U.S. Government Embraces Islamic Banking(training in Sharia)

On November 6, 2008, the U.S. Treasury Department hosted a seminar on Islamic banking to train government employees on Sharia-compliant finance (SCF). According to a press release, it was “designed to help inform the policy community about Islamic financial services, which are an increasingly important part of the global financial industry.”

It is interesting to note that while many in the West deride parallel societies, the lack of integration, and overall “foreign-ness” of its Muslim populations, they have no problem embracing Islamic banking. Maybe because this is the one area of religious “encroachment” that allows the West to make money, and lots of it.

The U.S. is behind European nations like the UK and France, which are actively promoting Islamic banking.

http://www.bankersonline.com/vendor_guru/edcomm/edcomm_mkt_100107.html
Banking on Sharia Principles: Islamic Banking and the Financial Industry
Dr. Linda Eagle

There are an estimated 1.61 billion Muslims worldwide, making Islamic banking one of the fastest growing segments of the financial industry. Banks serving the Islamic population must comply with several very specific principles of Islamic law if they hope to retain existing customers and attract new ones. Banks must be ready with specialized products and services and they must put programs in place to train their personnel to support these products and services in order to exist in this competitive marketplace.

http://www.postchronicle.com/cgi-bin/artman/exec/view.cgi?archive=82&num=161070

...”Terror Financing Mechanism: SCF (Sharia Compliant Banks) as monitored by paid Shariah law advisors to U.S. banking institutions must “purify” certain return on investment (ROI) dollars that do not meet Shariah law standards. This money must be donated to Islamic charities - including some that promote Jihad and support suicide bombing. Investment disclosures state that these sums can be as high as 6% of profits of investments. With $800 billion already in SCF assets, the potential for billions of dollars to be siphoned off for terrorism is real. This would be a serious criminal violation of U.S. law.”

Shariah law authorities, some of whom are now being paid handsomely by Barclays, Dow Jones, Standard & Poors, HSBC, Citibank, Merrill Lynch, Deutschebank, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, UBS, Credit Suisse and others, have the power to dictate Shariah compliance as deemed by “scholarly consensus” on matters of finance, family, penal law, apostasy, and war.
Shariah Financing and Shariah Banks has become a growing vehicle to use western money to finance terrorism and expansion of Islam. Shariah Finance is dangerous because Shariah investments are being used as a place for the Taliban, Iran and other Shariah regimes to invest their petrodollars.

Here is a statement of the problem as provided by American Congress for Truth:

“Terror Financing Mechanism: SCF (Sharia Compliant Banks) as monitored by paid Shariah law advisors to U.S. banking institutions must “purify” certain return on investment (ROI) dollars that do not meet Shariah law standards. This money must be donated to Islamic charities - including some that promote Jihad and support suicide bombing. Investment disclosures state that these sums can be as high as 6% of profits of investments. With $800 billion already in SCF assets, the potential for billions of dollars to be siphoned off for terrorism is real. This would be a serious criminal violation of U.S. law.”
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Shariah law authorities, some of whom are now being paid handsomely by Barclays, Dow Jones, Standard & Poors, HSBC, Citibank, Merrill Lynch, Deutschebank, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, UBS, Credit Suisse and others, have the power to dictate Shariah compliance as deemed by “scholarly consensus” on matters of finance, family, penal law, apostasy, and war.

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U.S. investment banks are essentially being money managers for regimes who want to build building nuclear weapons and those providing terrorists with weaponry used for killing American soldiers. The Taliban is reported in the news to be on the rise in Pakistan, funded by Shariah investment profits and embedded donations to “Shariah Islamic Charities.” As these regimes gain legitimacy in our banking system and their net worth increases, the network of extremism and terrorism grows. One sad example from the past: September 11th attacks were funded by Shariah Banks which provided profits to Al-Qaeda. Evidence of this was presented in a court in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on behalf of Cantor Fitzgerald, Ace, Allstate, Chubb and other life insurance companies, which paid insurance benefits to over 3000 widows, widowers or surviving family members....

http://michellemalkin.com/2008/01/25/banks-are-helping-sharia-make-a-back-door-entrance/

“Banks are helping sharia make a back-door entrance”
By Michelle Malkin • January 25, 2008 11:23 AM

...Tarek Fatah warns Canadians about sharia creep in the banking system–an issue raised here during the Dubai ports debacle.

