Phoenix Imam Tells Muslims To Disregard U.S. Laws

by Robert Spencer

“A Muslim must try his best to abide by the rulings of Sharia [Islamic law] whenever possible as much as he can. He should not allow himself to be liable to those western laws that contradict the clear-cut Islamic rulings.” The rulings of Sharia, mind you, include stoning for adultery, amputation of the hand for theft, and institutionalized discrimination against women and non-Muslims. But the speaker was not some fanatic Wahhabi in Saudi Arabia; it was the Phoenix-based imam Omar Shahin, president of the North American Imams Foundation. This is probably one reason why, as The Arizona Republic reported Monday, the FBI has stepped up scrutiny of Shahin and other Muslim leaders in Phoenix.

Omar Shahin has been in the news before. He is the spokesman for a group of six imams who sued US Airways after being removed from a flight in 2006 when passengers and crewmembers reported that they were behaving suspiciously. The imams were handcuffed and later interrogated, then released with no charges, whereupon Shahin led a news conference to condemn prejudice against Muslims. All six imams later sued the airline, airport police and an FBI agent, claiming they had been singled out solely because they were Muslim. “We did nothing,” Shahin maintained in a report on Boston Herald.com -- and the Council on American Islamic Relations seized on the incident as evidence of American “Islamophobia.” “We are concerned that crew members, passengers and security personnel may have succumbed to fear and prejudice based on stereotyping of Muslims and Islam,” said CAIR’s executive director, Nihad Awad, in the same report.

The imams also initially sued the anonymous passengers who reported them, before House Republicans pushed through a measure protecting whistleblowers in such circumstances. As I discuss in my new book Stealth Jihad, if this initiative had been successful, the only winners would have been Islamic jihadists who wanted to hijack airplanes. Any ruling against the passengers would have essentially placed Muslims beyond the pale of security-related scrutiny, because someone who reported suspicious behavior by a Muslim in an airport or airplane would have faced a real risk of being sued for discrimination.

Shahin’s questionable activities didn’t begin with this lawsuit, either. In the '80s, he was an imam at the Islamic Center of Tucson, which the Republic identified as “a hub for adherents to the radical Wahhabi school of Islam, some of whom later became important aides to Osama bin Laden in the al-Qaida terrorist group.” The report by Sean Holstege and Dennis Wagner also notes that Shahin raised funds for two Islamic charities that were ultimately shut down on accusations that they were funneling contributions to the jihad terrorist group Hamas.

Yet despite all this, “Shahin has served as a Muslim community liaison with the FBI and the Phoenix police,” according to the Republic. How did a man with a record like Shahin’s ever get into the good graces of the FBI? He was able to do so because many officials in positions of influence in the United States are standing by passively as the stealth jihad advances. They are ignorant of what is happening, and those who do know are making sure not to tell them. Willfully blind officials appear dedicated to “multiculturalism” and “diversity” no matter what the cost. They hinder the investigation of and resistance to the stealth jihad.

There is no gauging the extent of stealth jihadist infiltration into American intelligence and law enforcement agencies. But there is no question that the chief enabler of that infiltration has been political correctness among American officials. In this great war against the global jihad network, no one wants to appear anti-Arab or anti-Muslim -- and this has led more or less directly to some serious lapses in national security.

If America is to survive, it is eventually going to have to choose national security over political correctness -- and call upon Islamic leaders like Omar Shahin to stop teaching Muslims in the U.S. to disregard American laws when they conflict with Islamic norms. The spectacle of the FBI increasing scrutiny of a man whom they have worked with in the past is ludicrous beyond belief. How many more imams in America will teach Muslims that when Islamic law and U.S. law contradict each other, it is U.S. law that must give way, before those sworn to uphold and defend U.S. law wake up to what is happening?