Jihad Watch
via Obama Administration pushing Sharia in Kenya.
U.S. financial and rhetorical support for the Kenyan constitution has some members of Congress calling for an investigation. In a letter to Department of State officials and others, Reps. Chris Smith of New Jersey, Darrell Issa of California and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen of Florida raised questions about U.S. lobbying in Kenya — specifically, the possibility that the Obama administration may have violated federal law in doing so.
Administration officials have denied any impropriety. But, as the letter points out, our ambassador to Kenya has been quoted as saying that the U.S. has given Kenya $2 million for “civic education” on the constitution, and that we’re committed to more.
“The U.S. shouldn’t be interfering with this process, and we have serious questions about why the Obama administration is promoting a constitution which allows abortion on demand and waters down protections for religious freedom,” Rebecca Marchinda of the New York-based World Youth Alliance, which has an office in Nairobi, says. [...]
…the proposed constitution would also create a legal system within a legal system — codifying the strengthening of sharia by making it apply to every Muslim Kenyan. As Eric Rassbach of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty points out: “People are subjected to these tribunals merely by virtue of what religious community they were born into, and they have no way of opting out.”
Ray Walser of the Heritage Foundation gives the Obama administration the benefit of the doubt: “I would suspect the administration is pushing the constitution package as a whole with the promise to reduce presidential power and to place constitutional safeguards against corruption.” That would take Vice President Biden at his word. But the Achilles heel of this administration is that it is not, in the subtle words of Walser, “adverse to measures that permit space for sharia-like legal customs — for Muslim outreach/public-diplomacy purposes“…
Nina Shea, director of the Hudson Institute’s Center for Religious Freedom, has a more direct and alarming warning: “The U.S. is drifting unconsciously, haltingly, inconsistently toward a foreign policy that actively promotes the state coercion of Islamic strictures. It adopted such a policy in its financial and legal drafting support of the constitutions of Iraq and Afghanistan. … It did so at the U.N. Human Rights Council in October 2009, when the U.S. joined with Egypt, representing the Organization of the Islamic Conference, to introduce a resolution calling for states to enforce their hate-speech laws. It explained its initiative, which shocked many NGOs, as seeking to ‘reach out to Muslim countries.’” [...]
I would guess that it is not the decision of the Obama administration to promote Sharia specifically, but I do agree with the quote from Nina Shea: “The U.S. is drifting unconsciously, haltingly, inconsistently toward a foreign policy that actively promotes the state coercion of Islamic strictures. It adopted such a policy in its financial and legal drafting support of the constitutions of Iraq and Afghanistan. … It did so at the U.N. Human Rights Council in October 2009, when the U.S. joined with Egypt, representing the Organization of the Islamic Conference, to introduce a resolution calling for states to enforce their hate-speech laws. It explained its initiative, which shocked many NGOs, as seeking to ‘reach out to Muslim countries.”
All of this outreach has anti-Western influence, and I don’t agree with promoting anything that goes against our own principles. It’s our money, let’s promote our principles. Instead we get Islamic supremacist documents in all the countries we go into, with merely the facade of democracy and human rights.
