'SHARIAH COP' CRACKS DOWN ON
MINNESOTA MUSLIMS, Police 'monitor' Abdullah Rashid but
don't arrest him, by Leo Hohmann, 4/13/17, WND
A 22-year-old Muslim convert has
been denounced for trying to enforce Shariah law on Somali refugees living in
Minneapolis, but he says he’s just trying to be a good Muslim and please Allah.
Abdullah Rashid married a Somali
woman and moved from his hometown in Walton County, Georgia, to Wyoming and
then on to Minnesota last year. Formerly Devon James Miller, Rashid now dresses
in traditional Islamic headdress. But when he isn’t in a turban, he wears a
green uniform with a patch marking him as the “religious police.” That’s
causing quite a stir, even in the Muslim enclave of Minneapolis’s Cedar
Riverside community.
In a recent interview with the
Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Rashid said he aims to turn the city’s
Cedar-Riverside area into a “sharia-controlled zone” where Muslims are learning
about the proper practices of Islam and that “non-Muslims are asked to respect”
it, the
paper reported.
He pays regular visits to Somali
households and makes sure the women are dressed in compliance with Islamic law,
that no alcohol is being consumed and that nobody is interacting with the
opposite sex. He is performing, in his mind, a service similar to that of the
morality police who enforce Shariah in Saudi Arabia, Iran, Somalia or the
Islamic State.
He claims to have 10 other men
working under him to patrol the Cedar Riverside community.
There’s one problem: While Rashid
says he is just trying to be a good Muslim and do right by Allah, this isn’t
Saudi Arabia, or Somalia. “People who don’t know me would say I’m a terrorist,”
he told the local newspaper. “I’m someone who’s dedicated to Islam and trying
to help the community all ways I can.”
Local Muslim leaders told the
Star-Tribune they are working to stop Rashid’s group, the General Presidency of
the Religious Affairs and Welfare of the Ummah, while providing no evidence
that they are serious about stopping him.
Minneapolis is home to the nation’s
largest community of Somali refugees, which have been arriving weekly in the
U.S. since the early 1990s, most coming through United Nations refugee camps.
Just
last week, WND reported the Somalis
have taken over politics in the sixth ward in Minneapolis, providing a
video that showed their caucus event turning into bloody chaos.
Rashid has encountered some
backlash, even from other Muslims who may not yet be ready for full compliance
with various aspects of Shariah law, or who know it would do long-term damage
to Islam’s reputation in America if Muslims try to implement Shariah too early.
Rashid has been questioned by Minneapolis police who say they are “monitoring”
his actions.
He has been condemned as out of line
by local Muslim leaders, according to the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, which
turned to the Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR, for the
authoritative word on Shariah. “What he’s doing is wrong and
doesn’t reflect the community at all,” Jaylani Hussein, executive director of
CAIR
Minnesota, told the Star-Tribune.
CAIR, an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, is an unindicted co-conspirator in
the Holy Land Foundation terror-financing trial held in 2007-08 in Dallas and
which has seen several of its leaders convicted of terrorism-related crimes.
Minneapolis police started receiving
reports in February of Rashid making unannounced visits to Somali homes. So
far, they have not found reason to arrest him. “We’ve had conversations with
community members that live over there,” Officer Corey Schmidt, a police
spokesman, told the Star-Tribune. “Sometimes it takes a little bit of time to
deal with it, but it’s something we’ve been monitoring.”
There are other troubling aspects to
Rashid’s mission, such as his display of the al-Qaida flag and his adoration of
Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born imam of Yemeni descent who was a spiritual
leader of al-Qaida before he was killed in Yemen by a drone strike ordered by
President Obama.
His Somali wife, Kadro Abdullahi,
said Rashid is not mentally ill and that she supports his work. “He’s a man
with a good personality and he loves Islam,” Abdullahi told the Star-Tribune. On
his website, Rashid posted a video by Anwar al-Awlaki titled “Never Trust
Non-Muslims.”
On the same day the Star-Tribune
reported a Shariah enforcer is making house visits in Minneapolis, the Detroit
News reported a female Muslim doctor in
Detroit was arrested on federal charges that she was performing female
genital mutilations on girls as young as 7.
Jumana Nagarwala, a 44-year-old
emergency-room doctor at Henry Ford Hospital, was charged with female genital
mutilation, a five-year felony, and transportation with intent to engage in
criminal sexual activity, a 10-year felony, according to a complaint unsealed
Thursday in U.S. District Court. It is believed to be the first case of its
kind prosecuted under federal law.
