From Mere Rhetoric

Many of our readers are as fascinated by the Stuxnet worm as we are, and as happy that it is sabotaging Iran’s nuclear program.

For those who would like to know more about what it does and how it does it, Ed Barnes at Fox News goes into some detail. Here are quotations from his report:

The target was seemingly impenetrable; for security reasons, it lay several stories underground and was not connected to the World Wide Web. And that meant Stuxnet had to act as sort of a computer cruise missile: As it made its passage through a set of unconnected computers, it had to grow and adapt to security measures and other changes until it reached one that could bring it into the nuclear facility.

When it ultimately found its target, it would have to secretly manipulate it until it was so compromised it ceased normal functions.

Barnes explains more about how it works, and comes to this:

Masking itself from the plant’s security and other systems, the worm then ordered the centrifuges to rotate extremely fast, and then to slow down precipitously. This damaged the converter, the centrifuges and the bearings, and it corrupted the uranium in the tubes. It also left Iranian nuclear engineers wondering what was wrong, as computer checks showed no malfunctions in the operating system.

Time passed, the Iranian nuclear engineers and computer experts continued to be baffled, and the worm grew stronger and stronger, proliferated, and became ever more effective.

Estimates are that this went on for more than a year, leaving the Iranian program in chaos. And as it did, the worm grew and adapted throughout the system. As new worms entered the system, they would meet and adapt and become increasingly sophisticated.

Servers were traced to two unexpected places:

During this time the worms reported back to two servers that had to be run by intelligence agencies, one in Denmark and one in Malaysia. The servers monitored the worms and were shut down once the worm had infiltrated Natanz. Efforts to find those servers since then have yielded no results.

This went on until June of last year, when a Belarusan company working on the Iranian power plant in Beshehr discovered it in one of its machines. It quickly put out a notice on a Web network monitored by computer security experts around the world. Ordinarily these experts would immediately begin tracing the worm and dissecting it, looking for clues about its origin and other details.

But that didn’t happen, because within minutes all the alert sites came under attack and were inoperative for 24 hours.

The Iranian technicians labor on in an atmosphere of dread, fearing for their very lives which have become “a living hell“.

As Iranians struggled with the setbacks, they began searching for signs of sabotage. From inside Iran there have been unconfirmed reports that the head of the plant was fired shortly after the worm wended its way into the system and began creating technical problems, and that some scientists who were suspected of espionage disappeared or were executed. And counter intelligence agents began monitoring all communications between scientists at the site, creating a climate of fear and paranoia.

Even harder to find, and perfectly invulnerable, is the nameless Mind that made the Worm and sent it to do its work.

All praise to it!

Islam dare not reform or modernize for fear of destroying itself, Barry Rubin conjectures.

He writes that first the Reformation, and then the nineteenth century attempt to adapt Christianity to the modern age, worked a disenchantment among Christians resulting in an irreversible decline of the faith itself, and that in the light of this history Islam fears to change.

Scholars in the Age of Science hoped to reconcile science and religion but found them irreconcilable. Others went  in search of the historical Jesus, and the more they discerned of that dim figure, the more effectively they disentangled him from the Christian religion.

By the time this process was finished, huge numbers had fallen away from belief, while what remained in many churches, especially among the elite, is a sort of pious-flavored combination of social justice and social-climbing without much presence of divinity. Such arid religion is not particularly successful in inspiring, much less retaining, members. …

Western political, cultural, and intellectual elites today are, whatever patina of hypocrisy remains, overwhelmingly atheist. I’m not saying this is a good or bad thing. It’s simply my observation and analysis.

We see it as a distinctly Good Thing.

Rubin goes on to say the churches are aware that the more their members know  about science and history, the more likely they are to defect:

Evangelical churches retain their enthusiasm, but they have a difficult choice: do they try to shield their members, deeming knowledge unsafe for them, or can they really create an alternative elite that remains steadfast? The unpalatable alternatives often seem to be ignorance or defection.

To be conventional rather than consciously hypocriticial, politicians pretend t0 believe.

Still, it is necessary for at least those members of the elite engaged in politics to pretend they have some religious faith….

Then he goes on to suggest that Islam, seeing what happened to religion in the West, fears to start a process of reform which could be similarly lethal:

My interest is how this affects Islam and the Middle East. In light of this Western history, how strong is the motive to reform Islam?

