Unlike the Judeo-Christian principles that informed America’s
founding, classical sharia
does not abide a separation of spiritual from civic and political life.
Therefore, to rationalize on religious-liberty grounds our conscious avoidance
of Islamist ideology is to miss its thoroughgoing anti-constitutionalism.
Sharia rejects the touchstone of
American democracy: the belief that the people have a right to govern
themselves and chart their own destiny. In sharia governance, the people are
subjects not citizens, and they are powerless to question, much less to change,
Allah’s law. Sharia systematically discriminates against women and non-Muslims.
It is brutal in its treatment of apostates and homosexuals. It denies freedom
of conscience, free expression, property rights, economic liberty, and due
process of law. It licenses wars of aggression against infidels for the purpose
of establishing sharia as the law of the land.
Sharia is also heavily favored
by Muslims in majority-Muslim countries. Polling consistently tells us that
upwards of two-thirds of Muslims in the countries from which we are accepting
refugees believe sharia should be the governing system.
Thus, since we are vetting for
terrorism rather than sharia-adherence, and since we know a significant number
of Muslims are sharia-adherent, we are missing the certainty that we are
importing an ever-larger population hostile to our society and our Constitution
— a population that has been encouraged by influential Islamist scholars and
leaders to form Muslim enclaves throughout the West.
This leads seamlessly to
the second reason why the influx of refugees is calamitous. Not only are we
vetting for the wrong thing, we are ignoring the dynamics of jihadism.
The question is not whether we are admitting Muslims who currently have ties to
terrorist organizations; it is whether we are admitting Muslims who are apt
to become violent jihadists after they settle here.
The jihadism that most
threatens Europe now, and that has been a growing problem in the United States
for years, is the fifth-column variety. This is often referred to as “homegrown
terrorism,” but that is a misnomer. The ideology that ignites terrorism within
our borders is not native: It is imported. Furthermore, it is ubiquitously
available thanks to modern communications technology
In assessing the dynamic in
which ideological inspiration evolves into actual jihadist attacks, we find two
necessary ingredients: (1) a mind that is hospitable to jihadism because it is
already steeped in Islamic supremacism, and (2) a sharia-enclave environment
that endorses jihadism and relentlessly portrays the West as corrupt and
hostile.
Our current refugee policies
promote both factors.
Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/node/427698/print
