JUST SAY NO TO SHARIAH FINANCE

ATTORNEY DAVID YERUSHALMI has written the comprehensive explanation of what Shariah Finance is, and why it is a threat to free people.

The Law Offices of David Yerushalmi, P.C. (licensed since 1984) specializes in trial and appellate litigation. David Yerushalmi and his staff are available for consultation to lawyers and clients in complex civil matters in federal and state courts, especially matters relating to securities law, racketeering, national security, and international law.

The Law Offices of David Yerushalmi, P.C. also represents clients and assists attorneys in relations with legislative, executive and administrative agencies.

With a legal practice licensed in Washington, D.C., New York, California, and Arizona, the Law Offices of David Yerushalmi, P.C. is well-positioned to provide strategic and tactical advantage in complex litigation matters both in federal courts and in the state courts in which they practice.

If you are at all interested in becoming informed on this all-important subject, the article, "Shari’ah's 'Black Box”: Civil Liability And Criminal Exposure Surrounding Shari’ah-Compliant Finance," can be found in pdf form—here.

MORE ODINGA MESS FOR OBAMA

DID YOU READ our previous post? If not, please oblige. Then face some facts about our Democratic nominee.

Does not this Obama-Odinga relationship, just like so many of his past relationships, barrel directly to the question of Obama's oft-stated position of his supposed superior judgement? Of course it does. And no, his judgment is not only not superior in any sense of the word, and is not even ordinary, but is demonstrably suspect.

Raila Odinga, running on the slogan—Agent of Change—lost the race for President of Kenya in December 2007 and shortly thereafter waged a campaign of widespread ethnic warfare in protest of this loss. Following the post-electoral crisis that resulted in the deaths of 1,500 people and the displacement of 600,000 more, Odinga took office as Prime Minister, at the head of a national unity government, in April 2008.

Read more in this posting by Pamela Geller of Atlas Shrugs—which is also home to a frightening exposé of the candidate's citizenship controversy, as well.

To be clear about this, on August 2007, Odinga signed an agreement with Islamic extremists to institute Islamic Law should he be elected President of Kenya, and he vowed to end cooperation with the United States in the war against terror. We have one question. Why did the junior senator from Illinois actively campaign for him on the American tax dollar? When Obama went to Kenya in August of 2006, he was hosted by Raila and spoke in praise of him at rallies in Nairobi…

Obama’s bias for his fellow Luo (tribe) was so blatant that a Kenya government spokesman denounced Obama during his visit as Raila’s “stooge.”



Obama’s older brother still lives in Kenya. Abongo “Roy” Obama is a Luo activist and a militant Muslim who argues that the black man must “liberate himself from the poisoning influences of European culture.” (sounds a bit like Reverend Jeremiah Wright, doesn’t he?

To further undermine democratic elections, our own democratically elected president, Bush, as well as the extremely undemocratically appointed EU beaurocrats urged power sharing between Odinga and the duly elected Mwai Kibaki:

Asked in a Reuters interview whether Kibaki and Odinga should share power, President Bush remarked: “I believe that they have an opportunity to come together in some kind of arrangement that will help heal the wounds of a closely divided election.”

The European Union urged them to form a coalition government, a plan that was then put into play.

Imagine having foreign nations demand that John Kerry or Al Gore share power with Bush—or Obama share with McCain for that matter*#151;if a hotly contested election is the result.

Combine more than two decades of hate inspiring rhetoric of Reverend Wright & Louis Farakhan, the re-education camps and explosive ambitions and experiences of William Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn (& their Weather Underground cohorts), the varied and expanding financial links to Middle Eastern/anti-American/pro-sharia interests—with the current democratic nominee. Add a global media industry fully engaged in pro-Obama advocacy under the guise of anti-racism memes.

A recipe for political pandemonium.

In breaking news, Jerome Corsi, who wrote the book called The Obama Nation went to Kenya recently to dig into more about Obama. He has being jailed by Kenyan immigration officials, who announced today they are releasing but deporting Corsi.The DEmocratic camp has said it has no comment on these developments.