The answer is that it is far less strong than outside observers may think. The year is 2010, not 1517 when Martin Luther proclaimed his revolt against the Catholic Church and could in full confidence believe his reform would strengthen Christianity, as it arguably did for several centuries. Can Muslims believe the equivalent of that idea today?

It is 2010, not the 1820s or 1830s when [scholars] could believe that a thorough critical inquiry into Christianity would preserve its hegemony in European society. Can Muslims believe the equivalent of that idea today?

Islam suffers not due to any military or economic aggression of the West, but from the pervasiveness of apparently Western — but really more generically modern — ideas. For the great majority of believing Muslims, any serious reform of their religion is risky, probably too risky, to undertake and still expect the patient will survive. …

Here, then, is the paradox. Only massive social change, secularizing intellectuals, open debate, a critical examination of the most basic religious beliefs, a transformation of the role of women, and similar things can open up a modern society in Muslim-majority societies. Yet … the 2010 Muslim would see [such change] as suicide…

He thinks that fighting to preserve and spread their religion is a “logical response” on the part of Muslims who fear change, and the jihad  we are being subjected to is a struggle against modernity.

Conversely, to dig in, kill the critics, raise the walls higher, try to shut out (or severely constrain) modernity, and demagogically stoke the fires of jihad really is a logical response for those who want to preserve their religion and society as it has existed for centuries.

And he pessimistically expects that the fight could be continued for centuries, since there are “many in the Muslim-majority world ready to die trying” to avoid adaptation to the modern world.

Many who would rather cling to their belief in the unknown than trust themselves to the known!

But we ask, what if the secular world fights back?

We think that when the West comes round (as surely it must?) to recognizing that Islam is its enemy, and uses its political, military, economic, and above all intellectual resources to beat it, that old time religion will soon shrivel, and  eventually, along with all irrational beliefs dating back thousands of years, fade away.

Scott Johnson of PowerLine wonders how Mohamed Osman Mohamud, who tried to detonate a bomb at a Christmas tree-lighting in Portland, Oregon, became an American citizen:

Today’s Los Angeles Times features a profile of the would-be Portland bomber named Mohamed Mohamud. Those of us wondering how the Mohamud family was admitted to the United States, or how Mohamud came to swear fealty to the United States and become a naturalized citizen, will have to look elsewhere for an answer. The best the Times’s two reporters could come up with is this: “He and his parents, Mariam and Osman Barre, came to America when he was 5 as part of a diaspora that brought tens of thousands of Somali refugees to U.S. cities. About 6,500 Somalis are said to live in the Portland area.” Well, thanks.

Here we found a part of the answer:

Mohamud’s family fled Somalia in the early 1990s, and his father, Osman Barre, a well-educated engineer, worked to establish them in Oregon.

“Osman was very sophisticated,” said Chris Oace, a former refugee worker for Ecumenical Ministries of Oregon who helped the family resettle here in the early 1990s. “Some refugees are afraid of having Christian churches help them. But it wasn’t an issue with his family at all.”

What a menace the well-meaning are! They do so much harm.

Stupid benevolence, which characterizes contemporary Christianity, is a serious fault, always dangerous and often damaging or even fatal.

How often can we know enough about other people’s wants and needs to be certain that our interference will do good? How often and how accurately can we foretell the consequences of our actions?

As a moral goal, trying not to do harm, though unambitious, is at least respectful of our fellow human beings, and difficult enough to achieve.

Jillian Becker   November 29, 2010

The Muslims who want to build a mosque at Ground Zero have applied for a federal grant of $5,000,000 to help them realize their psychologically sadistic scheme.

They apparently see no reason why American tax-payers should not contribute to a building that would, in the eyes of most Americans, and of Muslims all over the world, celebrate the Islamic triumph of 9/11 when Muslims murdered some 3,000 people in a variety of horrific ways in the name of their nasty religion.

Investor’s Business Daily comments in an editorial:

Having taxpayers foot the bill would be the ultimate insult … a slap in the face to the victims of terror.

The application was submitted under a “community and cultural enhancement” grant program administered by the Lower Manhattan Redevelopment Corporation (LMDC). The agency oversaw the $20 billion in federal aid allocated in the wake of 9/11 and is currently doling out millions in remaining taxpayer funds for community development.

Developers hope to get around the “nonreligious activities” requirement in their application by mentioning only the cultural, educational and community development aspects of the 13-story facility and not the prayer room and other areas where Shariah law, which is diametrically in conflict with Western values and freedoms, will be preached and advocated. …

There is some comfort for most of us in the IBD’s assurance that “the grant is unlikely to be approved since such grants go commonly to finish or assist ongoing projects, not start them.” And the would-be developers do not have funds enough, as yet, to start their taunting project.

