A Shariah-Compliant Nominee?

The academic tenure of Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan at Harvard Law gives us a glimpse into not only the predilection of such institutions for systems not compatible with the U. S. Constitution but also the likelihood that such legal systems will play an increasingly unwelcome role in America’s future. “It turns out that, at the very moment Ms. Kagan was pushing aggressively to remove military recruiters from the Harvard Law School campus during her tenure as its dean, she was very supportive of having what amounted to Saudi recruiters ensconced there for the purpose of enlisting some of the nation’s finest young lawyers to work for the industry known as Shariah-Compliant Finance (SCF),” Frank Gaffney of the Center for Security Policy notes on BigGovernment.com. “The first insight this record suggests is that Ms. Kagan’s true motivation in barring the armed forces was, indeed, an animus towards the military, rather than concern about its supposed mistreatment of homosexuals.”

“After all, the theo-political-military-legal code that authoritative Islam calls ‘Shariah’ and that is the law of the land in Saudi Arabia is infinitely more homophobic than the Pentagon’s efforts to enforce the U.S. statute that prohibits avowed gays and lesbians from serving in uniform.  The former requires the murder of homosexuals; the latter simply kept them out of the ranks.”

Few have noticed that Kagan’s tenure at Harvard coincides with Saudi investment in same. “Thanks to millions of dollars gifted by an aggressive promoter of the so-called ‘civilizational jihad’ espoused by the Shariah-adherent Muslim Brotherhood, Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, and other Saudi sources, Harvard University is now a major beachhead of Shariah in America,” Gaffney argues.  “In particular, under Dean Kagan, the law school opened an Islamic Finance Project (a less-transparent euphemism for Shariah-Compliant Finance).”

“The Project’s personnel have been aggressive promoters of SCF, particularly in the aftermath of the economic meltdown in the Fall of 2008, which was portrayed by the industry as proof of the inherent corruption of capitalism and the need for a more virtuous, ‘ethical’ form of finance, namely that ‘required’ by Shariah.” As Gaffney notes, such an approach may be politically correct but may not be legal.

“It is alarming Ms. Kagan has appeared so indifferent to the ominous, if lucrative, use of her campus to legitimate and facilitate the penetration of the academy and, as we shall see, other institutions by Shariah’s insidious, anti-constitutional agenda and its adherents,” Gaffney writes.  “In fact, under a neglected part of the U.S. code, such conduct could constitute a felony offense known as ‘misprision of treason’–inaction (not to say complicity) in the face of seditious activity.”

“As it happens, Ms. Kagan’s Islamic Finance Project has also played an important role in the infiltration of Shariah’s promoters within the U.S. government,” Gaffney notes.  “On November 6 2008, Harvard Business School professor Samuel L. Hays III conducted a day-long ‘seminar for the policy community’ entitled “Islamic Finance 101.”

“Hayes was a founding member of Harvard’s Islamic Finance Project Advisory Board. Roughly sixty officials were encouraged to embrace the merits of Shariah-Compliant Finance from the standpoint of its ethical and strategic virtues–the latter primarily being an opportunity to recycle petrodollars from OPEC back to Western capital markets.”

“The host of this Kagan program-enabled ‘seminar’ was Assistant Treasury Secretary Neal Kashkari, who used the occasion to express his own enthusiasm for  Shariah-Compliant Finance.  At the time, Mr. Kashkari had his hand on the spigot of the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP).  The message was not lost on either his colleagues in government or on the financial sector:  At a time when the viability of major banks and investing institutions depended on Secretary Kashkari’s favor, getting with the SCF program could only be a plus.”

Bringing it all back home, Gaffney observes that “The Supreme Court may soon have an opportunity to consider whether such government involvement in promoting a religion violates the Constitution’s establishment clause separating church (or mosque) and state.”

“A federal lawsuit now pending in the Eastern District of Michigan that asserts the unconstitutionality of this arrangement seems like an open-and-shut case.  Do we really want Elena Kagan casting a vote on the question?”

Malcolm A. Kline is the Executive Director of Accuracy in Academia.