My jaw dropped in horror last week as we all watched the sickening scenes of Islamic terrorists attacking the Charlie Hebdo satire magazine in Paris. These Muslims barbarically murdered 12 people and left many others wounded.
The terrorists’ motive for murder had a short-term and long-term goal: defend the honor of Muhammad, and impose sharia law. We may be appalled by Muslim goals and actions, and hope these things don’t happen in America. I am warning you right now: sharia is already being imposed here, but in a way you don’t realize.
Sharia is Islamic law meant to shape and govern society. It does not stem from any governing body, but is deemed by Muslims to be eternal and commanded by Allah to create the ideal human civilization. The purpose of sharia is to subjugate and conform people to the religious ideal, Islam. When everyone is submitted to Allah, there may be true peace and harmony on earth under a global Muslim government or caliphate.
You don’t have to be a Muslim to live in this paradise, but you must conform to the Islamic ideal and submit to its rulership. Non-Muslims may be persuaded, bullied, and even killed to compel their conformity to sharia. Non-Muslims living under sharia often suffer the loss of religious freedom and freedom of speech. They must pay an oppressive non-believer tax, and have less education and economic opportunity because they are not Muslim. Sharia also is used to keep people from abandoning the ideal faith and society by converting to another religion. Death is a common penalty for violating this aspect of sharia law.
Terror is used by some Muslims to impose sharia on unwilling societies. Muslims are not powerful enough to enact it in a non-Muslim nation like France. However, if they bully and kill enough people, perhaps the non-Muslims will effectively enforce sharia upon themselves. If the non-Muslims behave in a sharia-compliant way, the bullying and killing will stop. If they don’t, the violence will continue until non-Muslims conform to sharia. The Charlie Hebdo journalists grossly flaunted sharia with their Muhammad cartoons, so they were killed.
You may be ready to tune me out now, thinking that America is not like France. As freedom-loving people, we would never submit to sharia law nor allow anyone to impose it on us. If you believe that, you need to wake up right now! Sharia is already being imposed in America, but, remember, I said it is in a way that you don’t realize.
You see, there is more than one kind of sharia. There is religious sharia which is used to realize an ideal religious society. There is also secular sharia — political correctness — and it is already well established in America today.
Remember, sharia is used to subjugate and conform people to an ideal. Only in America that ideal is not (yet) a global caliphate under the flag of Islam. Instead, the ideal is a global government under the flag of progressivism. We can have peace and harmony when institutional power is crushed and inequality is gone. Political correctness — secular sharia — is how we conform people to that ideal.
But what about non-conformers? Like in the Islamic world, sharia is used to persuade and bully non-believers into submission and conformity. If you don’t follow secular sharia, you will be ostracized. How dare you do something or say something politically incorrect? You will lose freedom of religion and freedom of speech. Progressives regularly try to shut up those who disagree with them, and there certainly is much less freedom of religion in this country than 50 years ago.
Still don’t believe me? How can you explain the actions of Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed? Last week when Muslims were shooting up a publishing house in Paris, Mayor Reed fired Atlanta Fire Chief, Kelvin Cochran.
Cochran’s crime? He wrote a book for his church bible study group about morality in which a few paragraphs expressed the Christian view that homosexuality is immoral.
Kelvin Cochran violated secular sharia, and King Kasim immediately declared, “Off with his head!” You have freedom of religion and freedom of speech only if you conform to sharia.
If you care about liberty, you should be appalled that progressives like Kasim Reed are imposing secular sharia on our society. Be warned.
Idealists, whether Islamic or progressive, tend to act the same way, because they both operate on idealistic assumptions. Sharia, whether Islamic law or political correctness, is how they conform you.
First they will try to persuade you to submit to their ideal. When you don’t, they may bully you, and even kill you, if they are able, until they achieve their ideal.
If we don’t tenaciously fight political correctness, much less Islamic law, we may as well raise the white flag now which reads, “Welcome to the Sharia World.”
[David Richardson of Peachtree City is the executive director of The Assumptions Project. He has a master’s degree from Oxford University, and is a university consultant in education and culture. He is a recognized expert on the religious attitudes and beliefs of university professors. He, his wife and children have lived in Fayette County for more than two decades.]