But impatient to see the mosque built, and the Muslims victorious, is the Left in general; and its media supporters are pushing the project hard in numerous direct and indirect ways.

Example 1

NBC names Sharif al-Gamal, who owns part of the Ground Zero property that he and Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf want to develop into the mosque and “community center”, a “Person of the Year“.

Atlas Shrugs here and Jihad Watch here report and comment on what sort of man this NBC hero is.

From Atlas Shrugs:

Sharif El-Gamal racked up at least seven run-ins with the law …

His most recent arrest was for a Sept. 10, 2005, assault on a barber who sublet a Manhattan apartment from El-Gamal’s brother, Sammy.

The brothers and another man went to the apartment that afternoon to retrieve back rent from Mark Vassiliev …

El-Gamal … cursed at Vassiliev, called him the Arabic curse word “sharmouta” and punched him in the face, breaking his nose and cheekbones.

When he was arrested, El-Gamal denied he socked Vassiliev, but conceded, “[Vassiliev’s] face could have run into my hand,” court papers say.

From Jihad Watch:

The thug Sharif el-Gamal has been sued for an unpaid loan, and faced eviction from his SoHo office over $39,000 in back rent. He was found to owe $21,000 in fines on a property with 13 violations. …

El-Gamal has also threatened a Muslim opponent of the Islamic supremacist mega-mosque at Ground Zero; spoken at an event for Hamas-linked CAIR; and has a history of thuggishness, including a recent comment about how beating people up is “exercise & stress relief.”

So why is NBC honoring this thug? Because the mainstream media is avid to get this Islamic supremacist mosque built, and the will of the people be damned. You see how the chips are stacked against the 70% of Americans who oppose the mosque: if the media reflected their concerns at all, Pamela Geller would be Person of the Year for her leading the effort to stop the mosque.

Example 2

Recently, on November 12, 2010, the New York Times featured an admiring profile of Imam Rauf’s wife, Daisy Khan.

Creeping Sharia comments:

When the New York Times ran a profile of Daisy Khan in its “Style” section last week, they clearly meant to create flattering portrait. Instead, the piece, at least to me, revealed the woman’s true priorities and intentions – and why she must be stopped.

Khan, wife of imam Feisal Abdul Rauf and his partner in creating the Cordoba House Islamic center on the edges of Ground Zero, has (if this profile is to be believed) one true goal: Islam uber alles. The organization she presides over seeks to glorify Muslims, not (as she claims) to promote interfaith projects. Her focus is Islam, not America. …

Though she insisted to the Times that she and her husband are “law-abiding citizens,” an apartment building they own in New Jersey has been cited for numerous health and fire violations. Moreover, just last week, a Hudson County, N.J. judge placed the building in custodial receivership, putting a local realtor in charge of correcting the violations using monies from October rents, since Khan and Rauf had failed to act themselves. The couple has also been cited for tax violations regarding the non-profit statuses of their various organizations, including Khan’s own American Society for Muslim Advancement. …

It’s not entirely clear what that organization actually does, other than solicit (and receive) grants and various donations. Last year, for instance, ASMA received a one-year, $150,000 endowment from the Henry Luce Foundation “to develop a graduate program in Islamic law for Muslim women.” Would someone please explain to me why ASMA needs $150,000 a year to plan a program that is not even listed among the organization’s projects, goals, or activities?

ASMA’s web site describes a mission to “elevate the discourse on Islam and foster environments in which Muslims thrive.” (“Muslims,” not “Americans.” Not “young men and women.” “Muslims.”) ASMA’s mission statement continues, “We are dedicated to strengthening an authentic expression of Islam based on cultural and religious harmony through interfaith collaboration, youth and women’s empowerment, and arts and cultural exchange.”

But again – notwithstanding the obvious fact that there is nothing “interfaith” about any of this — what, exactly, have they done? Click on “events,” and you’ll find a list of places that Daisy Khan has been invited to speak, or the fact that she was present at the 2007 Frankfurt Book Fair. Click on “programs,” and you get links to various articles about Islam. Click on “arts” and you find listings of exhibitions others have presented and organized, with no funding or other involvement from ASMA itself. Click on “shop,” and you can buy any one of three books – all by Khan’s husband, Imam Rauf.

