FBI searching for Mosque vandals in possible hate crime

OKLAHOMA CITY – The FBI said it is hoping surveillance video will help lead them to a pair of vandals who targeted an Oklahoma City mosque last weekend.

The American Muslim Association on the 3200 block of N.W. 48th St. was damaged when the suspects spray painted racial slurs and other graffiti on the walls.

FBI agents tell us they are investigating the incident as a possible hate crime.

Authorities admit the surveillance video is not the best quality but they’re hoping someone will recognize the suspects.

The video appears to show two males involved in the crime.

If you have any information on the vandalism, you can call the FBI hotline at (405) 290-7770.

Sharia law ban and Muslim wives

(AlJazeera English)

When Kansas State Senator Susan Wagle voted for Senate Bill 79 that would ban Sharia law in Kansas, she said that a vote in favour of the legislation was “a vote to protect women”. “In this great country of ours, and in the state of Kansas,” Wagle said, “women have equal rights.”

Her words echoed the sentiments of many of the 33 Senators in Kansas, in March 2012, who voted in support of the law. The Bill passed and was signed into law by the Governor of Kansas. On July 1, 2012, the application of foreign or Sharia law was effectively banned in the State of Kansas.

A mere month later, in August 2012, a court in Johnson City, Kansas, faced the consequences of the ban whose intent was to “preclude[s] the courts from applying foreign law, legal codes or systems that violate the public policy of our state or federal constitutions”. It has been widely viewed as precluding courts from applying Sharia law.

Before the Johnson City District Court came the Soleimanis, both from Iran and now divorcing in Kansas. The wife, Elham Soleimani asked the court to enforce their Islamic marriage contract which stipulated a payment of $677,000 from the husband to the wife in case of divorce.

The facts of the case were a saga of love, betrayal and abuse. Faramarz Soleimani had left Iran decades ago, fleeing from the draconian changes brought on by the Islamic Revolution. With him, was his wife Zohra Bamani.

The two arrived in Kansas and opened a restaurant, obtaining amnesty in their new country so that they would not have to return to a much changed Iran. They stayed for 30 years, until Soleimani, now nearly 60 years old, got on the internet and found love again.

His new flame was Elham Moghadem, 24 years younger, living in Iran. Rapt in passion, Soleimani divorced Zohra Bamani and arrived in Iran to marry again. His second marriage took place on July 19, 2009, two years before the Sharia ban and long before either the new husband or the new wife could predict just how bad things would become between them.

In the first heady months of romance, the newly married Elham and Faramarz Soleimani revelled in wedded bliss. To prove the eternity of his devotion to his new partner, Soleimani had her name tattooed on his chest. To prove she was a loving wife, Elham tried her best to get used to Kansas.

The divorce case of the Soleimanis

Based on the story told by court records, the end came hard and fast and with an avalanche of court proceedings. On June 1, 2011, less than two years after her marriage to Soleimani – the man she had found on the internet and followed across the world – Elham filed for divorce in the courthouse in Johnson City, Kansas.

Surrounding the divorce petition were allegations and pleadings of domestic violence, assault and battery, rape and even a marital tort case for spousal abuse.

By the time she filed for divorce, Elham, the once beloved bride, was alone, destitute, living in a domestic abuse shelter and looking to American courts to help her after her marriage became a harrowing ordeal.

Her account was one of betrayal, of having been wheedled into marriage by a man who boasted about his great wealth and promised her a fairy tale life in luxurious America. What she had found instead, like so many immigrant women arriving with little known and hardly seen husbands, was a domineering and abusive old man who wished to keep her in servitude.

So, betrayed Elham relied and asked for relief from the Johnson City court on the one thing she felt was in her favour: the Islamic marriage contract (mahr) signed between the parties during their wedding in Iran.

Based on its stipulations, Elham Soleimani, the wife, could demand the payment of 1,354 gold coins (valued at $677,000) from her estranged husband in the event of divorce. With no other recourse and little prospect of help under the rules of marital property division under Kansas law, she asked the court to enforce the agreement and make her husband pay up.

She was about to be disappointed again. On August 28, 2012, nearly two months after Kansas’ much touted Sharia ban went into effect, the District Court in Johnson County refused to enforce the agreement between the parties and grant Elham Soleimani the money she believed was due from her husband under the terms of Islamic marriage contract.

One of the most significant reasons offered by the court for its refusal to do so was the religious nature of the agreement, the precise sort they felt the Kansas Legislature had wanted to ban.

