A while ago I wrote that Andy McCarthy's theory of a grand conspiracy between terrorists and civil-liberties lawyers to destroy the United States was complicated by the fact that many of those lawyers were observant, even Zionist Jews. This is by no means the only hole in McCarthy's reasoning -- which is, roughly, premised on the assumption that anyone who disagrees with him on national-security matters works for al-Qaeda -- but it's a significant one, and one he simply hasn't addressed.
Yesterday, in an op-ed accompanied by a rather racist doctored picture of Elena Kagan in a turban, Frank Gaffney accused Obama's Supreme Court nominee of being part of a secret ploy to institute Sharia law in the United States:
Worse yet, Dean Kagan had an even more direct connection to the Saudis' Shariah-recruitment efforts at Harvard. She personally officiated in 2003 over the establishment of an Islamic Finance Project at the law school. The project's purpose is to promote what is better known as Shariah-compliant finance (SCF) by enlisting in its service some of the nation's most promising law students.
Islamic Finance is basically a set of financial practices that are deemed compliant with Islamic religious requirements. It is a growing segment of the global financial system -- it exists because some elements of finance we now take for granted, such as charging interest for lending money, are prohibited under Islamic Law. If you want to get a job dealing with finance law for a company located in say, Malaysia, you're going to have to know your way around it.
In Gaffney's view, establishing a part of the law school that would teach students about an emerging sector of the global financial system means that Kagan is part of the effort to put the U.S. on the road to Taliban-style justice. To Gaffney, there is no difference between learning about Islam and Islamic practices and being a de-facto member of the Muslim Brotherhood. Yet this would seem like an odd role for a Jewish woman from the Upper Wast Side -- one who pushed her Orthodox Synagogue to hold her Bat-Mitzvah, the first one it had ever performed.
As with the Jewish lawyers who defended suspected terror detainees because of their commitment to the rule of law, the obvious answer -- that Kagan was likely concerned with making sure her students at Harvard Law got the best education possible -- is inadequate. That's because Gaffney, like many of his fellows in this section of the right, is a birther who believes Obama is a Muslim, a raving conspiracy theorist who's most recent efforts to stop the spread of Sharia include decoding the secret Islamic messages in the logos of government agencies. The fact is that if a liberal so much as farted loudly in his presence, Gaffney would sniff and say it smells like Sharia.
At base, what the Islamic Conspiracy Theory wing of the Republican Party is concerned about is the role of Islam in politics and public life, particularly in the United States. Marc Lynch has a great post excerpting his recent Foreign Affairs piece on the subject that does a good job of cutting through the hysteria and dealing with the actual implications of political Islamism for the West.
One of the reasons I'm highlighting situations in which conservatives accuse observant Jews of being part of grand Islamist conspiracies is that they so resemble the anti-Semitic conspiracies of old, with their fantasies of secret plots for global domination and government subterfuge from within. As Hussein Ibish wrote recently, "Islamophobia is a barely warmed over, 20 seconds in the microwave, version of traditional anti-Semitism." In this case, it's so similar that a Jew is the actual target.
-- A. Serwer
