Yes, We Have No Sharia, or, So Darling, Save the Lap Dance for Me

Could it really be all that stands between us and paying the jizya tax is a G-string?

In an open letter Wednesday to Pastor Terry Jones, Dearborn Mayor Jack O'Reilly Jr. blasted claims that his city is under Islamic law, noting it has three strip clubs and a factory that makes pork products sitting across the street from a mosque.

“None of that should be allowed under Shari'a law,” O'Reilly wrote, referring to a set of Islamic rules and customs. (“Mayor O'Reilly's open letter to Pastor Terry Jones”).

Mayor Jack forgot to mention that Dearborn also has Miss USA Rima Fakih, who’s not afraid to pole dance.

As Niraj Warikoo at the Detroit Free Press reports it, “city officials, Muslim Americans and others see the anti-Shari'a efforts as part of a campaign to whip up hysteria against Muslims and score political points.” (“Detroit Suburb Fights Pastor's Mosque Rally”).

This kills me, because we’re the ones who are supposed to be hysterical. And yet this Terry Jones thing has Mayor Jack so worked up that His Honor is actually publishing an open letter that Dearborn boasts three strip clubs and enough bars to people skid row for a hundred years. (“Mayor O'Reilly's open letter to Pastor Terry Jones”).

O’Reilly usually can’t say ten words in public without breaking into a plug for Greenfield Village, “where more than 1.5 million visitors come each year from across the country!” and now he’s updated his tourist tagline to “Visit Dearborn! Come for our Constitutional freedoms, but stay for our VIP Rooms!”

Why is it I can’t shake this image of a 12-year-old kid sucking desperately on a cigarette to impress hoodlums demanding proof he’s not a sissy?

Suggestion to Mayor O’Reilly: If you want to reassure us that we’re enjoying the First Amendment here and there’s no Sharia, skip the examples of how depraved we all still are and show us some proof of where Islam can be publicly criticized in Dearborn without the chief of police getting involved.

This is what Mayor Jack has driven himself to. He first dug himself into this when he deprived those Acts 17 fundamentalists of their civil rights two years in a row at the Arab Festival. That was such a transparent effort to placate Dearborn’s Muslims that no one believes him now when he insists he supports nonMuslims’ rights, no matter how much he talks about the Bill of Rights. Now we have a county prosecutor (and shame, shame, SHAME on you, Kym Worthy) filing a criminal “complaint to institute proceedings to prevent crime,” and alleging, ludicrously, that “Pastor Jones will jeopardize the safety of the public by committing an act against the person or property of another in the form[ ] of burning a Koran." In other words, he might actually commit an act that is protected by the Constitution, but a capital crime under Sharia!

Maybe we should be grateful that Mayor Jack at least admits the existence of Sharia somewhere in the universe. I’m talking about when his open letter explains that it would never be allowed under Sharia to have a pork-processing plant across the street from a mosque.

And what is that supposed to prove? We’re not idiots. Those of us raising concerns about Sharia have never tried to say Dearborn is under as tight a Sharia grip as Iran is under the Mullahs. When we discuss Sharia we characterize it as “creeping,” as Islam in Dearborn.

It’s an axiom with us that where the Muslim community’s a minority, it’s not going to be imposed with the rigor with which it’s imposed now in Gaza, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Southern Lebanon, Iran, Pakistan, and, oh, you get the idea: all localities where Islam is the dominating majority. We don’t have to have a total Sharia to have Sharia. If the MSA exists in Dearborn, (it does), there is Sharia, along with the Muslim Brotherhood. (One word: footbaths). If Hezbollah is being funded and supported here, (which it is), that is Sharia. If you see a woman whose face is covered, you are looking at the face of Sharia. Christian missionaries are being arrested for evangelizing at public festivals. What else is that supposed to be but the civil law enforcing the strictures of Islam against evangelizing Muslims?

Mayor Jack’s pronouncement that there is no “Sharia law being practiced in the courts or civil law of Dearborn [or] … in our courts, [or] at our City Hall, [or] in any of our places of worship” protests too much, as false protests always do.

We can ask the Acts 17 evangelists, or now, Terry Jones (whose jury is being selected as we speak) if there’s any Sharia in our civil law. That’s the big argument, now, isn’t it? But then our Mayor Jack insists in his open letter that “Sharia Law is church- or faith-based law that is applicable only to the followers of that faith. For me it is Cannon [sic] Law of Catholicism, in Judaism it is Torah Law, and for Muslims it is Sharia Law.”

But as for its private practice, are there really no Muslims who follow Sharia, (or no Catholics who follow Canon Law, even in our “places of worship”)? This is how desperation talks. Deny Sharia in civil law you may have an argument. Deny no one anywhere in Dearborn is under Sharia, and now you’re just lying to us.

No one’s buying it. Even the ACLU has to admit that, “The government can not silence demonstrations in anticipation that their message will not be welcomed,” and, “As reprehensible as [Jones’s} beliefs may be, we believe this is an unconstitutional attempt to limit his unpopular speech.”

Which leaves Plan B, the excuse that Terry Jones and his one-man entourage will overwhelm a huge grassy easement along Altar Road and cause the media to block access to Good Friday services at the neighboring churches. The Dearborn Press & Guide is reporting that “city officials said they will not allow the expected gaggle of media and counter protesters to prevent parishioners from attending services.”

Jones’s protest is scheduled for 5:00 pm, two hours after the end of Christians’ traditional noon to 3:00 pm Good Friday services. Who exactly is buying all this?

The fact remains that all this hullabaloo isn’t about preventing a riot or a media crush at all. It’s all about getting Jones to deploy his one-man entourage and his megaphone somewhere else than the front doorstep of the Islamic Center of America. No one has explained yet who it is exactly that’s expected to riot if Jones protests in front of the ICA. Nor has Kym Worthy filed a complaint against the future crime of whomever it is she thinks is going to break out into a riot in response. Nor is she explaining why she hasn’t filed a criminal complaint against them. Civil liberties experts agree that it’s not Jones’s problem Jones insists he has no intention of burning another Qu’ran.

But even if he does, who exactly is expected to riot? And why wouldn’t a riot break out at City Hall, located in the heart of Arab east Dearborn, under the same circumstances? No one has a dimmer view of Dearborn’s Islamic leaders than I do, but the jihadist program is not taking the form here it does in the Middle East and the Maghreb, where Friday prayers in the mosques lead to violent rampages against infidels. Islam does not manifest in Dearborn as that kind of violence, or even violence at all. Nor have I ever said it does. I am the last person who expects that, even if Terry Jones were to break his word and do a Full Monty by setting alight a Qu’ran outside the Islamic Center of America, that a crowd of Dearborn Muslims are going to break out into a riot.

And I don’t believe Mayor Jack or Kym Worthy or Chief Haddad really expect that, either. Which is all the more reason I’m disgusted with them for hiding behind public safety to impose a lawless speech ban on Terry Jones.