U.S. Sharia Tribunals, ‘No Problem’?
Karen Lugo
Founder, Libertas-West Project
9:20 AM 09/29/2015
Recent news of an Islamic “sharia court” in the Dallas area raised alarms but once PolitiFact-Texas, Snopes, and Dallas Morning News reporters accepted sharia judge assurances that the tribunal is essentially just mediating marital and contract disputes, alarm subsided.
However, since the Islamic Tribunal website announces that the Dallas sharia center is a model and will serve to “set a precedence (sic) that will be emulated and duplicated throughout the country,” Americans should persist in getting answers to some deeper questions before assenting to a sharia tribunal franchise.
If sister sharia “councils” in the UK and the EU are instructive, this tribunal’s protestations that proceedings comply with the law of the land are false. Undercover investigations and policy center studies across the pond reveal that the sharia councils operate as counter-cultural and unlawful parallel civil — sometimes criminal – courts. Normalization of similarly operating sharia centers in the U.S. would be like embracing apartheid courts in this country.
To be sure, the Dallas sharia “judges” have now defined the operation as “non-binding” arbitration but this may be a clever way of trying to exist in the ambiguous space between regulated arbitration and advice-only mediation services.
Read more:
http://dailycaller.com/2015/09/29/u-s-sharia-tribunals-no-problem/#ixzz3nKIIR6d4
