How would you react to a newspaper printing a glowing page-one above-the-fold story with the headline blaring:
“If everybody observed Christianity, there would be no recession.”
Or this:
“If everybody followed the Ten Commandments, there would be no crime, no murder, and no adultery.”
(Perish the thought. We can’t even have the Ten Commandments on public buildings anymore!)
Or how about this one:
“If everybody was Halachah (Jewish law)-compliant, there would be no global warming.”
After all, what could be more environmentally friendly than abstaining from using electricity for a full day once a week?
I know how most of you on the Left would react: You’d be calling those newspapers screaming, “How dare you try to impose your religious values on me!!!!” right before cancelling your subscription to said paper.
OK, then. Question: When is it all right for a major media outlet to endorse a religious practice or dogma?
Answer: When that religion is Islam.
At least, that’s what seems to be the case with the Sacramento Bee. At today’s Front Page Mag, Lloyd Billingley writes:
California’s Shariah-Compliant Newspaper
By Lloyd Billingsley
FrontPageMagazine.com | Wednesday, April 01, 2009
“If everybody was Shariah-compliant, there would be no recession.”
That is the pull quote and nut graph for a remarkable page-one, above-the-fold story in theSacramento Bee on Monday, March 30, headlined “Islam’s financial laws can protect followers,” in the print version. On the website of the Bee, the only daily in California’s capital, the headline reads “Islamic laws of finance a cushion in hard times.”
“The recession gripping the nation has taken less of a toll on American Muslims who follow age-old Islamic laws against paying – or charging – interest,” says the lead of the story, by Stephen Magagnini.
“They've also been shielded by socially responsible retirement plans because Shariah– Islamic law – forbids investments in banks and mortgages as well as tobacco, alcohol, gambling, pornography or weapons.” […]
The article estimates that 20 percent of the Sacramento area’s 50,000 Muslims closely follow Islamic rules of finance. Some appear to follow them not so closely. Deya Dean Elghassein, a Palestinian American, explains that he uses credit cards but pays them off in full at the end of the month. He declines to invest in Costco because it sells pork and alcohol, but he and others shop there “out of necessity.”
Irfan Haq, an economist and president of the Council of Sacramento Valley Islamic Organizations, tells Mr. Magagnini that “Muslims in general have been much less affected by the recession because they're very cautious and conservative in matters of finance and take a longer-term view of life. . . They want to invest their funds in a way that pleases God so they can sleep peacefully – they care about the afterlife.” […]
In a news story it is customary to balance sweeping assertions with contrary information. At no point, however, does the Bee’s Stephen Magagnini do anything but record the statements of his Islamic subjects. Readers are evidently to assume that Shariah prevents inflation, that Shariah-compliant funds are indeed “relatively better” and that Shariah-compliant retirement plans “socially responsible.”
Might other plans along more standard lines be irresponsible or morally suspect? The author does not take up the question, and raises none of the church-state entanglement issues normally brought to bear on religious themes. For example, if a local minister had proclaimed, “If everybody was a Baptist, there would be no recession,” one may be sure, contrary opinion would be mandatory, along with a quote from the ACLU.
This amazing page-one story, with multiple photos, gives no clue that there might be any clash between Shariah law and the Constitution of the United States. The treatment of women under Islamic law, for example, does not exactly square with U.S. law and general practice in Western societies, likewise the treatment of homosexuals. Criminal law in Western societies is decidedly at odds with the Shariah approach. And if Islamic law is such a flywheel of prosperity and security, one wonders why anyone would bother moving to the United States.
The story does not mention attempts to allow Shariah law in Ontario, and does not cite Australian finance minister Peter Costello. In a 2006 speech, Costello said that those who want to live under Shariah law might feel at ease in Iran and Saudi Arabia, but not in Australia, where there was “one law” that proceeded from “the democratically elected legislature.”
Nobody is talking that way in America, certainly not in the politically correct capital of America’s most populous state, where the only daily newspaper is fully Shariah-compliant and runs Shariah ad-copy free of charge on the front page.
Yup. That is exactly what this is: a media-sanctioned endorsement of Islam. No surprise really from the same state where a public school had a program forcing its students to practice Islam.
There’s another message from this article that disturbs me. Couldn’t the headline have easily been rewritten: “If everybody was NOT Judeo-Christianity-compliant, there would be no recession.”
What I’m saying is that by endorsing Islamic values to avoid our recession, the Bee is implyig that it was Judeo-Christian values that got us here in the first place: Christians behaving like Christians (and to a lesser extent, because we’re a much more protected minority class, Jews acting like Jews) caused the recession.
Am I reading into that too much? Let me know.
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