Obama, change you can believe in...

TANCREDO INTRODUCES ANTI-SHARIA LAW

In America we call this police brutality, but Muslims demand sharia law...

IN THE WAKE OF BRITAIN'S recent capitulation to Sharia, this is just the kind of heads up legislation that we in the United States need, and should embrace wholeheartedly.

Let's be clear that Colorado Congressman Tancredo, despite his failed bid for the presidency, is exceptionally courageous—given the current political climate of cringing ignorance if not outright appeasement to accelerating Islamic demands—in introducing this bill, and The Two-Fisted Quorum hopes that it will, at very least, ignite a national debate on the dangers of unchecked Islamic immigration, aggression, and takeover aspirations.

From Borderfire Report:

WASHINGTON, DC—Amid disturbing revelations that the verdicts of Islamic Sharia courts are now legally binding in civil cases in the United Kingdom, U.S. Representative Tom Tancredo (R-Littleton) moved quickly today to introduce legislation designed to protect the United States from a similar fate.

According to recent news reports, a new network of Sharia courts in a half-dozen major cities in the U.K. have been empowered under British law to adjudicate a wide variety of legal cases ranging from divorces and financial disputes to those involving domestic violence.

“This is a case where truth is truly stranger than fiction,” said Tancredo. “Today the British people are learning a hard lesson about the consequences of massive, unrestricted immigration.”

Sharia law, favored by Muslim extremists around the world, often calls for brutal punishment—such as the stoning of women who are accused of adultery or have children out of wedlock, cutting off the hands of petty thieves and lashings for the casual consumption of alcohol. Under Sharia law, a woman is often required to provide numerous witnesses to prove rape allegations against an assailant—a near impossible task.

That specific number of MALE witnesses a Muslim woman needs to prove her rape case is FOUR! As if rape can't happen unless it is a gang bang, conducted by turncoats. This is an abomination, a miscarriage of justice, a fraud, a human rights atrocity going on around the world, and soon to a neighborhood near you, if you don't wake up! Do not be fooled by smiling taqiyya-spewing Muslims. They are a 1400 year old sadistic cult with no place in the West. Wake up you silly Americans. This is not a cute episode of South Park or The Simpsons. This is menacing blood and guts stuff. You need to wake up, and see what we are doing to ourselves by allowing this political machine masquerading as a religion to infiltrate our nation and our institutions.

“When you have an immigration policy that allows for the importation of millions of radical Muslims, you are also importing their radical ideology—an ideology that is fundamentally hostile to the foundations of western democracy—such as gender equality, pluralism, and individual liberty,” said Tancredo. “The best way to safeguard America against the importation of the destructive effects of this poisonous ideology is to prevent its purveyors from coming here in the first place.”

Tancredo’s bill, dubbed the “Jihad Prevention Act,” would bar the entry of foreign nationals who advocate Sharia law. In addition, the legislation would make the advocacy of Sharia law by radical Muslims already in the United States a deportable offense.

Tancredo pointed to the results of a recent poll conducted by the Centre for Social Cohesion as evidence that the U.S. should act to prevent the situation in Great Britain from replicating itself here in the United States. The poll found that some 40 percent of Muslim students in the United Kingdom support the introduction of Sharia law there, and 33 percent support the imposition of an Islamic Sharia-based government worldwide.

“We need to send a clear message that the only law we recognize here in America is the U.S. Constitution and the laws passed by our democratically elected representatives,” concluded Tancredo. “If you aren’t comfortable with that concept, you aren’t welcome in the United States.”

Of course, this will be contested by both the hard Leftists who say they don't believe that national borders of any kind should exist, except when THEY CONTROL the keys to the heated pool, and the equally inspired Muslims who agree to the same thought, EXCEPT WHEN THEY THEMSELVES CONTROL the lands of the ummah.

Oi vey! Pure diabolical non-sense.

FITZGERALD: HOW DUMB, HOW LONG?