Enforcing the agreement, the court concluded, would “abdicate the judiciary’s role to protect such fundamental rights, a concern that was articulated in Senate Bill No 79″. If they enforced the mahr agreement and force Soleimani to pay it, the court felt, they would be violating the ban on Sharia law in Kansas.

Here is where the court in Johnson City, Kansas, went wrong. While it is indeed true that separation of Church and State provisions under the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment of the United States prevents US Courts from interpreting religious texts, the court in Kansas disregarded longstanding precedent that insists that when the stipulations of a contract are clear, its religious origins do not preclude enforcement by a US Court.

One determinative case in this regard was Avitzur v Avitzur (1983), decided in the Second District of New York, where a Jewish woman petitioned the court to force her ex-husband to obtain a religious divorce decree as they had agreed in a contract prior to their marriage.

In Avitzur, the Supreme Court of New York decided that forcing the husband, Boaz Avitzur to obtain a Jewish divorce as per the agreement between the parties was not a violation of the separation of Church and State, and that the court could enforce the agreement despite its religious origins and content.

Foreign law not banned in New York 

Unlike Kansas, the State of New York has not banned Sharia or foreign law and so it can safely be concluded that the same case decided in that state would have yielded a markedly different result.

That is indeed exactly what happened in SB v WA - decided in New York in August 2012 – after the decision was issued by the court in Johnson City, Kansas. In that case, a Muslim-American woman married to an Egyptian immigrant, who subsequently divorced in the United Arab Emirates, was able to get a mahr payment of $250,000 enforced by the court.

The court decided in favour of the wife even though the agreement, an Islamic marriage contract, was entered in a foreign country and had just as much of a theological origin as the case in Kansas.

The issue at hand in both cases, fresh after the onslaught of Sharia ban that roared through the US, is not the issue of separation of Church and State – which has a long history of American jurisprudence attached to it – but rather the issue of the status of women, specifically Muslim women under Sharia law and the role of American courts in relation to it.

The case in Kansas reveals that imposing a blanket ban that refuses to allow for the consideration of the specifics of a case or the particularities of the position of an individual Muslim female litigant like Elham Soleimani, does more harm than good.

Where no ban would have resulted in an immigrant woman being able to avail of the resources that would allow her to begin a new life in the US and rehabilitate herself from an abusive relationship, a Sharia ban enabled the opposite, leaving her with nothing and allowing her more established husband to discard her with few consequences.

While all of these facts were argued in the feverish seasons in which the Kansas Legislature along with those in Oklahoma, Tennessee, Louisiana and others debated Sharia bans, the case of the Soleimanis lays in actual terms and actual lives the reduction of their effect and the dubiousness of their purpose.

If protection of women was indeed the issue before the Kansas court, or if the facts of the case were such that the same marriage contract would provide the wife with less than what would be available to her under the marital property division statutes of American law, then it would have made perfect feminist and jurisprudential sense to strike down the agreement under the Equal Protection Clause that provides for just such situations.

This was however, not the case. Under the provisions of stipulated mahr under her Islamic marriage contract, Elham Soleimani was entitled to more than she would have received under American laws of property division that would be governed the length of the marriage and the property acquired during the two years.

But in Kansas, with its Sharia ban in effect, Elham Soleimani lost out, not because she was a woman, but because the basis on which she argued her case for a future and for empowerment was Islamic.

Rafia Zakaria is on the board of directors of Amnesty International. She is a lawyer and a Political Science PhD candidate at Indiana University.

Follow her on Twitter: @RafiaZakaria

Randy Grau is against “unnecessary laws,” such as the “Oklahoma Blasphemy Law” (we support repealing this law), but he supported unnecessary laws banning the phantom threat of “Shariah law” and requiring doctors to do particular exams on women who want a prescription for abortion-inducing drugs.

Contradiction much? (h/t: Rizwan)

Oklahoma House of Representatives to Consider Repealing Blasphemy Law

In 1909, Oklahoma enacted a law prohibiting blasphemy, and it stands to this day. But if a new bill from Republican State Representative Randy Grau is passed and signed, that law will be thrown into the dustbin of history.

