From The Hayride, February 10, 2011:
Editor’s Note: With all the recent headlines about the Muslim Brotherhood and its potential ascension to power in Egypt, we thought we’d re-post this piece from our own expert on their organization and methods, Christopher Holton. This piece originally appeared on Sept. 23, 2010…
On Thursday, September 17th I had the good fortune of addressing the Ascension GOP Roundtable at a luncheon sponsored by the Ascension Republican Women.
The subject of my speech was the threat of Jihad, Shariah (Islamic law) and the Muslim Brotherhood in America. Among the topics I discussed was Louisiana’s new law designed to protect individual constitutional liberties from the infiltration of foreign legal doctrines, such as Shariah (as I explained in a recent Hayride article).
Among the attendees at this event was a reporter for the Baton Rouge Advocate named David Mitchell. Mr. Mitchell arrived about 10 minutes after my speech began and he and I spoke for several minutes after the conclusion of the event.
On Saturday morning, September 18th, The Advocate published an article written by Mr. Mitchell about my speech two days before:
Speaker tells group dangers of shariah
In that article, two professors from LSU, Mark Gasiorowski and Reem Meshal, took issue with my remarks, calling them “off-base,” “inflammatory,” and “irresponsible.”
Professor Gasiorowski, who served as a visiting professor at the University of Tehran in the Islamic Republic of Iran in 1994, 1996 and again in 1998, dismissed the threat of Shariah law and, most ominously, mischaracterized the Muslim Brotherhood as “a moderate political organization working within the political system to oppose Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.”
Professor Meshal, who went to high school in Saudi Arabia before moving on to college in Egypt, misrepresented the meaning of the term jihad, the broadness of shariah law and again, most ominously, the meaning of the term “Al Takeeya” (usually spelled Al Taqiyya).
Rather than engage in a tit for tat with these two professors, neither of whom attended my speech, I decided to consult third-party sources for the purposes of this article to address the statements attributed to the two professors in the Advocate article.
The Threat from Shariah
We will start with Professor Gasiorowski’s dismissal of the threat of shariah in which he stated:
“It is really irresponsible to talk that way because we don’t have shariah law, and we’re not going to.”
Gasiorowski is wrong on both counts.
In my previous Hayride article on Louisiana’s countershariah law, I specifically cited three examples of Shariah law being invoked in U.S. court systems.
These were but three examples out of scores in which parties to court cases have sought to invoke shariah law in the United States. These examples came to us courtesy of Louisiana lawyer Stephen Gele of the group Lawyers Against Shariah.