HUGH FITZGERALD OF JIHAD WATCH today asks, "How dumb do we have to be, and for how long?" The answer of course, is blowing in the wind. And you know what that means. Massive destruction. Bombs and explosions of every sort do indeed tend to present the olfactory sensitive with a peculiar odor of the day. But until then, let's just play with words, and send them money, yep that's what they need, more money, boast our misguided leaders.

SAN'A, Yemen - A bomb rigged to a motorcycle blew up amid a crowd of worshippers leaving Friday prayers at a mosque in a rebel stronghold of northern Yemen, killing at least 18 people and wounding about four dozen, officials said. –from this news article

Shi'a and Sunnis at it again. Yes, of course, the American government must do what it can to try to stop this kind of internecine warfare among Muslims, in Yemen as in Iraq. Otherwise there might be a "catastrophic" situation. Otherwise there might be "chaos" in the Middle East.

And somehow this "chaos" and this "catastrophe" that will ensue will, we are told, be bad for us, in ways always unspecified, as if we are simply to accept the conclusion of our betters—you know, the people in the government who pick up their news just as you and I do, but who lack the time, and the inclination (unlike you, unlike me) to spend the time to read about Islam, to read the texts of Islam, to learn what the Western students of Islam (not the espositos but the real thing) have said about the contents of Islam.

For they are just too occupied and preoccupied to sit in a room and read. They may be cosseted, chauffeured about, and so on, but their daily lives are full of meetings, and hectic busyness, and travelling hither and yon, and getting someone above to "sign off" on something, and coming up with "policies" that need to be formulated by consulting with everyone and his brother, and then written up in the stilted bloodless bureaucratic language which is now the favored medium—they know no other, they have never been exposed to any other—of those in the government, and who presume to instruct, and to protect us. They have to deal now with this crisis, now with that, and with every part of the world.

How can someone as mediocre as Bush, advised by someone as mediocre as Rice—people who have never had the inclination or leisure to read widely in history, or to exercise their imaginative faculty through literature—be expected to have read about Islam? Yet if you cannot imagine something, it is difficult to think about it. If you cannot imagine an islamized Western Europe, if it is simply beyond you, then you will not worry about what that would mean, and are not likely to come up with ways to avoid that completely plausible and deplorable, and entirely avoidable, future for the heart of the West.

One more thing. If leaving Iraq would, as some direly warn, cause great disruption, chaos, a "catastrophe" in the area, then why don't any of the Sunni Arab states, presumably those who would have the most to lose, bother to give any aid at all to the government of Iraq? Answer: why should they? They do not wish to shore up Shi'a who rule in Baghdad. They will, however, continue to urge the Americans to stay, in order to keep the Sunnis in Iraq supplied with guns and money and with a powerful protector that will pressure the Shi'a to make concessions, and concessions—and the Americans will, listening gravely to the advice of rulers of Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the other small sheikdoms, fall for it, not realizing how they are being suckered.

And if leaving Iraq would, as some direly warn, lead to terrible disruptions in the supply of oil (during the Iran-Iraq War, that lasted for eight years, there was little disruption and the price of oil went steadily down), then why aren't other oil-consuming nations concerned? Why hasn't China lifted a finger, or spent a penny, to help promote stability and prosperity in Iraq? Could it be that the Chinese are, like the Sunni Arabs, perfectly content to watch the continuing squandering of American money, material, men, morale, happy to see us bleed ourselves, in order to do something which will benefit China and other oil-consumers as much as, perhaps more than, it will benefit the United States?

How dumb do we have to be, and for how long?

Get our troops out of Iraq. Let he chips fall where they may. Inform the public what we are really up against, Begin preparations for all-out war. Seal the ALL borders. Stop all Muslim immigration. Issue national identity cards. Begin a national rationing program for pertinent goods, especially petroleum products. Modify trading levels with China until they bulk up their safety oversights and rectify the massive trade deficit the US has been complaining about for over a decade. Tell Americans that each of us need to gird our loins with the American spirit and start acting like we've got good sense. Maybe, just maybe, candidate Ron Paul had a good idea, or two, or several.