Reports The Oklahoman on HB 1088:

“Part of my goal is to get rid of unnecessary laws,” [Grau] said… The measure, which passed [the House committee] 6-4, would remove blasphemy as a misdemeanor…

“I am not pro-blasphemy,” Grau said. “I’m for everyone to freely exercise their religion. But that law prohibits the free exercise of religion as well as free speech. Under that law, you could be convicted of a misdemeanor for making fun of another person’s religion. Now, again, I don’t support going around disparaging other people’s religion, but it’s not a crime.”

Rep. Grau is no atheist, far from it. From his campaign website:

Our rights do not come from government, but instead, they are given to us by God…

My Christian faith guides my values in my public and my private life.

Charles Pierce at Esquire, late last year, noticed Grau’s work on this issue, and revealed that Grau was troubled by the protests in the Muslim world over the “Innocence of Muslims” video. But don’t get too excited — Grau also supported bills supporting the non-existant threat of Sharia law in Oklahoma and requiring doctors to perform particular exams on women who want a prescription for abortion-inducing drugs.

It’s interesting times in Oklahoma, considering the recent interest in atheist activism in the local media.

Anyway, HB 1088 will next be considered by the entire House. Its fate is anyone’s guess.

Voters passed a law banning the phantom threat of “Shariah Law” back in 2010, it was struck down as unconstitutional then, but now Oklahoma lawmakers are reviving the effort under the guise of “foreign law.”

Oklahoma considers foreign law court ban

By By SEAN MURPHY, Associated Press – 23 hours ago

OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) — Oklahoma lawmakers are considering banning judges in the state from basing any rulings on foreign laws, including Islamic Sharia law.

A Senate panel on Tuesday overwhelmingly approved the bill, which has broad support in the Republican-controlled Legislature. The bill would specifically make void and unenforceable any court, arbitration or administrative agency decision that doesn’t grant the parties affected by the ruling “the same fundamental liberties, rights and privileges granted under the U.S. and Oklahoma constitutions.”

“This is a way to protect American citizens … where somebody may try to use any kind of foreign law or religious law to affect the outcome of a trial,” said Sen. Ralph Shortey, R-Oklahoma City, who sponsored the bill. Shortey described it as “American Law for American Courts.”

A handful of other states have laws aimed at keeping courts from basing decision on foreign legal codes, including Islamic law. Oklahoma voters approved a constitutional amendment in 2010 that would have specifically prohibited courts from considering Sharia law, but a federal judge blocked its implementation after a Muslim community leader alleged it discriminates against his religion.

Shortey said he didn’t know of an instance in Oklahoma where a judge has relied on foreign laws, but he said there have been cases in other states.

That prompted state Sen. Brian Crain, R-Tulsa, to describe the measure as a “solution that’s looking for a problem.” Crain was the only member of the Senate committee to vote against the bill.

The panel approved the bill 8-1. It now heads to the full Senate for a vote. A similar measure has been introduced in the Oklahoma House.

The executive director of the Oklahoma chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union said Oklahoma courts already are required to enforce state and federal laws when they conflict with foreign law that violates public policy.

“This bill is entirely unnecessary and creates significant uncertainty for Oklahomans married abroad as well as those Oklahomans who have adopted a child from another country or are seeking to do so,” Executive Director Ryan Kiesel said in a statement. “These Oklahoma families don’t deserve to have this type of doubt cast over them.

“It also creates an atmosphere of uncertainty for foreign businesses seeking to do business with Oklahoma businesses.”

Oklahoma City Muslim family members think they were targeted because of their faith

Why am I not surprised that this happened in Oklahoma?

Both families agreed to the sentencing which likely wont pass a legal challenge, but can you just imagine the hackles and the howls that would be raised about “creeping Islamization” if those involved were Muslim?

Oklahoma Judge Defends Sentencing Tyler Alred, Teenager, To Church Even If It’s Not Legal

(Huffington Post)

MUSKOGEE, Okla. (RNS) A district judge in Oklahoma who sentenced a 17-year-old boy to 10 years of church attendance is standing by his sentence as the right thing to do — even if it may not have been the constitutional thing to do.

Judge Mike Norman gave Tyler Alred a 10-year deferred sentence for DUI manslaughter. Alred was driving a Chevrolet pickup in the early morning hours of Dec. 4, 2011 when he hit a tree. His passenger and friend, 16-year old John Dum, was pronounced dead at the scene.

The church requirement is just one of the conditions that Norman placed on Alred’s deferred sentence. The judge also ordered him to finish high school and complete welding school. Both Alred’s attorney and the victim’s family agreed to the terms of the sentence.

