Free Republic

Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) blasted Republicans for including a plank in their convention platform targeting Shariah law in an interview with Mother Jones Wednesday, blasting the language as "an expression of bigotry." "There has never been any legislation offered to establish Shariah law — not at the federal level, not at the state level. There's not been a municipal ordinance opposing this, there's not been anything," said Ellison, the nation's first Muslim member of Congress. The Republican platform included language demanding "no use of foreign law by U.S. courts in interpreting our Constitution and laws." "Nor should foreign sources of...

Residents of the French Hill neighborhood in Jerusalem plan to combat Arab prayer-calls by blasting music from loudspeakers, in defiance of Arab religious conventions. According to Israeli newspaper Yediot Aharonot, Israelis plan to broadcast music from loudspeakers positioned toward a mosque in the Arab village Al Issawiya, located in Jerusalem on Mount Scopus near Hadassah Hospital. A widespread practice among Muslims, the adhan is a call for Muslims to attend voluntary prayers that are broadcast from a Mosque’s large towers called minarets, like the one standing over the western wall in Jerusalem. In previous centuries, the muezzin, leader of the...

As Creeping Sharia asks, "Is this even legal?" How many post offices operate out of churches and synagogues? "New Islamic Community Center opens in Plymouth," by Renee Tessman for KARE11.com, July 8 (thanks to Creeping Sharia): PLYMOUTH, Minn. - Muslim families in the west metro suburbs now have a new place of worship. They celebrated the grand opening of the NorthWest Islamic Community Center in Plymouth on Saturday. Nausheena Hussain said, "It's really exciting to see the community come out and support it and it's not just for Muslims. There are a lot of neighbors here, a lot of our...

Three years ago film maker Robb Leech was reading a newspaper article about the radical Islamic preacher Anjem Choudary, when he spotted his stepbrother, Richard Dart’s name. Richard Dart, 29, is a white Muslim convert who featured in a BBC documentary last year filmed by his own brother about his conversion... now one of the extremist’s most devoted followers and was spending his days calling for strict Sharia law to be imposed in Britain. Unable to believe what he was seeing, Robb, who had been extremely close to his stepbrother when they were teenagers contacted him and they arranged to...

While the elections for a 200-member National Congress is unlikely to grant a majority to any one faction, the Muslim Brotherhood and its Islamist allies are confident they can join their counterparts in Tunisia and Egypt at the helm of leadership. Negotiations between the Muslim Brotherhood and a secular-based political movement led by former interim prime minister Mahmoud Jibril have focused on forming a post-election government as soon as the result is known. An adviser to Mr Jibril said the former prime minister was likely to take the post of figurehead president with Mustafa Abu Shagour, currently interim deputy prime...

CNSNews.com) – President Obama phoned the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohammed Morsi on Sunday evening to congratulate him on becoming Egypt’s new president, the U.S. Embassy in Cairo said in a Twitter message around 7 PM eastern time. Earlier, White House press secretary Jay Carney in a statement called the Islamist’s election a “milestone” in Egyptians’ transition to democracy. “Millions of Egyptians voted in the election, and President-elect Morsi and the new Egyptian government have both the legitimacy and responsibility of representing a diverse and courageous citizenry,” he said. Egypt’s election commission earlier announced that Morsi had beaten his second-round opponent, former...

Following are excerpts from an interview with Rif’at Al-Said, leader of the Egyptian Al-Tagammu’ Party, which aired on Dream 2 TV on June 6, 2012. Rif’at Al-Said: The danger in the Freedom and Justice Party [of the Muslim Brotherhood] lies in its being a Salafi organization, which relies upon peddling in religion. They believe that if their candidate becomes president, Islam itself will have come to power, and will serve as an umbrella for the rule. Therefore, if Muhammad Mursi, the Freedom and Justice Party’s candidate, is elected, any opposition to him will be considered opposition to the Islamic enterprise,...

The Muslim Brotherhood has vowed to face down Egypt's ruling generals in a "life or death" struggle over the country's political future, after declaring that its candidate had won the presidential election and would refuse to accept the junta's last-ditch attempts to engineer a constitutional coup. As final ballot results trickled in and unofficial tallies suggested that Mohamed Morsi had secured approximately 52% of the popular vote, the Brotherhood deployed its harshest language yet against the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (Scaf), promising to bring millions of Egyptians back on to the streets if attempts to rebuild the old...