And here's some positive news (well, the ACLU is against it, as well as all the usual suspects who are probably not quite as "law-abiding" as they would have us believe) on the defense front. The LA Times has reported that the LAPD has instituted a new anti-terrorism program that should serve as a national model for detecting suspicious activity, reporting it peer to peer and upward to the federal levels.

NOT SO FAST, CONGRESSMAN

THE NETHERLANDS IS BRACING for a new round of violence at home and against its embassies in the Middle East. The storm would be caused by "Fitna," a short film that is scheduled to be released this week. The film, which reportedly includes images of a Quran being burned, was produced by Geert Wilders, a member of the Dutch parliament and leader of the Freedom Party. Mr. Wilders has called for banning the Quran—which he has compared to Hitler's "Mein Kampf"—from the Netherlands.

After concern about the film led Mr. Wilders's Internet service provider to take down his Web site, Mr. Wilders issued a statement this week that he will personally distribute DVDs "On the Dam" if he has to. That may not be necessary, as the Czech National Party has reportedly agreed to host the video on its Web site.

Excellent, sir. All details comport to known intelligence. Those first two paragraphs of a letter penned by Republican Congressman Peter Hoekstra state plainly the case against Islamic aggression and taqiyya. However, the good legislator then stumbles with typical Western appeasement in his next paragraph:

Reasonable men in free societies regard Geert Wilders's anti-Muslim rhetoric, and films like "Fitna," as disrespectful of the religious sensitivities of members of the Islamic faith. But free societies also hold freedom of speech to be a fundamental human right. We don't silence, jail or kill people with whom we disagree just because their ideas are offensive or disturbing. We believe that when such ideas are openly debated, they sink of their own weight and attract few followers.

Wait a minute. Not so fast, Congressman. Reasonable men in free societies have no trouble at all exposing the "religious sensibilities" of the Islamic faith, a supremicist faith which does not curry nor warrant the respect of the West. Neither does this so-called religion curry or warrant the respect of the West's concept of the freedom of religion because reciprocity is forbidden to them by their own holy books and traditions. This so-called faith is a complete totalitarian system and is itself the trouble. This totalitarian faith is a free society's declared enemy. And we are not fooled by your controlled acquiesence to this menace, sir. But let us allow the Congressman to continue:

Our country allows fringe groups like the American Nazi Party to demonstrate, as long as they are peaceful. Americans are permitted to burn the national flag. In 1989, when so-called artist Andres Serrano displayed his work "Piss Christ"—a photo of a crucifix immersed in a bottle of urine—Americans protested peacefully and moved to cut off the federal funding that supported Mr. Serrano. There were no bombings of museums. No one was killed over this work that was deeply offensive to Christians.

Criticism of Islam, however, has led to violence and murder world-wide. Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa calling for Muslims to kill Salman Rushdie over his 1988 book, "The Satanic Verses." Although Mr. Rushdie has survived, two people associated with the book were stabbed, one fatally. The 2005 Danish editorial cartoons lampooning the prophet Muhammad led to numerous deaths. Dutch director Theodoor van Gogh was killed in 2004, several months after he made the film "Submission," which described violence against women in Islamic societies. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a former Dutch member of parliament who wrote the script for "Submission," received death threats over the film and fled the country for the United States.

The violence Dutch officials are anticipating now is part of a broad and determined effort by the radical jihadist movement to reject the basic values of modern civilization and replace them with an extreme form of Shariah. Shariah, the legal code of Islam, governed the Muslim world in medieval times and is used to varying degrees in many nations today, especially in Saudi Arabia.

Radical jihadists are prepared to use violence against individuals to stop them from exercising their free speech rights. In some countries, converting a Muslim to another faith is a crime punishable by death. While Muslim clerics are free to preach and proselytize in the West, some Muslim nations severely restrict or forbid other faiths to do so. In addition, moderate Muslims around the world have been deemed apostates and enemies by radical jihadists.

