Aug 4, 2011
New Jersey Republican Gov. Chris Christie defended his decision to nominate a Muslim judge to the state Superior Court against conservative critics who warned that the new judge will implement Sharia law. The notoriously blunt-spoken Christie calling their fears “crap” and “crazy.”
http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/ticket/chris-christie-slams-fearmongering-over-sharia-law-210648303.html
Abe Foxman is an idiot who’d love to play the role of Max in the Sound of Music. But I’m not sure I can agree with critics of Christie for this. Even during the Spanish Inquisition, Muslims held high positions in Spanish society, such as judges, professors, and high ranking royal officials. (Contary to legend, The Inquisition only targeted people who claimed to be Christian.) The judge has sworn an oath to uphold the laws of America. I’m familar with Taqqiya, but I’d say judge him on his rulings and conduct. His clients *were* found innocent, and the accused deserve adequate legal counsel.
Or have I missed something? Is there something these articles have failed to explain? Has this guy ever expressed support for medieval Shariah law? Has he ruled like a leftist, activist?
Abe Foxman is an idiot who’d love to play the role of Max in the Sound of Music. But I’m not sure I can agree with critics of Christie for this. Even during the Spanish Inquisition, Muslims held high positions in Spanish society, such as judges, professors, and high ranking royal officials. (Contary to legend, The Inquisition only targeted people who claimed to be Christian.) The judge has sworn an oath to uphold the laws of America. I’m familar with Taqqiya, but I’d say judge him on his rulings and conduct. His clients *were* found innocent, and the accused deserve adequate legal counsel.
Or have I missed something? Is there something these articles have failed to explain? Has this guy ever expressed support for medieval Shariah law? Has he ruled like a leftist, activist?
The Department of Homeland Security has been trying for some time to deport Qatanani for lying on his 1999 immigration paperwork. He’d been granted a religious-worker visa in 1996, enabling him to be the imam at the Islamic Center. When it expired in 1999, he sought to become a permanent U.S. resident. Though specifically asked about his criminal history, Qatanani failed to disclose that he was convicted in an Israeli military court for his membership in, and support of, Hamas. Mohammed’s firm helped Qatanani prepare the I-485, and Qatanani later claimed that he’d signed the form because he “trusted his attorney, Sohail Mohammed.” (See Homeland Security Investigation, Appendix, p. 4.)
The deportation case against Qatanani was heard by an immigration judge in 2008. Christie was then the Bush-appointed U.S. attorney for New Jersey, though his office did not handle the case. In light of Qatanani’s track record and the Islamic Center of Passaic County’s connections to the Bush Justice Department’s then-ongoing HLF prosecution, it is nothing short of shocking that U.S. attorney Christie went to Qatanani’s mosque for a Ramadan celebration while the immigration case was underway. There, he is reported to have embraced Qatanani and praised the former Hamas operative as “a man of great good will.”
More astoundingly, Christie permitted one of his assistant U.S. attorneys, Charles B. McKenna, to testify at the immigration hearing as a character witness on behalf of Qatanani — i.e., a Justice Department official was dispatched to undermine the Homeland Security Department’s case against Qatanani, which was built in part on an investigation conducted by the FBI, an agency of the Justice Department.
The immigration judge, Alberto Riefkohl, ultimately ruled in Qatanani’s favor, an absurd decision in which he baselessly discredited two federal agents who’d testified about Qatanani’s admission that he’d been arrested for Hamas activities, and irrationally discounted the evidence of Qatanani’s Israeli conviction. The judge stressed, in arriving at this ruling, how impressed he’d been by “law-enforcement officers that took time from their respective duties to appear before the court.” I’m sure. But the feel-good hallucinations of bridge-building can’t erase the reality of terror promotion. Judge Riefkohl was later reversed by the Board of Immigration Appeals, which found that there was no basis for Riefkohl to have ignored the government’s evidence.
The questions about Governor Christie’s appointment of Sohail Mohammed and his exertions on behalf of Mohammed’s client, Mohammed Qatanani, have nothing to do with either sharia or the all-purpose smear of Islamophobia. They are about the governor’s judgment. They are about a U.S. attorney with political ambitions pandering to a politically active constituency at the expense of national security and enforcement of the immigration laws. They are about his decision to award a state judgeship to an attorney who was an active and vocal board member of a very troubling Islamist organization — and who has a penchant for presuming that perfectly valid anti-terror prosecutions are, instead, anti-Muslim persecutions.