But nowhere is there an indication of what the organization actually accomplishes, of the activities it has initiated and developed. It is hard to decipher quite what gives the organization legitimacy as a “non-profit” – or, for that matter, where the donations it receives are actually going.

The real and contemptible intention behind the Ground Zero mosque plan is not hard to discern, but for those who can’t see it, some Muslims have spelt it out.

From the IBD editorial:

The mosque at Ground Zero is not about outreach. Its name, Cordoba House, was picked in honor of the bloody Muslim conquest of Cordoba, Spain, in 711. Canadian Muslims Raheel Raza and Tarek Fatah, who sit on the board of the Muslim Canadian Congress, write in the Ottawa Citizen of Aug, 7: “We Muslims know that the idea behind the Ground Zero mosque is meant to be a deliberate provocation to thumb our noses at the infidel.“

NBC and the New York Times are thumbing their noses hard in sympathy with their country’s ruthless enemy.

Now Stuxnet, the invisible, terrible, and mighty worm, is sending deceptive signals to the Iranian airforce through radar.

Airmen scrambled to intercept an attack by aircraft that were not there.

Here’s the report:

Stuxnet is also in the process of raiding Iran’s military systems, sowing damage and disorder in its wake.

On Nov. 17, in the middle of a massive air defense exercise, Iranian military sources reported six foreign aircraft had intruded the airspace over the practice sites and were put to flight by Iranian fighters. The next day, a different set of military sources claimed a misunderstanding; there had been no intrusions. Iranian fighters had simulated an enemy raid which too had been repulsed. …

There was no “misunderstanding.” The foreign intruders had shown up on the exercise’s radar screens, but when the fighter jets scrambled to intercept them, they found an empty sky, meaning the radar instruments had lied.

The military command accordingly decided to give up on using the exercise as a stage for unveiling new and highly sophisticated weaponry, including a homemade radar system, for fear that they too may have been infected by the ubiquitous Stuxnet worm.

Postscript: The fact that Stuxnet is not (or not yet) being used against North Korea suggests that it was not dispatched to Iran by the United States.

Abraham H. Miller, professor emeritus of political science, has an article at PajamasMedia that we applaud, because he succinctly endorses our own opinion of Obama’s treacherous and catastrophic pro-Islam policy – which we suspect springs from deep emotional ties to that cruel, totalitarian, and deathly religion.

Sharing Professor Miller’s indignation, we cannot resist quoting a fair chunk of his commentary, and hope you will go here to read all of it:

You’re about to be groped, X-rayed, and generally humiliated in the airport. The Islamic Fiqh Council, however, has issued a fatwa prohibiting Muslims from going through an X-ray machine. Separately, CAIR (Council on American-Islamic Relations) is advising Muslim women to avoid pat-downs beyond the head and neck. Our culturally sensitive administration will undoubtedly acquiesce. You, however, will be groped and X-rayed, unless of course you show up at the airport dressed in a tent. …

After stooping and genuflecting to the Islamic world and cutting Israel off at the knees, President Barack Obama has had such a positive impact on the Muslim street that its attitudes toward America were slightly better during Bush’s last year.

Cultural sensitivity has fared no better in Afghanistan, where the rules of engagement put the lives of our soldiers at greater risk in an effort to reduce civilian casualties. The administration has decided to trade American deaths for Afghan lives. The Afghan people, however, seem to have engaged in the rational calculus that it is better to side with those who will be there, the Taliban, than those who have announced their intention to leave. …

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano is still unable to utter the words “Islamist terrorist,” preferring to engage in Newspeak about “man-made disasters.” The real man-made disasters are the multi-ethnic states of Iraq and Afghanistan, lines on the map encompassing diverse people who have found familiarity breeds contempt and contempt breeds irrational violence. But more irrational is our hubris, thinking that we can suddenly transform seventh century societies into modern democracies amid the most virulent and transformative ideology on the planet, radical Islam.

The wars persist. Victory is as elusive as it is undefined. The spilling of blood and treasure goes on. We cannot kill our way to victory, and we cannot reshape the foundation of these cultures.

Our status in the world diminishes. …

And the Obama administration, having disengaged from Israel, has decided, in an act of consummate recklessness, to create a Saudi hegemony, to balance Iran, with the largest arms deal in the history of our nation, sixty billion dollars. Those who fail to learn from history are condemned to repeat it. This was the policy of prior administrations with regard to the shah of Iran, who was supposed to be the hegemonic power in the Persian Gulf, offsetting then Soviet interests in that region. And we all saw how well that turned out.

