"Bignorance": Seattle Does NOT Give Preference to or Force Compliance with Sharia Law

I am appalled at the ignorance of the right that combines with deep, passionate hatred - bignorance is my new term for it, big, bigoted ignorance.  Behold the shameful tragedy that are the conservatives among us.

What Seattle is doing is entirely about fairness and creating opportunities -- both for residents and for local business.  Minneapolis has had a similar plan since 2006, which has helped expand home ownership, and as a result also expanded the tax base.  No ill side effects have resulted from it. What they are trying to do in Seattle similarly is to accommodate a form of lending that is not unique to Sharia law or to Muslim culture, but has been common to the major religions of the world, and many of the majorly influential cultures of the globe. 

It reflects not ONLY an ignorance about Islam or other groups or faiths, but a profoundly willful ignorance of world history generally and comparative religions, but ignorance of Christian European history specifically.  It is appalling racism combined with the worst hypocrisy to condemn in others the exact same conduct and beliefs in your own culture, history and traditions. 

From wikipedia:

Historically, some cultures (e.g., Christianity in much of Medieval Europe, and Islam in many parts of the world today) have regarded charging any interest for loans as sinful.

Some of the earliest known condemnations of usury come from the Vedic texts of India. Similar condemnations are found in religious texts from Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (the term is riba in Arabic and ribbit in Hebrew). At times, many nations from ancient China to ancient Greece to ancient Rome have outlawed loans with any interest. Though the Roman Empire eventually allowed loans with carefully restricted interest rates, the Christian church in medieval Europe banned the charging of interest at any rate (as well as charging a fee for the use of money, such as at a bureau de change).
The pivotal change in the English-speaking world seems to have come with lawful rights to charge interest on lent money, particularly the 1545 Act, "An Act Against Usurie" (37 H. viii 9) of King Henry VIII of England.

Islamophobic intolerance is strong on the right.  Every possible opportunity is grabbed to pile more hate on decent, U.S. law abiding Muslims, in an attempt to turn the USA into a theocracy with the crazies in charge. 

I've quoted from the excellent debunker of myths and lies, Snopes, below -- but their entry goes on much longer than what I have excerpted.  I encourage people to read the Snopes entry in its entirety.

From Snopes:

FACT CHECK: Is the city of Seattle forcing local businesses to comply with Sharia law?

Claim:   The mayor of Seattle has “launched” a new “rule” forcing businesses to comply with Sharia law.

image: http://www.snopes.com/images/m/mostlyfalse.png
   MOSTLY FALSE WHAT’S TRUE:   Seattle is exploring options to make home loans accessible to Muslims who are unable to participate in standard mortgage programs due to religious proscriptions.
WHAT’S FALSE:   Seattle businesses are being forced to comply with tenets of sharia law.

Examples:    [Collected via Twitter, July 2015]

Warner Todd Huston @warnerthuston

Seattle Mayor Planning to Force Banks to Give Sharia Compliant Homes Loans to Local Muslims http://rightwingnews.com/democrats/seattle-mayor-planning-to-force-banks-to-give-sharia-compliant-homes-loans-to-local-muslims/ …

11:00 AM - 17 Jul 2015

EMERSON E.RODRIGUES @EMERSON_NALITA

Seattle's Liberal Mayor Caves To Muslims Following Sharia Law - BuzzPo http://fb.me/44me5n3Hp 

4:00 AM - 17 Jul 2015

Bunch @bunch1243

Mayor, no Sharia law applies in America!! Stop this unconstitutional junk. http://www.bizjournals.com/seattle/blog/2015/07/seattle-mayor-offers-plan-to-help-followers-of.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+quicksnailsfeed+%28quicksnailsfeed%29 …

10:10 PM - 16 Jul 2015

Origins: On 17 July 2015, the unreliable web site Conservative Tribune published an article titled “ALERT: Seattle Mayor Launches Rules to Force Local Businesses to Comply With SHARIAH LAW” claiming that:

In one major American city, new rules may force banks to comply with Shariah law on lending and interest.
One of the major tenets of Shariah law is that Muslims cannot pay interest on loans. In countries with large Muslim populations, there’s something known as Islamic banking, which manages to get around this through various machinations.
Seattle Mayor Ed Murray wants to see that change, and he’s apparently willing to force banks into Shariah-compliant lending if necessary.
This means that, if it passes, Seattle will be the first city in America to mandate that its banks allow access to Shariah-compliant financing.

