That great comic Lenin once observed that the bourgeoisie was so cravenly addicted to the profit motive that its members would happily sell Communist revolutionaries the rope with which they were to be hanged.
I couldn’t help thinking of that when a friend sent me a press release from the Dow Jones News Services yesterday proudly announcing that February marked the “10th anniversary of the launch of the Dow Jones Islamic Market (DJIM) Indexes.”
That’s right folks, mighty Dow Jones, publisher of The Wall Street Journal , also hosts an index “to measure the performance of a global universe of Shari’ah-compliant investable equities.”
“Shari’ah-compliant investable equities”–let’s see, that would be entities that comply with the dictates of Sharia (we infidels can skip the apostrophe), i.e., Islamic law, i.e., the charming code that tells you how and where to go about obtaining multiple wives, what offenses merit flogging, amputation of a hand or foot, or even what another friend of mine refers to as “the full Muslim.”
What John Prestbo, editor and executive director of the Dow Jones Indexes, refers to as “this thrilling indexing initiative” has apparently been a smashing success, not least because of input of the Dow Jones Islamic Market Index Shari’ah Supervisory Board, a six-member group of Islamic scholars. (I wonder if Omar Abdel Rahman has an honorary seat?)
The DJIM (I’m not sure how it is pronoucned: maybe like “Dhimmi,” as in “dhimmitude,” the official state of second-class citizenship reserved for non Muslims living in a land claimed by Islam) tracks companies that “meet Shari’ah principles for acceptable products, business activities, debt levels and interest income and expenses.” Meaning that “any company whose core business involves alcohol, conventional financial services, entertainment, pork-related products, tobacco or weapon production is excluded. In a second step, companies with unacceptable levels of debt or impure interest income are excluded.”
No pork-related products, eh? Well, I guess that excludes most of the U.S. economy at the moment. That’s the (gruesomely) amusing aspect of this latest spectacle of Western capitulation. Other less amusing aspects are not difficult to imagine. As the friend who alerted me to the Dow Jones Islamic Index remarked, “We in the West sure do bend over backwards for our Muslim brothers and sisters.” Indeed we do.
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