Controversial experts authored ‘Shariah’ report hailed by Bachmann

Last week, Rep. Pete Hoekstra of Michigan and Rep. Trent Franks of Arizona held a press conference in Washington, D.C. to promote a new report by the Center for Security Policy called “Shariah: The Threat to America.” Rep. Michele Bachmann, reported to be attending, didn’t show up, but she sent a letter praising the report. (Franks reads her letter at the 5:30 mark in this video.)

At the press conference, CSP founder and president Frank Gaffney said, in a bit of understatement, that the report was written by “outside experts with a distinctly different point of view” from “the official U.S. government view.” But a look at those experts and their views reveals a controversial track record, to say the least.

Gaffney himself is no stranger to inflammatory accusations, having declared last June that there is “mounting evidence that the president (Obama) not only identifies with Muslims, but actually may still be one himself.” This was shortly after the president’s famous speech in Cairo, Egypt, which Gaffney claimed was full of “code” words that signaled to Muslim extremists that we will submit to their Sharia rule over America.

He said that Obama’s statement that America “respects” Islam would be viewed as a message of submission “in the Taliban headquarters and in al Qaeda’s cave” — presumably such perceptions would occur to them in between dodging the daily missiles fired from American unmanned drones in Pakistan and avoiding the tens of thousands of troops hunting them down in Afghanistan.

Earlier this year, Gaffney accused the Obama administration of sending yet another signal of submission to radical Islam by changing the logo of a Defense Department agency to resemble the Muslim star and crescent symbol. He quickly had to retract that accusation after it was revealed that the new logo was, in fact, ordered by the Bush administration and Obama had nothing to do with it.

The team that wrote this report was led by Lt. Gen. William G. (Jerry) Boykin, a former United States Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence with a long history of undermining the military’s official stance of religious neutrality in the war on terror.

In 2004, Boykin was investigated by the Pentagon for a series of statements made in appearances before church groups that framed the war on terror as a holy war between Christianity and Islam. That investigation concluded that Boykin had violated military regulations in making those statements.

Boykin contrasted himself with a Muslim warlord in Somalia against whom he had led a mission, saying, “I knew that my God was bigger than his. I knew that my God was a real God and his was an idol.” These and other remarks were considered so dangerous by the civilian and military leadership at the Pentagon that even President Bush declared publicly that Boykin’s comments do not “reflect my point of view or the point of view of this administration.”

After retiring, Boykin began touring the country, appearing before fundamentalist Christian audiences in his military uniform and continuing to make similar statements.

And then there’s David Yerushalmi, general counsel to the CSP and another author of this report. He appeared at the press conference with Hoekstra last week. Yerushalmi also founded a group called SANE — Society of Americans for National Existence — and he has essentially revealed himself as a white supremacist in his writings over the years.

An orthodox Jew himself, Yerushalmi nonetheless defended Mel Gibson’s drunken tirade against Jews, writing:

“Let’s assume that Gibson looks out into the world and sees liberal Jews taking the social and political lead in all forms of World State ideologies and moral abominations… That Gibson sees Jews in an unfavorable light is only irrational if one wishes to make the argument that secular liberal Jews are not in fact the leading proponents of all forms of anti-Western, anti-American, anti-Christian movements, campaigns, and ideologies.”

SANE has a proposed law for America — once publicly available but since covered by a password on their website, thought it has been widely quoted all over the web — that would essentially outlaw Islam in America. Among its provisions:

[4] It shall be a felony punishable by 20 years in prison to knowingly act in furtherance of, or to support the, adherence to Islam.

[5] The Congress of the United States of America shall declare the US at war with the Muslim Nation or Umma.

[6] The President of the United States of America shall immediately declare that all non-US citizen Muslims are Alien Enemies under Chapter 3 of Title 50 of the US Code and shall be subject to immediate deportation.

[7] No Muslim shall be granted an entry visa into the United States of America.

He has also written some inflammatory things involving race and gender, like defending the denial of voting rights to women and blacks:

There is a reason the founding fathers did not give women or black slaves the right to vote. You might not agree or like the idea but this country’s founders, otherwise held in the highest esteem for their understanding of human nature and its affect on political society, certainly took it seriously. Why is that? Were they so flawed in their political reckonings that they manhandled the most important aspect of a free society – the vote? If the vote counts for so much in a free and liberal democracy as we “know” it today, why did they limit the vote so dramatically?

Mikey Weinstein, founder of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, reacted strongly to the endorsement of this report by Hoekstra, Franks and Bachmann.

“People like Jerry Boykin and David Yerushalmi are the very last sources we should be listening to when it comes to the proper way to engage with the Muslim world,” he said via email.

Boykin, he said, “is an unctuous, fundamentalist Christian supremacist who has been shamefully working for years to push the United States into a holy religious war with Islam, which can only result in more damage to our nation’s ability to fight the war on terror by egregiously alienating those moderate, pro-American forces within the Muslim world who are so crucial to that fight.”

“Yerushalmi,” he said, “is not trying to do away with Sharia, he is trying to do away with Muslims from the United States completely, shredding the constitution’s guarantee of religious freedom and destroying our most cherished principles in the process.”

Weinstein concluded, “It’s a scandalous shame that these legislators would promote the work of people of this sorry ilk. Our fight is against unconstitutional extremism of all types and the Center for Security Policy represents the extreme fringe of America just as surely as Bin Laden represents the extreme fringe of Islam.”