So now we are banking on an aging royal family with the legitimacy of Weimar standing in the headwinds of rising fundamentalism, a family that has walked the tightrope of dealing with the West while exporting its own brand of Islamic fundamentalism to undermine Western traditions and institutions. We are afraid to confront them, for in our multicultural mindset one culture is as good as another. …

Our influence in the world declines along with the value of our currency. We elected a president whom the world’s leaders do not take seriously. We are saddled with large unemployment in an economy that exports jobs faster than it creates them. We are becoming Britain of the post-World War II era, but now there is no America in the West to step into the power vacuum.

The New York Times exposes a farce enacted on the real stage of international politics: a perfectly performed con-trick by which an imposter extracted a mountain of moola from craven double-dealing presidents, diplomats, and generals involved in The Endless War of Waste and Futility.

The conman claimed to be Mullah Akhta Muhammad Mansour, “the second highest official in the Taliban movement” after the founder, Mullah Mohammed Omar.

He and “two other Taliban leaders” were flown to Kabul from Pakistan in a NATO plane, wearing serious beards, and were ceremoniously ushered into the presidential palace, where they proceeded to beard President Karzai in his den, so to speak. Then they were conducted to the city of Kandahar where “Mullah Mansour” and his two merry men hoodwinked government officials, NATO commanders, American diplomats and top-brass.

For months, the secret talks unfolding between Taliban and Afghan leaders to end the war appeared to be showing promise, if only because of the appearance of a certain insurgent leader at one end of the table: Mullah Akhtar Muhammad Mansour, one of the most senior commanders in the Taliban movement.

But now, it turns out, Mr. Mansour was apparently not Mr. Mansour at all. In an episode that could have been lifted from a spy novel, United States and Afghan officials now say the Afghan man was an impostor, and high-level discussions conducted with the assistance of NATO appear to have achieved little.

“It’s not him,” said a Western diplomat in Kabul intimately involved in the discussions. “And we gave him a lot of money.”

American officials confirmed Monday that they had given up hope that the Afghan was Mr. Mansour, or even a member of the Taliban leadership.

Doubts about the man’s identity arose after the third session of negotiations. Only then –

A man who had known [the real] Mr. Mansour years ago told Afghan officials that the man at the table did not resemble him.

Even so, they wistfully hoped that whoever he was would come again. They’d paid him to keep the fake peace talks going, and any old talks, with anyone at all, are better than none.

While the Afghan official said he still harbored hopes that the man would return for another round of talks, American and other Western officials said they had concluded that the man in question was not Mr. Mansour. Just how the Americans reached such a definitive conclusion — whether, for instance, they were able to positively establish his identity through fingerprints or some other means — is unknown.

As recently as last month, American and Afghan officials held high hopes for the talks. Senior American officials, including Gen. David H. Petraeus, said the talks indicated that Taliban leaders, whose rank-and-file fighters are under extraordinary pressure from the American-led offensive, were at least willing to discuss an end to the war. …

President Karzai himself – who wears, literally, the mantle of power – denied that any talks with any Taliban, real or pretend, were going on at all:

“Do not accept foreign media reports about meetings with Taliban leaders. Most of these reports are propaganda and lies,” he said.

The Taliban also deny that any talks took place, or were planned.

In a recent message to his followers, Mullah Omar denied that there were any talks unfolding at any level.

Now, since “Mullah Mansour” turns out to have been a scam artist, it seems they might be telling the truth.

Since the last round of discussions, which took place within the past few weeks, Afghan and American officials have been puzzling over who the man was.

So who was he?

[Some] say the man may have been a [real] Taliban agent. “The Taliban are cleverer than the Americans and our own intelligence service,” said a senior Afghan official who is familiar with the case.  “They are playing games.”

Others suspect that the fake Taliban leader, whose identity is not known, may have been dispatched by the Pakistani intelligence service, known by its initials, the ISI. Elements within the ISI have long played a “double-game” in Afghanistan, reassuring United States officials that they are pursuing the Taliban while at the same time providing support for the insurgents.

The theory we like best is that he was “a humble shopkeeper from the Pakistani city of Quetta”, who simply enlisted the help of two cronies and carried out the sting operation for the most understandable of motives – to get a lot of money. Which they did.

Ralph Langner, a German computer security expert, has fathomed what Stuxnet was designed to do (by whom, nobody knows), and declares it  a stunningly advanced technological achievement.

