Andrew G. Bostom: If Bill O’Reilly Had A Hammer (Imam Rauf is a nail)

Andrew Bostom writes today on the American Thinker of Bill O’Reilly’s challenge to Imam Rauf to “dedicate this mosque-community” overlooking Ground Zero as a “center-to peace.”

By offering to wield a hammer on behalf of the Ground Zero Mosque project, Mr. O’Reilly reveals his basic ignorance of Feisal Rauf’s expressed ideology, including the imam’s Sharia (Islamic Law)-based conception of “peace” itself — more accurately, a global Pax Islamica.

In other words, Rauf advocates for world peace by the establishment of a worldwide caliphate. There’d be no war, strife, crime, or dissent if only we’d all do exactly what the Koran dictates.

Is an Islamic center for the sole purpose of promoting the surrender of liberty something Bill O’Reilly would bring a hammer to help build? Clearly, his aim is to lure the imam onto his show for a debate. As Rauf never gives straight answers about sharia during American interviews, Dr. Bostom offers O’Reilly some history:

Rauf, in his 2004 “What’s Right With Islam” — released in Malaysia as, “A Call to Prayer from the World Trade Center Rubble: Islamic Da’wah From the Heart of America Post-9/11,” asserts that the US is in a state of “readiness” for the Sharia:

…[T]he American political structure is Shariah compliant, for a state inhabited predominantly by Muslims neither defines nor makes it synonymous with an Islamic state.

And Rauf also charts how the US could evolve toward what is clearly his ultimate goal — an Islamic State — beginning with a parallel Sharia judiciary:

…[It] also would not be a violation of church-state separation to have a subsidiary entity within judiciary that employs religious jurists…to comment on the compliance of certain decisions…to provide guidance on how Shariah compliant these decisions are…It can become truly Islamic only by virtues of a conscious application of the sociopolitical tenets of Islam to the life of the national, and by an incorporation of those tenets in the basic constitution of the country.

However it is Rauf’s earlier 1999 “Islam: A Sacred Law: What Every Muslim Should Know About Sharia” which makes unmistakably clear both the triumphal basis for his pious Muslim desire to impose Islamic Law, and the far reaching effects of this application:

…God’s role in the explicit philosophical construct of the law makes a big difference between the modus operandi of a righteous Muslim judge in a Muslim court and a righteous Western judge in a Western court. The judge who sits in judgment in an Islamic court sits in lieu of God as His worldly representative [khalifa] and is held responsible by God to His values. The Muslim judge explicitly ‘reports to God.’ The judge who sits in a Western court is only explicitly responsible to the Constitution, the interpretations of a civil law and its rules…And since a Shariah is understood as a law with God at its center, it is not possible in principle to limit the Shariah to some aspects of human life and leave out others.”…The Shariah thus covers every field of law — public and private, national and international — together with enormous amounts of material that Westerners would not regard as law at all, because the basis of the Sharl’ah is the worship of, and obedience to, God through good works and moral behavior. Following the Sacred Law thus defines the Muslim’s belief in God.

Imam Feisal Rauf’s lucidly expressed views can be summed up as follows: Sharia über alles!

Do your homework, Mr. O’Reilly. Better yet, match Dr. Bostom up with Imam Rauf for an entire hour.

Tagged as: Bill O'Reilly, Ground Zero, Imam Rauf, Islam, mosque