The culture of America is always under siege. Countless new arrivals have transformed American culture over the generations. Muslims from places as diverse as Morocco, Albania and Malaysia will change American culture, too. Whoever follows them will change it again. The idea that a handful of Islamic radicals can destroy a nation of 300 million people protected by the world's largest military is absurd. But questions about the Muslim world and its intentions toward the United States deserve answers, and I don't mean the ignorant rants polluting cyberspace. Fortunately, we have Karen Armstrong, a former Roman Catholic nun and an...

Here entire neighborhoods look like the Middle East, women walk around veiled, the mayor is a Muslim, sharia law is applied in the courts and the theaters. An extensive report from the most Islamized city in Europe. ROME, May 19, 2009 – One of the most indisputable results of Benedict XVI's trip to the Holy Land was the improvement in relations with Islam. The three days he spent in Jordan, and then, in Jerusalem, the visit to the Dome of the Mosque, spread an image among the Muslim general public – to an extent never before seen – of a...

Europe is already lost to a Muslim takeover and America has started down that same path. That’s the proposition persuasively made by Mark Steyn in his book "America Alone: The End of the World As We Know It." Mr. Steyn notes that America and Australia “grew the institutions of their democracy with relatively homogeneous populations and then evolved into successful ‘multicultural’ societies. But the continent isn’t multicultural so much as bicultural. You have hitherto homogeneous Scandinavian societies whose cities have become 40 percent Muslim in the space of a generation. Imagine colonial New England when it was still the Mayflower...

There's an impression that Muslims suffer disproportionately from the rule of dictators, tyrants, unelected presidents, kings, emirs, and various other strongmen - and it's accurate. A careful analysis by Frederic L. Pryor of Swarthmore College in the Middle East Quarterly ("Are Muslim Countries Less Democratic?") concludes that "In all but the poorest countries, Islam is associated with fewer political rights." The fact that majority-Muslim countries are less democratic makes it tempting to conclude that the religion of Islam, their common factor, is itself incompatible with democracy. I disagree with that conclusion. Today's Muslim predicament, rather, reflects historical circumstances more than...

It didn’t attract much notice, but the General Assembly of the United Nations ended the year by passing a disgusting resolution protecting Islam from criticism of its human rights violations. Lots of non-Muslims voted for it – a sign that more and more corrupt Third World governments are identifying with the ideology of Islam, even if they don't accept its doctrines. The resolution goes under the innocuous title "Combating defamation of religions" – but the text singles out "Islam and Muslims in particular". It expresses "deep concern that Islam is frequently and wrongly associated with human rights violations and terrorism".

In recent months, an epidemic of anti-Christian books has erupted, viciously attacking the faithful as “theocrats” and “fascists.” Conservative Christians are called evangelical mullahs, intent on replacing the government with our own “religion-soaked political regimes,” as one overheated author put it. Good gracious! Is America really about to fall into the hands of a diabolical Christian Taliban? Of course not. It’s a false and malicious charge, and our critics know it. I know of not one Christian leader, theologian, or scholar who wants to impose a theocracy—that is, the church running the state—because the notion is entirely contrary to Christian...

Hundreds of thousands of secularist Turks took to the streets for the second time in two weeks yesterday after a dramatic intervention by the military in an attempt to stop Abdullah Gul becoming the first Turkish President with an Islamist past. Demonstrators in Istanbul carried blood-red national flags and posters of Kemal Atatürk, the founder of a secular Turkey. Banners read: “Sharia (Islamic law) shall not rise to the Presidential Palace.”

The Somali jihad is over for now, but it still has supporters worldwide – including within the United States. The southern Somali city of Kismayo has fallen to a combined force of Ethiopian and Somali troops. The Somali Supreme Islamic Courts Council regime ruled Mogadishu for only a few months, instituting a particularly draconian version of Sharia. Now its leaders have fled, and the remnants of their forces are now trapped between the sea and Somalia’s border with Kenya. “Nobody expected the Islamists to show this little political resilience. They were the first movement to pacify southern Somalia for 16...