The Star-Tribune, which surprised
some by even reporting on the Shariah cop in Minneapolis, described Shariah as
merely a set of customs that Muslims follow as a “daily guide” and that
varies in practice around the world. That is almost word for word the
description for Shariah given by the Southern Poverty Law Center, a
left-of-center political organization that defends Islam at every turn.
Anwar al-Awlaki published Inspire
magazine, the chief recruitment tool for the group al-Qaida in the Arabian
Peninsula. Inspire ran articles that included recipes for homemade bombs and
encouraged Muslim acts of global terrorism. “Al-Awlaki was as bad as it got in the
terrorism world,” noted former Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann.
“So dangerous was al-Awlaki that even
President Obama ordered his death through a drone strike, the only American
Obama ordered killed on foreign soil.”
Thursday’s revelation in the
Star-Tribune is frightening, she said. “Today, walking freely on the streets
near the former hippie enclaves of the University of Minnesota, near downtown
Minneapolis, and in the shadow of light-rail connecting to the Mall of American
and the new United Bank football stadium, site of the 2018 Super Bowl, is a
Muslim man wearing al-Qaida flags on his green ‘religious police uniform’ who
takes his directives from the chief recruiter for Islamic terrorism in modern
times.”
Shariah
implemented in phases
Daniel Akbari, a former top Shariah
defense lawyer who defected from Iran and now lives in Texas, said Rashid may
be jumping the gun in enforcing Shariah, thus incurring the wrath of imams and
CAIR leaders who may see him as usurping their authority.
Akbari said the Quran provides three
basic mechanisms for spreading Islam: Dawa or proselytizing, jihad and the enforcement
of Shariah. But the Shariah mission is to be implemented in phases in areas
where Muslims already have control and want to maintain their authority. Shariah can be enforced both
privately and collectively, he said. Akbari said “private enforcement of
Shariah is exactly what Abdullah Rashid is doing.”
“He assumes Muslims have control
over the neighborhood he is patrolling. Abdullah Rashid’s assessment of the
situation and his assumption that Muslims have control over those neighborhoods
is something that CAIR finds unrealistic,” he said. “CAIR members strongly
disagree with their faithful but naïve Muslim brother, Abdullah Rashid. CAIR is
well aware that they have not reached to that point yet. They know how rushing
to enforce Shariah will irreparably damage their mission of bringing everyone
under the control of Shariah law.” CAIR applied the same analogy against ISIS,
Akbari said. “Leaders of CAIR called ISIS non-Islamic because they believed
that their savage brothers did not follow the way the Messenger of Allah did
when he was in a weak position,” he said.
“When the Messenger of Allah was in
Mecca, he did not wage jihad because he knew he was not in a strong position.
It is not that ISIS’ brutal actions are non-Islamic. The only non-Islamic action
they committed was revealing the real face of orthodox Islam too early when
there are still works to be done.”
Islam
is all about Shariah
John Guandolo, a former FBI
counter-terrorist specialist who now consults law enforcement with Understanding the
Threat, said there are two reasons Muslim
organizations clash: over matters of Shariah and matters of power and control.
“What Abdullah Rashid is doing is
lawful under Shariah, and CAIR and the other Muslim groups mentioned in the
Star-Tribune article know it,” he told WND. Guandolo said the Star-Tribune is
incorrect in asserting that Shariah is “a daily guide” for Muslims. “Shariah is
law that comes with punishments from their god Allah in the Quran and their
prophet Muhammad, who is the ‘perfect example’ for all Muslims to follow.” The
Star Tribune’s commentary that Shariah’s “interpretation and practice vary
around the world” is also false, Guandolo said.
“While Shariah may be implemented in
different stages in different areas, what Shariah is and what it says does not
vary. There is one Islam and one Shariah. One-hundred percent of Shariah
mandates warfare against non-Muslims until the world is under Shariah, and a
‘Muslim’ is one who submits to the Shariah. Ask the Hamas leaders like Jaylani
Hussein of CAIR Minneapolis to produce one authoritative book on Shariah that
says otherwise. He won’t because he can’t, because it does not exist.”
The community leaders are opposing
Abdullah Rashid for one singular reason: He is infringing on their power in the
community, Guandolo said.
“The Muslim Brotherhood runs that
community, and Rashid is an outsider. That’s what is going on,” he said. “Law
enforcement needs to understand the threat before this situation deteriorates,
and they should begin by locking up the terrorist leaders from Hamas doing
business as CAIR for being terrorists, and Rashid for imposing foreign law on
citizens of Minnesota.”
No comments:
Post a Comment