KYLE SHIDELER
In Beverly Hills, California, feminists, actors and celebrities were
rallying outside the Beverly Hills Hotel,
in order to protest its owner, the Sultan of Brunei's, decision to
institute harsh shariah law punishments, including the stoning of
homosexuals and adulterers, and floggings and amputations for thieves
and other violators of Islamic law. TV star Ellen Degeneres announced a
boycott of the Sultan's hotels on twitter, and comedian Jay Leno,
together with his wife Mavis, leader of the Feminist Majority
organization,
led a protest
outside the hotel. The Beverly Hills City Council is expected to pass a
resolution against Brunei's sharia laws, while the Beverly Hills Mayor
Lili Bosse called the laws "so barbaric" that the city council felt
forced to act.
Meanwhile in another part of California, Republican Assemblyman Tim
Donnelly, running for the GOP gubernatorial nomination against former
Bush Assistant Secretary of Treasury Neel Kashkari,
took fire from California GOP officials
for pointing out on Facebook that Kashkari had hosted a panel of Sharia
law specialists at a Treasury Department meeting in 2008, arranged with
Harvard University.
Donnelly was compared to Todd Akin, whose
comments regarding rape and pregnancy, widely regarded as offensive,
made national news during the 2012 Presidential campaign. Vice Chair
Harmeet Dhillon said Donnelly's remarks traded "on bigotry, racism,
hatred of the other, hysteria." Recently Representative Darrel
Issa weighed in, calling Donnelly's statement, "hateful and disgusting rhetoric," that had no place.
Kashkari campaign spokesman Aaron McLear
responded by saying,
"The conference on Islamic Finance was designed to explore how free
market principles could work in Islamic countries. It had nothing to do
with changing America's legal or financial systems."
That explanation however appears to be less than accurate. In a
copy of the seminar schedule,
presentation topics included, "US regulation of Islamic financial
institutions," and the "US market for Islamic financial services."
One presenter in particular is worthy of further scrutiny. Yusuf
Talal Delorenzo, whose bio in the seminar schedule describes him as "a
scholar of Islamic Transactional Law whose 30 year career was featured
in an August 2007 front page story in The Wall Street Journal."
The subject of Delorenzo's talk was "Shariah Compliance."
It fails to mention however that Delorenzo was a member of the
Research Department of the International Institute for Islamic Thought
(IIIT), as well as a member of the Fiqh Council of North America, part
of the Islamic Society of North America. Both IIIT and ISNA are known to
federal law enforcement as affiliates of the Muslim Brotherhood.
It was in this capacity, that Delorenzo was responsible for approving the translation of a manual of Shariah law called, "
The Reliance of the Traveller: A Classic Manual of Islamic Law."
Published in translation by Nuh Mim Keller in 1994 and reprinted as
recently as 2011, the book contains not just shariah law as it regards
finances, but the very same "barbaric" punishments that the Beverly
Hills City Council found so outrageous as to require a resolution
against it.
Included in Reliance are such legal requirements as stoning or lashes
for those guilty of "Fornication or Sodomy." It also calls for the
death of homosexuals.
DeLorenzo's participation in the review of Reliance of the Traveller
raises questions about separation between Islamic finance and shariah
criminal codes, as the book contains legal instructions on Trade,
Inheritance, Marriage, Divorce as well as "Justice" under which the
punishments for homosexuality and adultery are found.
Which raises the question of why media organs like the Los Angeles
Times single out Jay Leno, Ellen Degeneres, Mayor Lili Bosse and the
Beverly Hills City Council for their appropriate stand against Shariah
law when it comes to Brunei, yet Donnelly's raising of the issue of
Kashkari's participation in a Shariah law event, featuring a person with
DeLorenzo's background, is aggressively condemned.
Kyle Shideler is the director of the Counterterrorism Education and Analysis Project at the Center for Security Policy (centerforsecuritypolicy.org).
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