Sharon Angle and other Tea Party and GOP extremists have made outrageous claims about Sharia Law and Islamofascism taking hold in the U.S.
Where do these wild claims come from? Is it just odd ball imagination with strange flights of fanciful stupidity? Or is there something to these claims, what are the facts?
How was Dearborn Michigan turned into a city hostage to Sharia Law where good Christian Americans get singled out for arrest just for not being Muslim?
How could this happen, under our very eyes, without our knowing it, and god bless Sharon Angle for helping us find out about it and wake up and smell the Turkish Coffee of alertness to domestic Islamofascist terroism!
Or are these outrageous claims about Sharia Law and Islamofascism in fact constructed verbatim out of winger mythology --from winger websites, talk radio, Fox News, RW Christianist activists and wingnut welfare propaganda outlets?
Read on to find out how Dearborn Michigan was turned into a city hostage to Sharia Law where good Christian Americans get singled out for arrest just for not being Muslim.
Sharon Angle and Sharia Law in Dearborn, Michigan
It was on the Daily Kos front page Friday Oct. 8, 2010, that Sharon Angle "fears Muslims are imposing theocracy in America". She also stated at a campaign rally, as reported by Yahoo News:
U.S. Senate candidate Sharron Angle told a crowd of supporters that the country needs to address a "militant terrorist situation" that has allowed Islamic religious law to take hold in some American cities.
"My thoughts are these, first of all, Dearborn, Michigan, and Frankford, Texas are on American soil, and under constitutional law. Not Sharia law. And I don't know how that happened in the United States," she said. "It seems to me there is something fundamentally wrong with allowing a foreign system of law to even take hold in any municipality or government situation in our United States."
Her comments came at a rally of tea party supporters in the Nevada resort town of Mesquite last week after the candidate was asked about Muslims angling to take over the country...
What the heck is Sharon Angle talking about in Dearborn, Michigan??? (Side note, Frankford, Texas was a suburb of Dallas that is now part of Dallas and hasn't existed as Frankford any more for many years. I couldn't find anything about it and sharia law. This does appear to be a strange flight of fancy by Sharon Angle.)
What the heck is she talking about:
Dearborn Mayor Jack O'Reilly called Angle's comments "shameful." He said tea party groups inaccurately spread the word that his Detroit suburb was ruled by Islamic law after members of an anti-Islam group were arrested at an Arab cultural festival in June because a Christian volunteer complained of harassment.
"She took it as face value and maligned the city of Dearborn and I consider that totally irresponsible," he said. "If she wants to come here, I will take her on a tour. I will show her we follow the Constitution just as well as anyone else."
Mayor O'Reilly is exactly correct. Well, Sharon has managed to tick off an entire town in Michigan. Not bad for a day's work politicking and making friends and influencing people.
Here's what actually happened in Dearborn, Michigan:
I found the story hard to find in mainstream press outlets but it is all over the RW GOP and Christianist blogosphere. Wonkette has covered it sarcastically but accurately well:
9:11 am June 24, 2010
Police arrested four Christians for disorderly conduct the other day after they tried to distribute Gospel of John books outside the Dearborn Arab International Festival...
According to "John," who posted the arrest video on the Internet and also possibly wrote the gospel in question, "under Sharia law it is forbidden to proselytize to Muslims." OK maybe. But WHO CARES, the Constitution rules the land, right?
The Michigan Messenger reports that at least one Christian ministry was permitted to distribute Christian lit outside the Muslinfest, and that "[a]ll groups, whether religious or not, were restricted to handing out literature from tables near the entrance." So how come the four arrestees — including members of the group Acts 17 Apologetics — got singled out for jail time?
...These guys (plus one gal) don’t accept, they insist. And insisting leads to problems with law enforcement. Which necessitates video cameras...
There’s lots more words on the Acts 17 blog...:
"Many people seem to believe that concerns about creeping sharia are exaggerated or misplaced. This incident demonstrates, I think, the contrary," says "John" about the video, on his Power Line blog and doomsday prediction info-center.
For your amusement here's the link to these Christian activists' blog that Wonkette quoted. Read there how silly these people are and how they actually describe their outrage at how they deliberately violated the legal parameters of what they were allowed to do there. They give a pretty clear account from their viewpoint of what actually happened, and oh the Sharia outrage as a result! Here's an excerpt from their blog describing what happened:
"I went to the Dearborn Arab Festival, which had already become an open celebration of persecution against Christians. The festival organizers had declared that Christians could not distribute materials on the public sidewalks or street, and, when the matter was brought before the courts, the judge agreed that Christians could not freely distribute information during the festival. (Note: This decision has been defended in the media by claiming that the "no-distributing-materials" rule applied to everyone, and therefore wasn’t unfair to Christians."
So what we have here as the basis of Sharon Angle's accusation of "a militant terrorist situation" and Sharia Law in Dearborn Michigan is the incident of the arrest of 4 Christians distributing literature being wildly exaggerated into a sweeping declaration of Dearborn Michigan being under Sharia Law.
What about her language to describe this, is it an original Angle exaggeration or have others influenced her thinking?
Hmm... let's see what googling dearborn michigan sharia law turns up:
Sharia Law in Dearborn, Michigan?
Sharia Law in Dearborn Michigan
SPECIAL REPORT:
Sharia Comes to Dearborn, Michigan
Sharia law trumps the US constitution in Dearborn Michigan ...
etc., etc., etc.-- slews and slews of RW and Christianist blogs repeating these headlines written before Sharon Angle spouted off about it, with typical texts like this one:
"Under Sharia law, it is forbidden to proselytize to Muslims, and no Muslim can leave the faith. Dearborn, Michigan, is home to a substantial Muslim population, and there is strong evidence that local authorities now enforce sharia in preference to the Constitution of the United States."
This is how Sharon Angle 'lurned' her some 'facts' about Sharia Law happenin' in dear old Dearborn, Michigan right here in America, land of the free and stuff!!
What we have here is that Sharon Angle and many other Tea Party GOP candidates get their news and thinking from RW blogs, talk radio and Fox. They think and talk like Free Republic bloggers. They even likely are Free Republic bloggers. Exaggeration, hyperbole and embellishment are as 'facts' in their culture, and they are prone to this disease of critical 'thinking' skills gone mad. And often aren't thinking of these nutty things on their own by themselves. They are repeating what they have read and heard produced by the RW propaganda machine, especially when it comes to accusations of Islamofascism.
Accusations of Sharia Law and Islamofascism taking hold in the U.S. are in fact part of the winger belief system created by a wingnut welfare cottage industry of Neocon propagandists such as Daniel Pipes and reinforced by RW Christianists ranting preachers both of whom I diaried previously about here. So if you hear a tea party candidate making such claims, you can google to find out if their thoughts were original, likely they weren't.
Educating ourselves about the sources of their cognitive dissonant brain flatulence is a good first step on the road to a 12 step recovery program for detox from exposure to winger craziness. Remember, information is empowerment-- for us it is liberating, for critically thinking impaired wingers, their 'mythinformation' is a prison of ugliness that those of us exposed to it can only be cleansed by employing the true facts and comedic mockery.