Anti-Sharia Leader Yerushalmi Claims ‘I’ve Never Called For Discrimination Against Muslims’

On July 30, the New York Times profiled David Yerushalmi, the man behind the anti-sharia movement, looking into the hysterical claims of the “creeping sharia” crowd, as well as Yerushalmi’s own history of inflammatory and bigoted statements.
Yesterday, Yerushalmi responded in the American Thinker, accusing the writer Andrea Elliott of taking his words “out of context” (his standard claim whenever confronted with his own past writings) and insisting, “I have never written anything that calls for discrimination against…Muslims qua Muslims.”

Really? Here’s Yerushalmi on the very same website in 2006:
Islam was born in violence; it will die that way. Any wish to the contrary is sheer Pollyannaism. The same way the post World War II German youth were taught by their German teachers and political leaders to despise the fascism of their fathers, with strict laws extant still today restricting even speech that casts doubt on the Holocaust, so too must the Muslim youth be taught from the cradle to reject the religion of their forebears.

I’d say that advocating a legal regime that forces Muslims to reject Islam pretty clearly qualifies as “calls for discrimination against…Muslims qua Muslims.”
But if that’s not plain enough for you, Yerushalmi also heads an organization called Society of Americans for National Existence (SANE), whose “draft law outlawing sharia” suggests the following measures for dealing with America’s alleged Muslim problem:

- It shall be a felony punishable by 20 years in prison to knowingly act in furtherance of, or to support the, adherence to Islam.
- The Congress of the United States of America shall declare the US at war with the Muslim Nation or Umma.
- The President of the United States of America shall immediately declare that all non-US citizen Muslims are Alien Enemies under Chapter 3 of Title 50 of the US Code and shall be subject to immediate deportation.

- No Muslim shall be granted an entry visa into the United States of America.
Maybe Yerushalmi just has his own secret, magical definition of “discrimination.”
Fortunately, it seems that more people are getting wise to Yerushalmi’s scam. Yesterday, Abe Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League — which provided a good backgrounder on Yerushalmi — published an op-ed noting that “the threat of the infiltration of Sharia, or Islamic law, into the American court system is one of the more pernicious conspiracy theories to gain traction in our country in recent years”:
[Anti-sharia] measures are, at their core, predicated on prejudice and ignorance. They constitute a form of camouflaged bigotry that enables their proponents to advance an idea that finds fault with the Muslim faith and paints all Muslim Americans as foreigners and anti-American crusaders.

It is true that Sharia is being used elsewhere around the world in dangerous ways. While Sharia law can address many daily public and private concerns, it is nonetheless subject to radical interpretation by individuals or groups who subscribe to a more puritanical form of Islamic jurisprudence. Some individuals try to interpret Sharia law for their own radical agendas. It raises more serious concerns when it comes to implementing Sharia law in its entirety, as can be seen with the examples of Iran, Saudi Arabia and the Taliban. But that certainly doesn’t apply to America, where concerns about a “creeping Sharia law” are the stuff of pure paranoia.

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