Norman said the church requirement is something he has done in the past, especially in child support cases. He has never done it for a manslaughter charge.

Ryan Kiesel, the executive director of the Oklahoma chapter of the ACLU, said the requirement to attend church is a “clear violation of the First Amendment.”

“It’s my understanding that this judge has recommended church in previous sentences, and I believe that goes too far, as well,” Kiesel said. “This, however, actually making it a condition of a sentence, is a clear violation of the Establishment Clause and the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment.”

Norman said he didn’t believe his sentence would pass a legal challenge — but he doesn’t believe either side will seek an appeal.

“Both families were satisfied with the decision,” Norman said in an interview. “I talked to the district attorney before I passed sentence. I did what I felt like I needed to do.”

In order to challenge the constitutionality of the church attendance requirement, an individual or organization must show that it has legal standing to do so. Kiesel said the ACLU is considering what options they have.

“If the court or the district attorney attempts to enforce this requirement, we will look at possible ways to intervene,” Kiesel said. “I know the boy agreed to this, but is someone facing a judge in open court really making a voluntary decision? Government officials should not be involved in what is a very personal choice.”

The Rev. Bruce Prescott, executive director of the Oklahoma chapter of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, said he is sure the sentence doesn’t pass constitutional muster, but he is equally worried about the spiritual ramifications.

“I’m a minister,” Prescott said. “I want people to go to church, but it’s not helpful for a judge to sentence someone to church. What will the judge do if the young man changes his affiliation in the next few years? Will he be allowed to switch to a mosque or become an atheist? Religion is not a tool of the state, and it’s certainly not for the state to use as a tool of rehabilitation.”

Norman said he has received phone calls on both sides of his decision.

“One gentleman from Missouri left a message on my phone. He said judges can’t order people to go to church. People are calling from all around the country. I live in the Bible Belt, though. The Bible is still alive down here; churches are still open. I’m sure those people are right, but they’re going to have to do what they want to do.”

Kiesel said he is especially concerned in this case because the judge admits to making a decision he knows is not legal.

“The Constitution is not exercised at your discretion,” he said. “You take an oath to uphold it all the time, not just sometimes.”

Saadiq has been barred from returning to the United States as US authorities has placed his name in the no-fly list

Oklahoma Muslim on no-fly list to return to U.S.

On Monday, November 19, representatives of the Oklahoma chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR-OK) will meet a Muslim Air force veteran who had been barred from returning to Oklahoma when he finally arrives at Will Rogers World Airport.

“We welcome the positive development in this case and hope Mr. Long will not face any bureaucratic difficulties when he returns to his native land,” said CAIR-OK Executive Director Adam Soltani.

Following intervention by CAIR-OK, Saadiq Long, a U.S. citizen and Air Force veteran living in Qatar, was allowed to board a Delta Airlines flight (3316) due to arrive at 5:02 p.m. on Monday. He has been struggling to return home for six months after being denied boarding on two previous flights to visit his terminally-ill mother, apparently because he had been placed on a government no-fly list.

CAIR press release, 18 November 2012

See also “Oklahoman on ‘no fly’ list allowed to fly home”,KOCO.com, 18 November 2012

“Once, not very long ago, Americans and Europeans prided themselves on their enlightened attitudes of religious toleration, although everyone knew that the history of the West has actually been characterized by intense religious animosity and violence,” she said.

Why is it that priding yourself with enlightened attitudes of religious toleration only an ideal?  One reason why it has and still is an ideal is that religious toleration seems to be trumped by ”intense religious animosity and violence,” according to the renowned philosopher Martha Nussbaum,

Renowned philosopher berates Western ‘Islamophobia’

By Olivia Patton

Renowned philosopher Martha Nussbaum addressed a packed auditorium Friday afternoon, berating Western Islamophobia, a problem Nussbaum said continues to plague the country today.

“Once, not very long ago, Americans and Europeans prided themselves on their enlightened attitudes of religious toleration, although everyone knew that the history of the West has actually been characterized by intense religious animosity and violence,” she said.

Nussbaum, a service professor of law and ethics at the University of Chicago, said blatant legislative discrimination against Muslims in the United States, France, Belgium, Germany, and Spain, among other countries, requires examination.

“Our situation calls urgently for critical self examination as we try to uncover the roots of ugly fears and suspicions that currently disfigure all Western societies,” Nussbaum said.