That claim was sourced to the TeaParty.org site’s article “Seattle Mayor Offers Plan for ‘Sharia-Compliant’ Housing Rules,” which offered the following visual:

That article was a word-for-word copy of a Puget Sound Business Journal article about a potential plan by the mayor of Seattle to help Muslims obtain home loans to buy houses. Quoting both Seattle Mayor Ed Murray and Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) Seattle-area Chapter Executive Director Arsalan Bukhari, the article explained that the city was examining housing options available to home-buying Muslims who are prohibited from participating in the traditional American housing market due to religious restrictions that prohibit them from obtaining standard home loans (despite their having desirable credit profiles).

GIGO: Islamophobia, the Ridiculous Radical Religious Right, and Hate Crimes

Remember when....... pick one.......the state of (blank) passed laws banning Sharia law?  There's more coming.

A panel of local Muslims last week denounced the state’s ban on a foreign law designed to bar Sharia or Islamic law.

“Folks were in this hysteria thinking that the minority Muslim Community here in North Carolina could somehow impose our laws, laws taken from the Sharia,” Imam Khalid Griggs of Community Mosque said at a forum on the subject held Tuesday, Jan. 27 at the Polo Recreation Center
...Proponents of the bans say they protect the Constitution, but many disagree. Muslim groups have been joined by Jewish organizations in their opposition to the bans. The Anti-Defamation League in Florida opposed that state’s foreign law ban, which passed last year, for fear of its potential effects on alimony, child custody and even the ability to remarry for Jews who divorce in Israel."

The right is wrong, and has been wrong since Barry Goldwater said this:

I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice! And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!

But Goldwater was correct when he noted, as an ardent opponent of the religious right:

Those who seek absolute power, even though they seek it to do what they regard as good, are simply demanding the right to enforce their own version of heaven on earth. And let me remind you, they are the very ones who always create the most hellish tyrannies.

Ironically, both quotes are from Goldwater's presidential nomination acceptance speech in San Francisco waaaaay back in 1964.

That right wing extremism has resulted in actual hate crimes.  No, not the shooting of the three Muslim students in North Carolina, but in more clear and obvious and genuine hate crimes like the burning of a Mosque in Ohio by an Indiana man 'riled up' by Fox News.

But there is plenty of hate to go around with out actual violence, like regarding the arson attack on a Muslim Center in Texas, where a person misrepresenting himself to be a fireman used social media to post this:

We have plenty of hate, by the right, from the right, riling up people with purely evil right wing propaganda full of lies.

There is a real tragedy that OPPOSING the evils and abuses of religion, like the ones below, from any and every religion, wherever it occurs, is being miscontrued as a hate crime in what appears to be an ordinary, every day case of gun violence by a man in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, in the tragic shooting deaths of three Muslim students by a man obsessed like George Zimmerman with trying to dominate and intimidate a wide variety of people in his immediate neighborhood with his excessive gun collection, a man who had apparent anger issues.

There are a lot of things to criticize Craig Hicks for, but being an Islamophobe is not one of them, nor should being Anti-Theist.   This is a case where the Left wing media has it wrong, in generalizing that being Anti-religion generally for what is wrong with religious oppression and conflict is the same as being Anti-Muslim.  And of course the Right has it wrong as well.  The promoting of Islamophobia was one of the things Hicks opposed.  Hicks was indicted by a grand jury yesterday, per MSNBC news:

A grand jury indicted a North Carolina man on Monday for the shooting deaths of a newlywed Muslim couple and the wife's sister last week, a court official said.
Craig Hicks, 46, of Chapel Hill, was charged by a grand jury with three counts of first-degree murder and one of discharging a firearm into an occupied dwelling, said Angela Kelly, an assistant clerk of the Durham County Superior Court.
Investigators have said initial findings indicate a dispute over parking prompted the shooting, but they are looking into whether Hicks was motivated by hatred toward the victims because they were Muslim.

A new law to ban Sharia law is being introduced in Montana, following passage in other states, and of course the overturning of such a ban after Oklahoma passed one. From another apparent Islamophobe/ bigot, in the Examiner:

Montana's Senate Bill 199–also called the Primacy of Montana Law–would prohibit the state from abiding by foreign religious customs and foreign laws within the court system. Well there's an idea! A United States that follows United States laws. I'm getting excited already. Maybe we'll even follow the Constitution one day. Janna Taylor, a Republican state senator in Montana, said that the bill is modeled after a similar anti-Sharia law that has been passed by Republicans in three other states so far: Tennessee, Kansas and Louisiana.

Of course, the islamophobe bigots CLAIM, wrongly, that they support the U.S. Constitution as well as their state constitutions. They just forget that we have the supremacy clause, which establishes that where there is a conflict between Federal and State law, Federal law 'wins' aka usually supersedes state law.

