The Anti-Sharia Law Movement in the United States

In late April 2011, Rick Santorum, the former governor of Pennsylvania and a possible Republican candidate for the presidency, delivered a speech at the National Press Club in Washington in which he said: "But terrorism is a tactic, not an ideology. This new existential threat to America, Sharia and its violent iteration jihadism, has yet to be adequately explained by our leaders -- except in using the term terror to describe its military profile that it's violent, widespread and fanatical. But it's more, including non-violent efforts to insinuate Sharia law in Western countries, including our own."

An existential threat is defined as one that endangers the an individual's or a nation's existence. Nuclear weapons are an existential threat because the United States and Russia have enough of them to demolish each other and the world. Terrorism, however, is not an existential threat: the attacks of 9/11 were a shocking atrocity, but they never threatened the existence of the United States or its political structure. Nor would additional terrorist attacks have done so, anymore than, the death by homicide of 30,000 Americans a year would do so.

Similarly, Santorum was demonstrably wrong in alleging that Sharia law poses an existential threat to the United States anymore than the occasional application or interpretation of foreign tort laws by American corporations poses a threat to the nation, or its economic structure.

Nevertheless, a movement has arisen in the United States to ban Sharia. The movement likens Sharia to a threat as vast and all-encompassing as the cold war as a way of rallying opposition to Islam while providing right-wing groups such as the Tea Party or followers of Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachmann a strong, visceral cause.

What is the origin of the movement against Sharia?

Three predominant voices or organizations are behind the push to "ban" Sharia in the United States:

• David Yerushalmi, a lawyer with a history of questionable and divisive beliefs about race and intelligence, and the leader of what he calls the Society of Americans for National Existence
• ACT for America, an Islamophobic organization that helped fuel U.S. Rep. Peter King's "homeland security" hearings about the perceived threats of Islam in the United States, and whose spokespersons include Brigitte Gabriel, a Lebanese expatriate leading a campaign against Islam's influence in the West.
• Frank Gaffney and the Center for Security Policy, a right-wing "national security organization." Gaffney has previously argued that President Obama is a Muslim. The center has channeled at least $153,000, according to The Times, to Yerushalmi, and helped fund a "research" project that, according to the Times, "involved surreptitiously sending researchers into 100 mosques."

Yerushalmi is a native of South Florida who spent many years in the settlements of the West Bank in occupied Palestine, working as a lawyer there.

In a 2006 essay entitled "On Race: A Tentative Discussion," he wrote: "Most of the fundamental differences between the races are genetic. [...] With all of the liberal talk of evolution and biology, why do people find it so difficult to confront the facts that some races perform better in sports, some better in mathematical problem solving, some better in language, some better in Western societies and some better in tribal ones? For what the moderns believe were now thousands of years, the races lived separated by environments wholly different one from the other. If evolution and the biologists who espouse the theory are correct, then the idea that racial differences included innate differences in character and intelligence would it seem be more likely than not. In other words, why would the evolutionary and genetic processes have stopped at those traits we consider offlimits due to political correctness? Is nature and biology somehow so perfectly tied into our social milieu of today that it refused to make the distinctions we consider politically and socially repugnant?"

The Anti-Defamation League, the Jewish human and civil rights organization, describes Yerushalmi as "an Arizona attorney with a record of anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant and anti-black bigotry," and who has "vigorously opposed all perceived 'inroads' of Shari'a law in the United States, even entirely innocuous measures such as American financial institutions creating financing packages designed to be compatible with Islamic restrictions against loaning money at interest.

Yerushalmi has written a model law that is making the rounds of state legislatures in the United States. It is called "American Laws for American Courts," and it is intended to ward off any influence of foreign law, chiefly Sharia but also European or other laws, on American jurisprudence. The popular force behind the movement, The Times reports, is "a network of Tea Party and Christian groups."

The law passed in Oklahoma but was then ruled unconstitutional for its violation of the First Amendment.

The Times reported: "The more tangible effect of the movement, opponents say, is the spread of an alarmist message about Islam — the same kind of rhetoric that appears to have influenced Anders Behring Breivik, the suspect in the deadly dual attacks in Norway on July 22. The anti-Shariah campaign, they say, appears to be an end in itself, aimed at keeping Muslims on the margins of American life. 'The fact is there is no Shariah takeover in America,' said Salam Al-Marayati, the president of the Muslim Public Affairs Council, one of several Muslim organizations that have begun a counteroffensive. 'It’s purely a political wedge to create fear and hysteria.'"