I’m crazy for loving you, Sohail…
American Thinker’s Brian Schwarz and Tom Lifson noted on April 23, 2011 their dismay over much vaunted (by Ann Coulter, in particular) New Jersey Governor Chris Christie’s shocking, malign disregard of NJ Transit worker Derek Fenton’s first amendment freedom—effectively kowtowing to Sharia “blasphemy law.”
Now a detailed evisceration by Andrew C. McCarthy of Christie’s latest caustic outburst about the so-called “crap” of “Sharia law crazies” puts the Governor’s cynically opportunistic Islamophilia in chronic perspective.
McCarthy’s searing critique demonstrates just how morally unfit Christie is for serious consideration as a national leader in an era of rampant global jihad. Lowlights McCarthy elaborates demonstrating the Governor’s poor judgment and pandering dhimmitude include Christie’s silence about an ugly, now infamous Sharia case in New Jersey, and his self-righteous championing of a questionable judge appointee, Sohail Mohammed, board member for a jihadist organization, the American Muslim Union:
Maybe Governor Christie ought to ask S.D. if sharia law concerns are “just crap.” We know “S.D.” only by her initials to protect her from further indignity. She is a Muslim woman from Morocco who was serially raped and beaten in New Jersey by the Muslim man to whom she was wed as a teenager — one of those arranged marriages common in Islamic cultures. A New Jersey judge declined to give her a protective order, though. Under sharia, a man cannot rape his wife: “A woman cannot carry out the right of her Lord til she carries out the right of her husband,” declares one relevant hadith (Ibn Majah 1854). “If he asks her to surrender herself she should not refuse him even if she is on a camel’s saddle.” Or, as S.D.’s husband translated this sharia tenet as he forced himself on her, “This is according to our religion. You are my wife, I [can] do anything to you. The woman, she should submit and do anything I ask her to do.”
The Department of Homeland Security has been trying for some time to deport Qatanani [i.e., a Muslim Brother, and imam of one of the state’s largest Muslim communities, the Islamic Center of Passaic County] for lying on his 1999 immigration paperwork. He’d been granted a religious-worker visa in 1996, enabling him to be the imam at the Islamic Center. When it expired in 1999, he sought to become a permanent U.S. resident. Though specifically asked about his criminal history, Qatanani failed to disclose that he was convicted in an Israeli military court for his membership in, and support of, Hamas. Mohammed’s firm helped Qatanani prepare the I-485, and Qatanani later claimed that he’d signed the form because he “trusted his attorney, Sohail Mohammed.” (See Homeland Security Investigation, Appendix, p. 4.)
The deportation case against Qatanani was heard by an immigration judge in 2008. Christie was then the Bush-appointed U.S. attorney for New Jersey, though his office did not handle the case. In light of Qatanani’s track record and the Islamic Center of Passaic County’s connections to the Bush Justice Department’s then-ongoing HLF prosecution, it is nothing short of shocking that U.S. attorney Christie went to Qatanani’s mosque for a Ramadan celebration while the immigration case was underway. There, he is reported to have embraced Qatanani and praised the former Hamas operative as “a man of great good will.”
More astoundingly, Christie permitted one of his assistant U.S. attorneys, Charles B. McKenna, to testify at the immigration hearing as a character witness on behalf of Qatanani — i.e., a Justice Department official was dispatched to undermine the Homeland Security Department’s case against Qatanani, which was built in part on an investigation conducted by the FBI, an agency of the Justice Department…. The questions about Governor Christie’s appointment of Sohail Mohammed and his exertions on behalf of Mohammed’s client, Mohammed Qatanani, have nothing to do with either sharia or the all-purpose smear of Islamophobia. They are about the governor’s judgment. They are about a U.S. attorney with political ambitions pandering to a politically active constituency at the expense of national security and enforcement of the immigration laws. They are about his decision to award a state judgeship to an attorney who was an active and vocal board member of a very troubling Islamist organization — and who has a penchant for presuming that perfectly valid anti-terror prosecutions are, instead, anti-Muslim persecutions.
Those questions are not answered by bluster.
But of course the Hamas front jihadist organization CAIR’s New Jersey branch applauded Christie’s factually and morally-challenged outburst.
From: Ibrahim Hooper [mailto:ihooper@cair.com]
Sent: Friday, August 05, 2011 5:52 PM
To: Recipient list suppressed:
Subject: CAIR-NJ Thanks Governor for Defending Muslim Judge
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
CAIR-NJ Thanks Governor for Defending Muslim Judge
(SOUTH PLAINFIELD, NJ, 8/5/2011) — The New Jersey chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR-NJ) today thanked Governor Chris Christie for his strong and rigorous defense of newly-confirmed Superior Court Judge Sohail Mohammed
