The American Caliphate
(posted by Daniel Koffler)
Okay Frank Gaffney, you want your chance to soil your sheets, Leonidas-style, over the silent and perhaps at this point irreversible Islamofascist conquest of America? You don’t need to resort to fantasizing about Muslim sovereign fund managers putting a hex on their bond issues, or, I don’t know, doing a universal find and replace of “New York” for “London” in whatever Melanie Phillips wrote this week. You don’t need to make up anything at all. Because it turns out that the most cunningly disguised Islamofascist sleeper cell ever has just planted the bloody banner of the false prophet Mahound and his demonic minions in a courtroom a mere stone’s throw from the Capitol:
To defend itself against a lawsuit by the widows of three American soldiers who died on one of its planes in Afghanistan, a sister company of the private military firm Blackwater has asked a federal court to decide the case using Islamic law, known as Shari’a…
If the judge agrees, it would essentially end the lawsuit over a botched flight supporting the U.S. military. Shari’a law does not hold a company responsible for the actions of employees performed within the course of their work.
Erik Prince, who owns Blackwater and Presidential Airways…was asked to justify having a case involving an American company working for the U.S. government decided by Afghan law.
“Where did the crash occur?” Prince said. “Afghanistan.”
For those who might have spent the last few years under a rock, Blackwater is a fundamentalist Christian mercenary band whose disposition to violence and aggression is matched only by their incompetence (and maybe also their Evangelical zeal). The US government contracted Blackwater (without bidding, naturally) for backup security operations in Iraq. Blackwater assayed the task of securing Iraq by, among other things, massacring Iraqis on multiple occasions, coming perilously close to launching an assault on the Iraqi army (by accident, presumably), and murdering a security guard of the Iraqi vice president (they then attempted to cover up the last incident with the support of the US government).
Here on the homefront, you might think the fact that an American firm with an extremely cozy relationship with the US government is attempting to get a federal judge to scrap American law in favor of sharia — just kind of, because — might encourage certain people to acquire a renewed appreciation of the value of things like the rule of law, separation of powers, checks and balances, the ancient liberties of common law, the enumerated rights of the Constitution, and on and on. Then again, the piece by piece replacement of the rule of the rule of law (if you will) with the rule of a cheap postmodernism according to which the law is simply the advantage of the stronger won’t expose us to any threat from sharia, just as long as we outbreed the Mussalmen and refuse to trade credit derivative swaps with them. So I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for the flatterers-of-power party to rediscover the value of the American system of government any time soon.
(Hat tip: Ali Eteraz)
Tags: liberty, rule of law
June 26th, 2008 at 1:55 pm
If Sharia law is as illiberal as they say, then I might be willing to apply it to Blackwater….
June 26th, 2008 at 4:05 pm
I thought Shariah-law only came into play when both parties accepted its validity.