…but is Sharia law in itself an existential threat? Excerpts from a piece by Reuel Marc Gerecht (via Terry Glavin, read this relevant post):
…I’ve spent a lot of time sitting with Shiite and Sunni clerics who were teaching Sharia and opining about daily life, and such schooling didn’t strike me then, and still doesn’t, as a good laboratory for terrorists, which is why, I suspect, so few terrorists have had any proper clerical training. A rigorous Islamic education may make you a killjoy, but it doesn’t make you a terrorist. If the empirical record tells us anything, it’s that a skimpy Islamic education combined with a mediocre—even a decent—Western education seems much more likely to produce an explosive mix.
…we shouldn’t see enemies where they are not. The Holy Law is, as it’s always been, what Muslims make of it. In the titanic struggle within Islam between those who fear modernity and those who embrace it, we would do well not to make the clergy our foes. They will go, as they always have done, where the majority of Muslims take them. Like Ayatollah Khomeini before him, bin Laden once thought that most Muslims would rise up to defend his cause. Both gentlemen were wrong. Westerners and most Muslims may not (yet) share with the same intensity and priority that many values, but we share enough to provide considerable hope that the “clash of civilizations” will end, as Grand Ayatollah Sistani no doubt wants it to, in a suspicious, at times tense, but peaceful and prosperous co-existence.
Reuel Marc Gerecht is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and a contributing editor at The Weekly Standard.
Please check the three links immediately above before commenting. And there is still…
A very good question relating to some Muslims
Mark
Ottawa
I would agree that Shari’a law isn’t an existential threat because it is clearly a failure. It simply can’t work in a globally connected modern world with large populations that no longer resemble the tribalism from which Shari’a law sprung. But what is an existential threat are the progressives or the enemy within like McGuinty who wanted to introduce Shari’a to Ontario until thank God and Allah and especially thank Muslim women who talked him out of it.
The progressive cultural relativists in our midst are the most serious threat to our liberty and it will take all our resources to counter them because they are like parasites. They are sucking the life blood out of our institutions; especially our campuses and the MSM. Taking the prosecution of Gert Wilders as an example, that isn’t about his stance on Islam, it’s about liberty; as was the Danish Cartoon incident, as well as here at home with the HRCs against Macleans/Steyn etc.
In short the existential threat is any Muslim or progressive McGuinty-type who wants to impose Shari’a law upon us or for that matter any other law other than our own law of the land that offers liberty to all.
[...] earlier post on Mr Gerecht: There may be much to criticize about [...]