The Week in Sharia: And They Will Call it “Al-Aska”

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Choose your analogies carefully:

  • Terror babies are back! Because a jihadist is never so dangerous as when he’s teething, the Center for Immigration Studies, a far-right anti-immigrant group, is out with a new report alleging that terrorists are coming to the United States to have babies, which would, some 21 years down the line, make use of their American passports to wage stealth jihad. There are obviously no flaws with that plan.
  • Rick Santorum is back, too, and he’s in mid-season form. At an event in Durham, New Hampshire the former Pennsylvania Senator made clear he intends to make the threat of Islamic law a central part of his candidacy for the GOP presidential nomination. Per Politico: “We need to define it and say what it is. And it is evil. Sharia law is incompatible with American jurisprudence and our Constitution.”
  • I’d always assumed that, when the global caliphate comes to North America, we’d all be forced to move to Alaska to live out our pathetic existence in relative peace, in some sort of fusion of Coming Into the Country and Solzhenitsyn. But apparently it’s the Last Frontier for Sharia, too. On Thursday, Alaska held hearings on a proposal to ban Islamic law from being enforced in state courts. You’ll never probably guess who was invited to testify.
  • At hearings this week in Jefferson City, Missouri State Rep. Don Wells, sponsor of (one of) his state’s proposed Sharia-bans, wanted the perfect analogy for what Sharia was capable of doing to his state. Instead, he compared compared it to Polio. Polio? Really?
  • And in Tennessee, the sponsor of a controversial bill that would classify Sharia as prima facie counter to American principles appears to have backtracked—at least somewhat.
  • Sharia giveth and it taketh away. On Tuesday, Pakistani authorities acquitted American contractor Ray Davis, who had been charged with murdering two men in Lahore. Why would they do that? TPM explains: “[T]he resolution came only after a deal was reached to pay the victims’ families what the Punjab Law Minister called ‘blood money’—in accordance with Islamic law.” It’s still unclear who actually paid for Davis’ release.

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In "It's Not a Crisis. This Is the New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, how brutal it is to sustain quality journalism right now, what makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there, and why support from readers is the only thing that keeps us going. Despite the challenges, we're optimistic we can increase the share of online readers who decide to donate—starting with hitting an ambitious $300,000 goal in just three weeks to make sure we can finish our fiscal year break-even in the coming months.

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