Seventy percent of Oklahoma voters in 2010 opted to pass an amendment to the state’s constitution that singled out Shariah Law — the moral code of Islam — as something Oklahoma courts would not be influenced by.

Shariah law regulates Muslim personal conduct and provides rules on alcohol consumption, dietary practices, prayer and codes of honesty in business dealings.

The amendment, approved by voters, was ultimately struck down as unconstitutional, and never went into effect.

The measure mirrors other recent U.S. attempts at religious intolerance.

Nussbaum shed light on a proposed Tennessee law that would have criminalized the practice of Shariah law with a felony punishable up to 15 years in jail. A rewritten version of the bill that did not expressly reference Islam or Islamic law, but did still carry criminal penalties, eventually passed.

In addition, U.S. Muslim women have experienced harassment because of their personal choice to wear the hijab and burka, Nussbaum said.

A female Moroccan hostess who worked at Disney Land’s Grand California Hotel is suing Disney for the right to wear her head scarf during work. Her supervisors allegedly told her the head scarf went against the “Disney look” and that she would have to take a job outside of the view of customers if she wished to continue wearing it.

“What I favor in the undergraduate curriculum is that everyone should have some knowledge of the major world religions,” Nussbaum said. “So I think we’re lucky in a sense that we have more opportunities for this kind of intervention to learning and conversation.”

The University’s 15-month-old Institute of Humanities and Global Cultures sponsored the talk to enrich its program aimed at providing the structure for graduate students and faculty to further their work in the humanities.

The remains of the Islamic Society of Joplin mosque (Credit: Islamic Society of Joplin/Facebook)

If events continue like this we are sure to see more such attacks in the future, as the anti-Muslim ideology shows no sign of abating in the USA or Europe.:

Eight attacks, 11 days

BY UZMA KOLSY

There’s a crime wave targeting houses of worship, most of them Muslim. Is something sinister at work?

David Conrad, a resident of Morton Grove, Ill., was likely peeved by the noise from the Muslim Education Center. Conrad’s home is adjacent to the center’s parking lot, and during the holy month of Ramadan, men, women and children pack the mosque on a nightly basis. On Friday, Aug. 10, Conrad allegedly shot a pellet rifle at the mosque wall, while some 500 people were praying inside. The building structure sustained minor damage, but no one was hurt. Was this just the rumbling of a disgruntled neighbor? Maybe.

But given a chain of incidents at mosques across the country over the past two weeks, the Morton Grove shooting doesn’t appear to be an isolated event. In the past 10 days, there have been eight cases of vandalism and attacks on houses of worship across the nation, including the deadly shooting spree in a Sikh gurdwara in Wisconsin on Aug. 5. The other seven incidents were mosque defacements, which have sent a tremor of fear through America’s Muslim community.

While Morton Grove Police have not charged Conrad with a hate crime, the FBI is currently investigating the attack as a hate crime and CAIR has also called on the FBI to investigate the Lombard incident as such. Just 25 miles from Morton Grove, an Islamic school in Lombard was targeted with an even more chilling assault on Sunday night. An assailant flung a homemade “MacGyver bomb” at the building, while worshippers prayed inside. The soda bottle — filled with household chemicals, including acid — did not break the window, and again, the worshipers were rattled but unharmed. According to local reports, no one has yet been charged, and the FBI is investigating the matter.

Frank Gaffney’ is getting a lot of mileage out of the “Muslim Brotherhood infiltration” conspiracy (via. Islamophobi-Watch):

The Muslim Brotherhood conspiracy comes to Edmond, Oklahoma

EDMOND, Okla. — There is a controversy in Edmond involving the expansion of a local mosque. The small mosque, which has been in Edmond for 20 years, sits across from the University of Central Oklahoma. Officials have requested permits to expand the building to five times the size it is now.

When neighbors were notified about the expansion plan, letters of complaint began coming in. In a hand-written note the writer asked planning commissioners to look at recent events in Murfreesboro, Tenn., and “what our grandchildren are going to face.” In one letter the sender called the mosque near UCO, “a headquarters for terrorist affiliate organizations.”

KOCO, 24 July 2012 

The letter describing the proposed mosque as a terrorist threat was accompanied by a flier circulated by an organisation called Oklahomans for Responsible Government (“This has nothing to do with the First Amendment. This is about treason and sedition”). As you can see from their website, the campaign draws its inspiration from Frank Gaffney’s paranoid Muslim Brotherhood conspiracy theories.