Catastrophe - Dick Morris [117]
Shariah law is the basis of the Islamic religion. It regulates what devoted Muslims may and may not do. It prohibits eating pork and drinking alcohol. It stipulates that one must pray five times each day, always facing Mecca. It requires daytime fasting during the month of Ramadan and a visit to Mecca during one’s lifetime. As such, it resembles the Talmudic law that governs Judaism in its comprehensiveness and specificity. Yet its tenets are far more ambitious, even rapacious—at least as interpreted by modern Islamic radicals.
In the late 1990s, investors from the Islamic world—who controlled vast amounts of oil money—began approaching American banks and investment firms, requesting that the companies set up special investment funds to include only industries and companies that eschew any activities prohibited by Shariah law. That way, devout Muslims could be confident that their money would not promote any activity that was inconsistent with Islamic law—such as pork farming or alcohol distribution. Eager to gratify the every whim of these wealthy foreign investors, many of the most prominent American financial institutions set up Shariah-compliant indices so investors in stocks and bonds could put their money only in companies that did not engage in conduct prohibited by Shariah law. In effect—pardon the pun—they made sure the investments would be kosher.
To guide it in deciding what company stocks and bonds to include in the Islamic Index, Dow Jones and the other firms that have created Shariah-compliant funds have retained a group of Shariah scholars who were fully conversant with the intricacies of the Islamic legal code to form a Shariah advisory board. These scholars set up criteria for Shariah-compliant investments. As Frank Gaffney, now president of the Center for Security Policy and a former official in Ronald Reagan’s Defense Department, describes it: “The issuing company must not be involved in ‘vice industries’ like businesses associated with pork, alcohol, interest income–generating activities, entertainment (such as pornography and gambling) or Western defense industries…. [They must be] engaged in acceptable businesses [and] must not violate the prohibition Shariah imposes on earning or paying interest.”441 (Getting around the interest ban takes some doing, but with a few imaginative euphemisms, even that becomes possible for these funds.)
The Shariah advisers must, of course, also examine the “financial statements of companies in which [Shariah-complaint] investments are being made”442 to police their compliance with Shariah law. If they are in violation—if they earn too much from interest or invest in any forbidden activity—they have to be purified by donating to one or more “charities” approved by the Shariah advisers. In addition, Shariah-compliant funds must invest 2.5 percent of the proceeds of the investments they control in these designated “charities.”
That has led to a serious problem. Unfortunately, several of these sanctioned charities are thinly veiled fronts for terrorist organizations such as Hamas and Hezbollah and funnel money to the families of suicide bombers in Palestinian communities and Islamist madrassas in places such as Pakistan.443 Gaffney notes that “three of the largest Shariah-favored charities in the U.S. have since 9/11 been shut down by the U.S. government for providing financial support of terrorism and other pro-jihad conduct.”444
The 2.5 percent tariff that Shariah-compliant funds must donate to “charities” runs into billions of dollars.445 As the flow of Shariah money increases, it becomes a key source of financing for our enemies—often through cash provided unwittingly by devout, but peaceful, Muslims.
And when a Shariah-compliant