Radical jihadists believe representative government is un-Islamic, and urge Muslims who live in democracies not to exercise their right to vote. The reason is not hard to understand: When given a choice, most Muslims reject the extreme approach to Islam. This was recently demonstrated in Iraq's Anbar Province, which went from an al-Qaeda stronghold to an area supporting the U.S.-led coalition. This happened because the populace came to intensely dislike the fanatical ways of the radicals, which included cutting off fingers of anyone caught smoking a cigarette, 4 p.m. curfews, beatings and beheadings. There also were forced marriages between foreign-born al Qaeda fighters and local Sunni women.

There may be a direct relationship between the radical jihadists' opposition to democracy and their systematic abuse of women. Women have virtually no rights in this radical world: They must conceal themselves, cannot hold jobs, and have been subjected to honor killings. Would most women in Muslim countries vote for a candidate for public office who supported such oppressive rules?

Not all of these radicals are using violence to supplant democratic society with an extreme form of Shariah. Some in the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Germany and Denmark are attempting to create parallel Islamic societies with separate courts for Muslims. According to recent press reports, British officials are investigating the cases of 30 British Muslim school-age girls who "disappeared" for probable forced marriages.

While efforts to create parallel Islamic societies have been mostly peaceful, they may actually be a jihadist "waiting game," based on the assumption that the Islamic populations of many European states will become the majority over the next 25-50 years due to higher Muslim birth rates and immigration. [Emphasis added and note: This is precisely what happened in Lebanon]

What is particularly disturbing about these assaults against modern society is how the West has reacted with appeasement, willful ignorance, and a lack of journalistic criticism. Last year PBS tried to suppress "Islam vs. Islamists: Voices from the Muslim Center," a hard-hitting documentary that contained criticism of radical jihadists. Fortunately, Fox News agreed to air the film.

Even if the new Wilders film proves newsworthy, it is likely that few members of the Western media will air it, perhaps because they have been intimidated by radical jihadist threats. The only major U.S. newspaper to reprint any of the controversial 2005 Danish cartoons was Denver's Rocky Mountain News. You can be sure that if these cartoons had mocked Christianity or Judaism, major American newspapers would not have hesitated to print them.

European officials have been similarly cautious. A German court ruled last year that a German Muslim man had the right to beat his wife, as this was permitted under Shariah [emphasis added]. Britain's Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, stated last month that the implementation of some measure of Shariah in Britain was "unavoidable" and British Muslims should have the choice to use Shariah in marital and financial matters.

So explain to me again why we should respect this so-called religion?

I do not defend the right of Geert Wilders to air his film because I agree with it. I expect I will not. (I have not yet seen the film). I defend the right of Mr. Wilders and the media to air this film because free speech is a fundamental right that is the foundation of modern society. Western governments and media outlets cannot allow themselves to be bullied into giving up this precious right due to threats of violence. We must not fool ourselves into believing that we can appease the radical jihadist movement by allowing them to set up parallel societies and separate legal systems, or by granting them special protection from criticism.

And why Congressman, are you not convinced that Geert Wilders in correct in his assessment of Islam? You sir, are more politically correct than you give yourself credit. We did not allow Nazis into this country in the years leading up to and during World War II. Why do we persist in allowing Muslim immigration into this country, knowing what we know, knowing what even you seem to know?

A central premise of the American experiment are these words from the Declaration of Independence: "All men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." There are similar statements in the U.S. Constitution, British Common Law, the Napoleonic Code and the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights. As a result, hundreds of millions in the U.S. and around the world enjoy freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of religion and many other rights.

These liberties have been won through centuries of debate, conflict and bloodshed. Radical jihadists want to sacrifice all we have learned by returning to a primitive and intolerant world. While modern society invites such radicals to peacefully exercise their faith, we cannot and will not sacrifice our fundamental freedoms.

Mr. Hoekstra, who was born in the Netherlands, is ranking Republican on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.