We have in this country, and have always had, religious courts in parallel to our secular court system.  In Christianity it is Canon law, versions of which are practiced by Roman Catholics, Eastern Rite Christianity, Anglicans and Episcopalians, Presbyterians and Methodists, Lutherans, and in some forms by Quakers and the Amish.  Judaism has Halacha (aka Halakha) law and courts, and Islam in this country has Sharia.

An example of how a religious court operates would be the requirement for both a SECULAR legal decision and a religious one to end a marriage, either by divorce or annulment in some faiths and the requirement to do so by secular courts as well, before one can marry, IF one's religion has that requirement (and some do).  In other instances religious courts are purely advisory, for example on the finer points of keeping Kosher or Halal.

If you don't want to go through the religious courts, then no one requires it for secular purposes; it is entirely voluntary as a matter of religious faith and conscience.

But the ridiculous radical religious right deliberately misrepresents this, ginning up fear that Sharia law is somehow a threat to replace secular law.  It never has been and never would or could be; this is pure propaganda, complete ignorance pandering to the gullible, looking for an excuse to express their hatred for anyone who does not conform to their belief or will. From the same source above:

At least individual states are finally taking matters into their own hands to stop the travesty of Sharia law in America. The Christian Action Network noted on its website that Sharia law, also called Islamic law, has been used in United States courts multiple times to override America's law under the guise of Freedom of Religion. Of course! Freedom of Religion is suddenly important when it involves catering to the violent religion of Islam. However, if you take your Bible to the public square you better have on a bullet proof vest and when you demand protection from your President against foreign and domestic threats you get psycho-babble about the Crusades.
The Christian Action Network site went on to say: “Montana may be on the brink of accomplishing what Congress, the federal court system and all but three other states could not: Banning Islamic Shariah law from being used in state courts.”

There is NO case, whatsoever, ANYWHERE in the United States, its possessions or territories, at any time, that any religious law, Sharia, Halacha, or Canon law, has been used to override American law.

Another example of this kind of fear mongering and hate peddling is occurring across right wing media over a Sharia court in Irving Texas.  Specifically, a proposal for a ban on Sharia law in Mississippi is referencing that religious court, from the Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN):

Lawmakers in Mississippi are proposing legislation that would ban Sharia law from the state.

"I think we need to make a stand and a statement that we are not going to allow it to be used in our court system," state Rep. John Moore, R-Brandon, said.

More than two dozen states have considered similar bans on the laws followed in Muslim nations.

A group of Muslims in northern Texas has created what may be the first official Sharia law system in the United States. 

The Sharia tribunal in Irving, Texas, said they're not planning to follow the type of Sharia practiced in Muslim countries, where severe punishments are handed out for even small crimes, women have very few rights, and blasphemy against Mohammed can result in a death sentence.

But in Mississippi, Rep. Moore recently introduced a meaure that blocks any foreign laws from being enforced or applied in the state and country.

He made clear that Sharia law is a big concern and wants to make sure it never gets argued in a Mississippi courtroom.

He said a Muslim defendent could try to use Sharia law as a defense against a U.S. criminal case.

This is a right wing lie; no one has succeeded in using such a defense, nor is it a defense attempt unique to one religion.  The closest we have come to a problem with a religious law interfering with the function of civil and criminal secular law was the abuse by the Roman Catholic church in conducting their own investigations under Canon Law instead of immediately reporting all accusations of sex crimes.  This led to priests being protected by the Church from legal action, including prosecution  under cover of priests being subject to Canon Law rather than civil and criminal secular law, as we see in the findings of subsequent law suits and investigative reports by journalists.

So we see the ridiculous, radical, religious right engaging in the most vile hypocrisy when it comes to outlawing Canon Law, and instead obsessing factually falsely about Sharia Law, as a justification and pretence for raging bigotry and Islamophobia.

From the Freethinker in the UK: Silly Fears Over Non-Existent Sharia Law

I've recently added the Freethinker, an atheist publication dating back to 1881, back on our blog roll; they have unusual religious stories which can be equally of interest and applicable to political ideologies in the U.S.  In particular, institutionalized Islamophobia is rampant on the right in this country.  It is a knee-jerk issue, a political dog whistle topic, especially among the would be Christian theocrats among the religious right, who would impose their notions of Christian/ Biblical law on the rest of us, to the detriment of our freedom of religion, or from religion.

This was one of the Freethinker's recent posts that caught my attention, in that context:

Two guys called Mo fined for spraying burqas on billboard models in London

THE Mos – short for teenage morons Mohammed Hasnath and Muhammed Tahir – have earned themselves convictions for criminal damage after they did a cover-up job on scantily-clad models featured in poster ads.