(See our posts A virus that might save us all, Sept 25, 2010, and Sound the trumpet!, September 29, 2010.)

Praising the sophistication of the attack code, Langner … compared it to “the arrival of an F-35 fighter jet on a World War I battlefield.” He called the technology, “much superior to anything ever seen before, and to what was assumed possible.”

It was designed, he says, specifically to attack Iran’s nuclear program by means of two distinct “digital warheads” aimed respectively at two military targets: uranium enrichment plants and the Bushehr nuclear power plant.

He explained how the worm works to destroy these targets:

The portion of the worm that targeted uranium enrichment plants manipulated the speeds of mechanical parts in the enrichment process, which would ultimately “result in cracking the rotor, thereby destroying the centrifuge.”  …

The second “warhead” [that] targeted the Bushehr nuclear plant … had no relation to the first “warhead” … [It]  was intended to attack the external turbine controller of the Bushehr plant, a 150 foot “chunk of metal,” that could “destroy the turbine as effectively as an air strike.”

He did not say that he or anyone else could “cure” the infected Iranian computer systems.

However, Iran does not apparently need any outside help. Having superior technological know-how, it can deal effectively with Stuxnet all by itself,  according to its intelligence minister Heldar Moslehi:

“Iran’s intelligence department has found a solution for confronting (the worm) and it will be applied,” he was quoted as saying. “Our domination of virtual networks has thwarted the activities of enemies in this regard.”

Somehow he doesn’t sound either convinced or convincing. We cheerfully guess – and affably hope – that the Iranian dominators of virtual networks will struggle on unsuccessfully with the Stuxnet depredations for a good long time to come.

Michael Gerson, in an article at Townhall – a conservative website! – objects to Oklahoma’s constitutional amendment preventing the introduction of Islam’s sharia law into the state.

He claims that the measure was introduced to “to taunt a religious minority”, and dubs it “faith-baiting”, warning that other states could follow the example and introduce measures to “bait” Christians, for instance, or Hindus.

He tries to defend sharia:

Anti-Shariah activists argue that Shariah law controls every area of a Muslim’s life … and thus that Islam itself is incompatible with American democracy. Radical Islamists would nod in agreement to each of these claims…

Not surprising really, since the claims are true. But he has a different understanding:

Both are wrong. The proper interpretation of Shariah law is a subject of vigorous debate within Islam. There are some who would freeze societies in the cultural practices of seventh-century Arabia. But there are others who identify a core of Islamic teaching that is separable from the cultural assumptions of the Quran and the teachings of Muhammad. Predominantly Muslim nations take a variety of approaches to the application of Islamic law, from theocracy to official secularism. …

Wherever did he get this idea of a “vigorous debate within Islam” over sharia or anything else? Where is “Islamic teaching separable from the Quran and the teachings of Muhammad”? What taqqiya (religiously sanctioned lies) has he been swallowing? He gives no sources, no references.

Most if not all states that have a majority Muslim population and a constitution  – and we have found only one exception  – claim that the basis of their  law is sharia. The exception was Turkey, but that is changing. Turkey is now governed by a religious party. The genuinely secular state  that Kemal Ataturk created is being dismantled and the Turks are returning to Islamic darkness.

Does Gerson actually know anything about sharia law? He goes on:

So is Shariah law compatible with democracy? In the totalitarian version of the Taliban, it cannot be reconciled with pluralism. But if Shariah is interpreted as a set of transcendent principles of fairness and justice …

If it is so interpreted? It would be interesting to see how a system of law that has a woman’s testimony valued at half that of a man’s, and prescribes death for apostasy, to take just two examples, can be interpreted as “a set of transcendent principles of fairness and justice”.

He really seems not to know what he’s talking about. It is precisely this sort of deliberate blindness to what Islam is and intends that helps it towards its objective of domination.

He also seems to be unaware that sharia is creeping into Western countries and creating a great deal of justified anger and anxiety by the sort of “justice” the sharia courts are doling out. Muslim women in Britain, for instance, who had hoped for protection from sharia under British law, are now subjected to the “justice and fairness” of one or another of 85 sharia courts, whose rulings are enforced by the British state. They feel bitterly betrayed by the country in which they sought refuge from the subjugation that the law of Islam prescribes for them. (See our post Sharia in Britain, November 5, 2010.)

The state of Oklahoma, in our opinion, is foresightful and wise to bar sharia out. What is deplorable is that it has become necessary to take legislative action against it in the United States of America.