When the news first broke about the Supreme Court leak and the possibility that the court might actually overturn Roe v. Wade, Leftists were quick to liken pro-lifers to the Taliban, eager for the chance to oppress women by outlawing murder in the womb. “It is a bit amazing,” said The Daily Show. “After all these years of the right screaming about the threat of Sharia law, it turns out they were just jealous.” Mia Farrow tweeted (and then deleted) that Republicans would “be happy to impose Sharia laws.” One Twitter user summed it up: “Abortion is illegal. Religion taught in schools. Rejection of Gay Marriage. Press is the enemy of the people. No separation of Church and State. Political leaders worshiped. Rejection of science. Rejection of vaccines. Republican or Taliban? They look the same to me.” But now Muslim leaders in the U.S. are crying foul: as they see it, all these comparisons to Republicans are giving Sharia a bad name.
NorthJersey.com reported Wednesday that “the comparisons are not only offensive but also inaccurate, say Muslims.” One of the principal reasons why is that Islam isn’t even pro-life: “Under most interpretations of Islamic law, abortion is permitted within the first 120 days.” The report asserted that “today, some American states have tougher abortion laws than Afghanistan, which allows the procedure if the mother’s life is at risk or if the child will be born with severe disabilities.”
Accordingly, the founder of the New York-based Women’s Islamic Initiative in Spirituality and Equality, Daisy Khan (whose husband, Faisal Abdul Rauf, was a prime mover behind the ill-fated Ground Zero Mosque initiative a few years ago), declared: “We cannot preach women’s rights to other countries when we are stepping back the rights [American] women have to control their own reproduction.”
And we especially cannot preach abortion, in the view of Khan and her allies, by likening its foes to Muslims who follow Islamic law down to the last detail. Sahar Aziz of Rutgers University Law School complains that “liberals are seeking to protect women’s right to privacy and autonomy over her body. They are perversely doing so by maligning Islam as misogynistic by comparing the opposition to Sharia.”
Abed Awad, whom NorthJersey.com says is “a national expert in Islamic law,” without explaining what exactly constitutes a “national expert,” “said he has grown frustrated with the spread of misinformation about Sharia over two decades, most recently with the abortion debate.” Ah, there’s that word again. If only we had, say, a Disinformation Governance Board to go after the miscreants who spread this alleged misinformation! “Sharia,” says Awad, “when it comes to the right to terminate a pregnancy, is far more egalitarian and progressive.” So comparing pro-lifers to the Taliban is just the wrong look; after all, who could possibly be more egalitarian and progressive than the Taliban?
Related: A Crash at the Intersectionality Intersection
The Muslim leaders quoted in the NorthJersey.com article are complaining in this article that Islam isn’t even pro-life, so the comparison is unfair, but also they dislike the fact that Sharia is being discussed as if it were a bad thing. It reveals that all their carefully crafted public relations campaigns over the years have been ineffective even among those whom they consider allies and who would never dream of maligning Sharia in any context other than as a stick they can use to beat pro-lifers.
The comments from Trevor Noah and Mia Farrow show that. The irony here is that both Noah and Farrow, as committed, wholehearted Leftists, would eagerly denounce any criticism of Sharia as “Islamophobic” and “racist,” even in regard to Islam’s treatment of women. But if Sharia can be used as a stick to beat Republicans with, then they happily become “Islamophobic.”
It’s easy to see why some Islamic leaders would find this annoying. After any opposition to jihad violence and Sharia oppression of women that actually dares to discuss its root causes in Islamic texts and teachings has been thoroughly stigmatized as “Islamophobic,” and even the mildest opposition to jihad terror can get you inundated with charges of “hatred” and “bigotry,” it must be disconcerting in the extreme to see Leftists casually referring to Sharia as if it were a bad thing. What do you do when the people you’ve propagandized and brainwashed turn out to have an independent thought after all? Step up your war against reality, of course. Watch for it.
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