Andrew Bostom, M.D.
If there is one man in this nation to whom the powers that be should pay attention with regard to Muslim history, Muslim law and the fate of non-Muslims in shariah-compliant states, it is Andrew Bostom. Here’s a partial transcription of his salient comments on the Libyan revolt, the Arab Spring and the Muslim Brotherhood’s involvement, taken from this morning’s brief interview on America’s Morning News:
1) On the Libyan transition following the death of Ghadaffi:
“Well, I really want to echo Michele Bachmann’s concerns. I think she’s right on target, here. Back in August, we saw the Transitional Council drafted a constitution where part one, article one says Islam is the religion of the state and the principle source of legislation is Islamic jurisprudence, i.e., sharia. And then, yesterday the head of that Council, Abdul-Jalil, who actually, his background is in Islamic law, I mean that’s really what he was before he came into originally the Ghadaffi administration. He announced one aspect of what that means. They’re gonna annul what had been a secular family law to allow the Quranic injunction from Quran 4:3, which allows polygamy. In other words, that had been, as odious as the Ghadaffi regime was, there was a secular element to it, and it had abrogated the traditional Islamic law under the shariah, which allows polygamy, up to four wives. For some reason, that seemed to hold the priorty with the new government, that they’re abrogating that law. I just think that, besides the gruesome nature of scenes that we saw afterward, that we have a long history of red flags there, including the fact that the revolt, itself, at least the muscle for the revolt, was driven by al Qaida elements. We know this. The city of Derna, which was a hub of the rebels on a per capita basis, had provided more recruits to al Qaida in Iraq than any other place in the Middle East. It’s very disconcerting. And then, one strange, delusional Jewish man who had roots in Libya, came back to try and restore one crumbling temple that remained from the era where the Jews were pogrommed out of Libya, which is actually before Ghadaffi took power, and he was chased out. One. One. It was intolerable to have one person that wasn’t a Muslim, that was a Jew, come back to Libya, which had an ancient Jewish community. I just think there’s a lot of disconcerting signs there.
On looking at the revolt through “rose-colored glasses”, as though it could be the birth of democracy:
I think the most promising potential location is Tunisia. But, I must say, even there, again, I think a lot of everything that’s going on, and it’s not just with the Arab Spring. It’s with the countries where we’ve invested a lot of blood and treasure, like Afghanistan and Iraq. I think one thing that people are ignoring, or just sort of willful-, sort of being willfully blind to, is, look at a lot of these changes through the prism of the non-Muslim minority communities and its effects on them. And it has been universally deleterious, every single place, including Afghanistan and Iraq, where the State Department admitted that, dating back to, I guess, the British colonial period, there is not a single church left standing now in Afghanistan. And this has happened on our watch. We’ve seen Muslims who dare to leave Islam, you know, driven out of the country or threatened with death for apostasy under a constitution that we helped mid-wife. In Iraq, we’ve seen the decimation of the Assyrian Christian community. I think that, alone, has to give us pause about the forces that we’re empowering. And then, of course, I’m sure you guys heard the other day that as soon as Hillary Clinton and Petraeus left, Karzai gave an interview to a huge Pakistani television station, where he said that, well, if there’s a conflagration between Pakistan and the United States over various matters, he’d side with Pakistan. I just think that something is missing in the policy-making elite, where this idea that you empower some form of sharia-based government is a bad thing. If they could get their minds around that principle, and then say that, well, if that’s gonna happen indigenously, there’s not much we can do about it. But we shouldn’t be abetting it. And we should be going back and focusing on the nature of acute threats to our interests, period, without any ideas of nation-building, and certainly of empowering movements that seek to impose more and more elements of the shariah, which is just antithetical to our system of governance.
Listen to all of it.