IN COPENHAGEN PROTESTORS ATTACKED

The attack was not covered by MSM

This is not 1773, and standing up to the Islamofascists in America will never be a Boston tea party, but Europe meanwhile already has its hands full of its own blood, evidenced this time as several SIAO members from Denmark suffered an attack on their lives by Leftist thugs in the lead-up to the October 21 demonstration against the Islamization of Europe. This is nothing new, of course. Just within the past week, David Horowitz is shouted down by ill-mannered and poorly educated students at Emory University in Atlanta and Robert Spencer is repeatedly interrupted with shouts at the University of Rhode Island by opponents of free speech there, and both must travel with their own security squads for personal protection. This scene in Denmark and those happening around the campuses of America this week should serve to remind us that resisting fascism in any form is not a picnic. There will be casualties. But do not meet violence with violence, otherwise you will play into the hands of the enemy and give them the ammunition they need to retaliate. It is not the Muslim community who should be the focal point of attack but our own political leaders who have brought us into the present mess with appeasements and blatant ignorance. These outrages among peoples without borders offers merely a glimpse of what is to come should our political leaders continue to mishandle the problem.

As is pointed out often anywhere outside the mainstream media, left-wing radicals and their heroes can come to any campus in America (Ahmadinejad at Columbia) and speak to great cheers without security being breeched even once, but conservative speakers like Brigitte Gabriel, Walid Shoebat and others who disagree with the jihadi left, face grave personal dangers with each speaking engagement they accept.

Of course, the Left will continue its infilading probe into the hornet's nest. Witness this week's Code Pink attack on Condoleeza Rice. The beat goes on.

So let's persevere with our campaign, continuing to clarify the issues relating to the Islamofascist threat, but we should never descend to the tactics of these "counter" aggressors here in the US, misdirected groups such as Code Pink and IVAW. We enjoy these liberties of free speech only because of the sacrifices made by our forefathers (forefathers who these radicals now despise) with their own self-loathing apotheosis of the Other. Yes, there is much wrong with American policy, both at home and abroad. We here at the Project just feel another tact is required of our dissenters.

What is happening in our institutions of higher learning is abominable. In fact, it is these same "liberal" liberties of free speech and freedom of assembly absent in so much of the world that the enemies of liberty wish to deny those of us less susceptible to their unprovable ideologies while using such "liberal" laws to gain an advantage, many by the institution of "political correctness" onward toward sharia law which are incompatible with democratic principles and the US Constitution.

Such insanity! Better to consider the very real oppression endured by the ordinary citizens of Islamic regimes.

Coming to a blog near you. Dare I say it, should we just stop globalization in its tracks right now! Yes, let's just recoil back in time and sanctimony to our own respective testaments in history, pick a date, any date, and demand that the rest of the world feel free to crawl back under the rock they first left with outstretched hand. That should clear all this mess up, nice and tidy, right?

TALES OF PURCHASING POWER

From the Washington Times article—The Camel in the Tent—by Rachel Ehrenfeld and Alyssa A. Lappen

Objections to Borse Dubai's proposed acquisition of 20 percent of Nasdaq last week prompted Massachusetts Rep. Barney Frank to quip, "In the ports deal, the concern was smuggling something or someone dangerous... What are we talking about here—smuggling someone onto a stock exchange?"

It is not "who" Dubai will smuggle into the stock exchange we should worry about. It's the arrival of the world's first Islamic stock exchange exerting unprecedented Islamic influence in the heart of the U.S. and Western economies that should raise our alarm. Dubai's handsomely paid Washington lobbyists see nothing wrong with that. Rather, they claim the deal benefits U.S. financial markets, giving "Nasdaq access to rich Mideast pockets." Unfortunately, the deal also increases the appeal and influence of Islamic financing in the West.