According to this report, the two 18-year-old Muslims from east London were caught defacing advertisements when members of the public called police.

Vandals Hasnath and Tahir

They had been spotted painting over a Lynx advert which showed Kelly Brook as an angel, as well as painting over the other side of the hoarding, which was an ad for the film Drive Angry.

I was not familiar with either the model or the product referred to; so I don't know which of these photos, if any, was the catalyst for the vandalism.  The movie looks to be a particularly vapid, stupid action film, so I hadn't paid any attention to it either.  Readers can see some of the photos in the ad campaign for a deodorant referenced, here.  The movie poster was probably something like this one,  below.  The fact that Ms. Heard, seen here, has recently announced that she is dating a woman, and is apparently bi-sexual, may have been an additional incentive for the vandalism, but the images themselves in either case are hardly hard core exposure.

The article continues (numpties is Scot-speak for idiots).  These two fools clearly were clueless; that they could be so naively ignorant is in itself a concern as to what kind of world view and lack of education they must have to think and act this way.  Beyond that they seem harmless enough, and appear to have wised up after their quite peaceful encounter with the law.

When police arrived, they admitted what they had done.

The numpties admitted the offence, saying they were acting in the greater good because women should not be uncovered.  Taiwo Akinrowo, prosecuting in their recent court case, said:

They told them [the police] that the way the women had been photographed was against their religion and said it was a sin in Islam for a male to look twice at a woman who is not covered. Both have admitted painting over them. At first, they did not think it was a bad thing to do but they accept that it was not legal because it was not their property.

I personally, as a woman, have an issue with any religion that operates on the premise that when men experience lust - as both men and women sometimes do - it is the women who are held responsible somehow for the troubling (or pleasurable, or both) emotions that the men feel.  While there are cultures that use Sharia law to enforce that responsibility on women, it is far more an ethnic and  regional cultural attitude than a religious one.   There are numerous Islamic men and women who have no problems with western morality and dress, including the wearing of bikini style swimwear, or underwear models, etc. in advertising.  This is more an example of a relatively innocent culture clash than a dangerous Islamic threat.  These young men were stupid, but well intentioned.

Hasnath – who had earlier been fined £100 for posting stickers which declared Tower Hamlets a “gay-free zone” – declared:

If someone was to look at our wife or mother or daughter with a bad intention we would not like it, so we were just trying to do good.

They were each told to pay costs of £283 and were released on a 12-month conditional discharge.

Last month, posters were found in Tower Hamlets, Newham and Waltham Forest declaring the boroughs to be “Sharia-controlled zones”.

The posters said:

You are entering a Sharia controlled zone. Islamic rules enforced.

Underneath, images indicate that smoking, alcohol and music are banned.

Islamic hate preacher Anjem Choudary, who said in 2008 that gays should be stoned to death, has claimed responsibility for the campaign.

This hardly translates into a threat of enforcement of Sharia law; Andjem Choudary can say whatever he likes, but if the only response is spray painting bill boards in questionable taste, there is little harm done. 
Quotes from the wikipedia entry for him provide a larger perspective for the conservative religious views (photos from other sources):

Choudary has received little support from the mainstream UK Muslim population, and has been largely criticised in the media.

and

Choudary, center

 In January 2010 Guardian contributor Mehdi Hasan wrote: "Is Choudary an Islamic scholar whose views merit attention or consideration? No. Has he studied under leading Islamic scholars? Nope. Does he have any Islamic qualifications or credentials? None whatsoever. So what gives him the right to pontificate on Islam, British Muslims or 'the hellfire'? Or proclaim himself a 'sharia judge'?", and claimed that Choudary was "as unrepresentative of British Muslim opinion, as he is of British anti-war opinion."

and 

Choudary, left

Choudary has received little support from the mainstream Muslim community, although in January 2010 Telegraph writer Jamie Bartlett speculated that he might have "some" support among the minority of Muslims in the UK who could be considered to hold conservative views.

There have been no instances that I can find of alcohol being banned, or smoking, or music, or the stoning of gay men, or even harrassment of men or women minding their own business, expressing their own personal style, walking down an English street; no Sharia law in evidence ANYWHERE.  Nor is there any indication that is likely to happen any time soon, because while events like this are a minor embarrassment to the perpetrators, they are no real threat to anyone. 

The low key approach, rather than an over reaction to non-existent Sharia law is more than sufficient, and it avoids the escalation of fear, hostility and ill-will.  Any other reaction is an over reaction, other than to push back equally against militant Christian fundamentalists who would equally impose their extremist notions on the rest of us, if we let them.