Fatah:

It seems only yesterday that Premier Dalton McGuinty declared: “There will be no sharia law in Ontario.” Many of us, who witnessed the medieval nature of manmade sharia laws in our countries of birth, heaved a sigh of relief back in September of 2005. We thought this was the end of the attempt by Islamists to sneak sharia into a Western jurisdiction. We were wrong....

http://www.shariahfinancewatch.org/blog/

http://www.chronwatch-america.com/blogs/964/Sharia-Banking—The-Silent-Jihad-Against-the-West.html

...Islamic Sharia banking is coming to the United States and other western nations, thanks to global banks such as Citigroup, HSBC, Deutsche Bank, Morgan Stanley, and Goldman Sachs. Great Britain is now pledging to become the Islamic banking center of the world. Clearly the headlong rush by all global banks to enter the world of Islamic banking is well underway.

Why do western banks seek to participate in Sharia banking? It is because it gives them a chance to enter the Islamic banking industry which has over $1.5 trillion available today and is growing at a steady and explosive rate of over 15% per year.

The implications for the west, and especially for the United States, are staggeringly destructive. Islamic banking working through global banks is doing for Islam what it could never do on its own: giving legitimacy to Sharia law and infiltrating it into the fabric of western society.

For those not familiar with Sharia Banking, it is a system which creates and sells services and products that are in strict accordance with Sharia law. Sometimes it is referred to in the Islamic culture as “Sharia finance.” It dictates how the practices of banking, investment, bonds, loans, brokerage, etc., are to be conducted.

To insure compliance and to become “Sharia banking” compliant, banks must hire Sharia experts to review and approve each product and practice of the bank. This is known as “halal,” which has been described as “the Muslim equivalent of kosher in Judaism.”

There is a shortage of such Sharia experts, so there is competition among banks to find such experts to sit on their boards of directors. By having an “expert” involved in banking decisions, this provides the legitimacy to each banking decision because it is made at the director level rather management level. However, most of these Sharia experts” are from the radical Wahhabi school of Islam in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere, and they hold views diametrically opposed to the basic values of Western civilization.

The Center for Security has identified some of the Sharia experts sitting on the boards of U.S. financial institutions. The top twenty “advisors” include many with conflicts of interests and anti-trust issues since they sit on boards of many Islamic banks at the same time. The Center for Security identifies a couple of advisors with ties to money-laundering and terrorism:

Yousuf Quaradawi, who is prominent in the Muslim Brotherhood, owns two banks himself and has issued statements in support of Palestinian attacks on Israeli citizens and has issued rulings supporting Hamas and Hezbollah jihad attacks against Israel.

Muhammad Yaqui Usami who is a radical cleric and Sharia court judge in Pakistan. He is on the board of organizations that train thousands of Taliban and jihad foot soldiers. But the most heinous thing is his complicity in the murder and suffering of countless innocent Muslims as apostates because they disagreed with his Islamic mandates.

These are the kinds of people advising U.S. banks on how to conduct their business to assure they are “Sharia compliant.”

There are many differences of Sharia banks from orthodox banking. In Sharia banking, interest (deemed “usury” regardless of rate or amount) cannot be charged, and investments must not be associated in any way with gambling, drinking alcohol, eating pork, etc. Very importantly, it calls for alms giving, referred to in Islamic parlance as “zakat.”...

http://www.forbes.com/markets/feeds/afx/2008/01/21/afx4553493.html

Malaysian government launches Asia’s first Islamic exchange-traded fund - UPDATE
KUALA LUMPUR (Thomson Financial) - The Malaysian government launched Monday Asia’s first Islamic exchange-traded fund (ETF) in a bid to cement its position as the regional hub for the Sharia-compliant market, the fund’s manager said....

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