What is "Islamic" finance? Islamic, or Shariah-based finance, is the 1920s invention of Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna. He ordered the Muslim Brothers to create an independent Islamic financial system to supercede the Western economy, facilitating the spread of Islam worldwide. He set the theories and practices and his contemporaries and successors developed Shariah-based terminology for "Islamic economics," finance and banking. Attempts by Muslim Brotherhood members in the early 1930s to establish Islamic banking in India failed. Egyptian President Gamal Abdel-Nasser shut down the second attempt in 1964, after only one year, later arresting and expelling the Muslim Brothers for attempts to kill him. Saudi Arabia welcomed them and adopted their ideas.

In 1969, soon after a mentally deranged Australian Christian fundamentalist, Michael Dennis Rohan, tried to set fire to the Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, the Saudis convened the Conference for the Islamic Organizations (OIC) to unify the "struggle for Islam," and have been its major sponsor ever since. The 56 OIC members include Iran, Sudan and Syria.

Based in Jeddah, "pending the liberation of Jerusalem," the OIC mandates and coordinates actions to "support the Palestinian people, assist them in recovering their rights and liberating their occupied territories." The OIC's first international undertaking was the 1975 establishment of the Islamic Development Bank "in accordance with the principles of the Shariah," marking the beginning of the fast-growing, petrodollar-based Islamic financing market. From 1975 to 2005, the bank approved more than $46 billion in funding to Muslim countries. Since 2000, it has transferred hundreds of millions of dollars raised especially to support the Palestinian intifada and suicide bombers' families -- and has channeled United Nations funds to Hamas. Yet the bank received U.N. observer status in 2007.

Overseeing Shariah finance are the 1991-Bahrain-registered and -based Accounting and Auditing Organization for Islamic Financial Institutions (AAOIFI), which laid the groundwork for the global Islamic financial network and the "de facto Islamic Central Bank"—the Islamic Financial Services Board (IFSB), established in 2002 in Kuala Lumpur "to absorb the 11 September shock and reinforce the stability of Islamic finance." Chairing the meeting, then-Malaysian Prime Minister Mohamed Mahathir stated: "A universal Islamic banking system is a jihad worth pursuing to abolish this slavery [to the West]."

According to Saleh Kamel, president of the Saudi Dallah Al-Baraka Group and the Islamic Chamber of Commerce and Industry (ICCI), more than 400 Islamic financial institutions currently operate in 75 countries. They now hold more than $800 billion in assets—growing at a rate of 15 percent annually. All investments with Islamic financial institutions are subject to the minimum zakat (Islamic charitable wealth tax). On April 30, the OIC, the organization that initiated global Muslim riots after the Danish cartoon publications, established the clerical International Commission for Zakat, replacing more than 20,000 organizations that previously collected the money. Islamic clerics' "expert committee" in Malaysia now supervises and distributes those funds. The new committee will shortly distribute to Muslim charities roughly $2 billion collected during Ramadan.

But not all charities are equal. In 1999, Muslim Brotherhood spiritual leader Yousef al-Qaradawi decreed: "Declaring holy war [and] fighting for such purposes is the way of Allah for which zakat must be spent." If past zakat distribution is any indication, all Muslim jihadist-terror organizations (including Palestinian Hamas, the al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades, and the many al Qaeda offspring) will benefit.

Shortly after September 11, Osama bin Laden called upon Muslims "to concentrate on hitting the U.S. economy through all possible means. Look for the key pillars of the U.S. economy. Strike the key pillars of the enemy again and again and they will fall as one."

Most Arab and Muslim states publicly denounced bin Laden. But the impending Nasdaq acquisition, the purchases of over 52 percent of the London Stock Exchange and 47.6 percent of OMX (Nordic exchange) and the vigorous expansion of Shariah financing apparently follow the Muslim Brotherhood-bin Laden script.

President Bush on Sept. 25 at the United Nations called on all nations to open their markets. Surely, he did not mean opening the markets to domination by Shariah.
_______________

Rachel Ehrenfeld is director of the American Center of Democracy and a board member at the Committee for the Present Danger. She is also a member of the American Congress for Truth Board of Advisors. Alyssa A. Lappen is a senior fellow at the American Center of Democracy.