufficiently unpleasant for other habitués that they flee. Pressure to
moderate and assimilate ebbs. In effect, it is the gradual assertion of Islamic
sovereignty over territory — without exploding a bomb or firing a shot.
But not all territory is physical. The law, too, is
susceptible to Balkanization, and is thus the second dawa target. Here, Muslim
supremacists find a willing partner: the Lawyer Left, so sympathetic to claims
that Western justice systems are inherently unjust, and that the law is an
instrument for social change, not an expression of the society’s unifying
principles.
Increasingly, sharia-based claims are finding hospitable
audiences. The Australian case mirrors one in New Jersey, where a judge denied
a protective order to a woman who was being serially raped and beaten by her
husband. The judge’s rationale? The couple was Islamic, and under sharia a
woman is required to submit to her husband’s authority and sexual demands. It
would be unfair, the judge decided, to hold the husband accountable when he was
really just adhering to his cultural norms. In Dearborn, Mich., Christian
missionaries were arrested on “disorderly conduct” charges after handing out
copies of St. John’s gospel on a public street outside an Arab festival. The
arrests were outrageous enough, but, worse, the authorities actually went ahead
with a prosecution.
To point these cases out, some argue, is to overreact.
After all, the system usually works. The Australian case was reversed on
appeal, and Belghar ended up pleading guilty to abduction and assault charges.
The New Jersey ruling, too, was reversed. And in Dearborn, the missionaries
were acquitted. But the vast majority of rulings in lower state courts do not
get appealed, and criminal charges are overwhelmingly settled by plea bargains.
Generally, it is only trials and appeals that break into the public
consciousness. However, trials and appeals, being expensive and burdensome, are
rare.
That means we really have no idea how much sharia is
seeping into Western law and jurisprudence. A year ago, without breaking a
sweat — i.e., by just looking at published appellate decisions — the Center for
Security Policy found 50 cases across the United States in which Islamic law
factored into rulings. Most of these involved domestic relations — issues
involving marriage and child custody. Yet, as a practical matter, there is no
telling how extensively sharia has encroached on Western law; we know only that
its reach grows as Muslim enclaves multiply.
How could it be otherwise? When not inveighing against
the label (some might say the oxymoron) “moderate Islam,” Prime Minister
Erdogan can be found bewailing the pressure on Muslims to assimilate in the
West. “Assimilation,” the prime minister says, “is a crime against humanity.”
For his trouble, Western chancelleries hail Erdogan as a visionary Islamic
leader — President Obama’s most trusted friend, with whom he finds so much
common ground that Erdogan has become his go-to guy on everything from solving
Syria to raising teenage daughters (or, as they are known around the White
House, “senior staffers”).
When the administration is not taking its cues from
Ankara, it is making common cause with the Organization of Islamic Cooperation.
This 57-member bloc of Muslim governments (including the “State of Palestine”)
sees itself as the global caliphate under construction. Echoing Erdogan —
Turkey and the Muslim Brotherhood having become two of the OIC’s most
influential voices — the OIC’s 2010 report on “Islamophobia” warned (at page
30): “Muslims should not be marginalized or attempted to be assimilated, but
should be accommodated. Accommodation is the best strategy for integration.”
Yes, but best for whom? Sharia’s integration into Western
law is not apt to be very accommodating for women and non-Muslims.
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