“Newt Gingrich’s vision of America segregates our citizens by faith. His outdated political ideas look backward to a time when Catholics and Jews were vilified and their faiths called a threat,” said CAIR Legislative Director Corey Sayolor in a statement.

“The time for bias in American politics has passed and Newt Gingrich looks like a relic of an ugly era,” Sayolor said.

CAIR said the release was prompted by the candidate’s remarks Tuesday in Columbia when, asked if he would ever endorse a Muslim running for president.

“It would depend entirely on whether they would commit in public to give up Shariah,” Gingrich said.

“A truly modern person who happened to worship Allah would not be a threat, a person who belonged to any kind of belief in Shariah, any effort to impose it on the rest of us, would be a mortal threat,” Gingrich told the crowd, adding that he’s “totally opposed” to Shariah law being applied in American courts and favors a federal law that “preempts” its use.

This month, the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals struck down an Oklahoma ban on the application of “Sharia law” and “international law” in courts.

Pointing to the religious freedoms guaranteed by the First Amendment, CAIR defends Shariah law as a set of beliefs that “teaches marital fidelity, generous charity and a thirst for knowledge,” and mandates that Muslims respect the law of the land in which they live.

Gingrich had a different interpretation of Shariah law, pointing to the, “rising Islamization of Turkey has been accompanied by a 1,400 percent increase in women being killed.”

“When you look at the application of Shariah in places like Iran, when you look at churches being burned in Nigeria and Egypt, and that the decline of Christians in Iraq from a million, 200 thousand when the Americans arrived to about 500,000 today, I think it depends entirely on the person,” he said.

“If they are a modern person integrated in the modern world and they are prepared to recognize all religions, that’s one thing. On the other hand, if they’re Saudis, who demand that we respect them while they refuse to allow Christians to worship in Saudi Arabia, that’s something different,” he continued.

Later in the day during a question and answer session in Aiken, S.C., Gingrich also called the Ground Zero mosque “a deliberate and willful insult to the people of the United States who suffered an attack by people who are motivated by the same thing.”

“I think the time has come for us to have an honest conversation about Islamic radicalism. I don’t think we should be intimidated by our political elites, and I don’t think we should be intimidated by universities who have been accepting money from the Saudis and who, therefore, now have people who are apologists for the very people who want to kill us,” he said.

 

January 20, 2012 2:00 P.M.

Newt Was RightThe presidency is incompatible with adherence to sharia. By Andrew C. McCarthy

Newt Gingrich’s ardent admiration for Franklin Delano Roosevelt owes more to the latter’s unflinching wartime leadership than his welfare-state policy prescriptions. This week, though, the former Speaker is also undoubtedly in accord with FDR’s aphorism, “I ask you to judge me by the enemies I have made.” To his great credit, Newt has made an enemy of CAIR.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations, that is. The nation’s best known cheerleader for radical Islam — or, as Fox News compliantly puts it, “the largest Muslim civil liberties group in the United States” — has issued a blistering press release that labels Gingrich “one of the nation’s worst promoters of anti-Muslim bigotry.” The occasion for this outburst is the imminent Republican primary in South Carolina.

Asked at a campaign appearance whether he’d ever consider endorsing a Muslim for president, Gingrich sensibly answered that he would not rule it out — “it would depend on whether [the hypothetical Muslim candidate] would commit in public to give up sharia.” Naturally, the usual suspects are in full fury, with CAIR the loudest among them. They’ve trotted out the rote response, dutifully echoed by Fox, that sharia, Islam’s legal code, is simply a set of spiritual guidelines — one that, in CAIR’s portrayal, “teaches marital fidelity, generous charity, and a thirst for knowledge.”

Actually, it teaches polygamy, the underwriting of jihadist violence through ostensible charity, and the Islamization of knowledge. Don’t take my word for it. I refer you instead to a CAIR favorite, the International Institute of Islamic Thought.

CAIR and IIIT are both Muslim Brotherhood affiliates long active in our country. Founded in the early Eighties, IIIT is a Virginia-based think tank dedicated to what it calls the “Islamization of knowledge,” which is a “euphemism,” as the Hudson Institute’s Zeyno Baran puts it, “for the rewriting of history to support Islamist narratives” — such as the claim that Spain is actually the rightful property of Muslims, to be renamed “al-Andalus,” as it was known under jihadist conquest. CAIR, strategically based in Washington, was shrewdly designed to be an Islamist public-relations arm — the Brotherhood realizing that the American media and government were suckers for agitators who style themselves as “civil rights” advocates. This was back in the mid-Nineties, when new criminal laws against supporting terrorists complicated the Brotherhood’s overt championing of Hamas.

Both CAIR and IIIT were identified as Brotherhood satellites in the internal Brotherhood memoranda that proved critical in the Justice Department’s successful Holy Land Foundation prosecution — a case involving millions of dollars funneled to Hamas, and a case in which CAIR was cited as an unindicted co-conspirator.

CAIR and the IIIT are so inter-bred that CAIR’s advisory board has included Sayyid Syeed, a founder of, and director of “academic outreach” for, IIIT — in addition to being a founder of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA, another unindicted coconspirator in the HLF case) and a former president of the Muslim Students Association (MSA), the first building block of the Brotherhood’s American infrastructure. And late last year, just weeks before blasting Gingrich, CAIR presented a lifetime achievement award to Iqbal Unus, a top IIIT official, who was also a prime mover in the development of MSA and ISNA.

CAIR’s reverence for the IIIT is relevant because the Islamization think-tank is prominent among the endorsers of Reliance of the Traveller: A Classic Manual of Islamic Sacred Law. In fact, IIIT’s endorsement report is included in Reliance, vouching that this English translation of Umdat al-Salik — an authoritative compendium of sharia composed by a renowned 14th-century Islamic jurist — is accurate, faithful to Muslim doctrine, and highly successful in “its aim to imbue the consciousness of the non-Arabic-speaking Muslim with a sound understanding of Sacred Law.” Thus, IIIT opined, “there is no doubt that this translation is a valuable and important work, whether as a textbook for teaching Islamic jurisprudence to English speakers, or as a legal reference for use by scholars, educated laymen, and students in this [English] language.”