Some REALLY Bad Ideas on How to Solve America's Debt Problems
by CHRISTOPHER HOLTON
August 11, 2011
Not surprisingly, the financial jihadists are promoting Shariah as the solution to America’s debt problems.
We’ve seen this before. Back in 2008, in the wake of the subprime mortgage debacle and near-financial meltdown, the financial jihadists insisted that Shariah-compliant finance would have avoided the whole mess. Then, in 2009, defaulting on sukuk (Islamic bonds) just about became the official sport of Islam and all the big talk evaporated overnight.
Well, they’re back at it again. Financial jihadists are in the Western media trying to convince us to invest according to Shariah and we’ll be safe and secure.
It’s not true. Shariah-compliant finance is not immune from the business cycle or the effects of market forces. In fact, if the price of oil, which drives the whole Shariah finance industry in the Middle East, were to drop precipitously, we’d all see very quickly just how vulnerable Shariah-compliant assets are to market and macroeconomic forces.
But there is a more disturbing aspect to this effort to get Americans to embrace Shariah-compliant finance. The whole purpose of Shariah-compliant finance is to promote Shariah itself, a barbaric code of life that is the law of the land in such paradises-on-earth as Saudi Arabia, Iran, Sudan, Taliban-controlled areas of Afghanistan, Al Shabaab-controlled areas of Somalia and a few other places.
The financial jihadists want us to become at ease with Shariah, to see it not as a threat, but as something to be embraced, even if we don’t happen to be Muslim. Shariah-compliant finance, however, is at the very forefront of Islamic imperialism and supremacism.
Despite all this, we all know that unfortunately, the financial jihadists have plenty of useful idiots at their disposal in the Western financial services industry and the Western news media.
Linked below we have two prime examples of those useful idiots:
Clem Chambers is a columnist for Forbes, but he ought not to be after this article he posted on their web site. Ol’ Clem thinks that the solution to America’s debt problems is for America to issue sukuk, known as Islamic bonds. From his description, it’s pretty clear that Clem doesn’t know much, if anything, about sukuk. He makes them sound like some sort of magical instrument in which countries or companies can borrow without borrowing. What utter hogwash.
Despite what Clem Chambers might think, sukuk absolutely involve borrowing. There is no Islamic ban on borrowing. There’s only an Islamic ban on riba, or, as it is applied today, on receiving or paying interest. Sukuk are a man-made concoction designed to get around the prohibition on interest. Through a variety of convoluted mechanisms, sukuk avoid any interest, but don’t think for a second that you can borrow money for free in a sukuk. In fact, the reality is, borrowing in a sukuk arrangement is almost always more expensive than a conventional bond.
There’s something else about sukuk Clem either doesn’t know or isn’t bothering to tell us: a couple of years ago, one of the Islamic world’s most prominent financial jihadist Shariah scholars, Mufti Taqi Usmani, declared most sukuk to be “haram”, i.e. non-Shariah-compliant. Usmani’s opinion was that sukuk were actually nothing more than a charade created to get around the prohibition on interest by disguising the interest as something else. Eventually, Usmani was outvoted and then convinced (no doubt with Saudi money as lubrication) to back off on his fatwa, but that doesn’t change the truth.
The real questions are: Why does Clem Chambers really think that sukuk are something that they are clearly not, and why does he recommend that America go into debt to people who hate our way of life?
Meanwhile, over at the Huffington Post (no great surprise there), another author has put forth a similarly modest proposal. Faheem Younus, a professor at a JUCO in Baltimore, believes that Islam can eliminate the US debt. How?
Well, it appears that he is endorsing some sort of hybrid of Shariah Finance and socialism. He says that too much of the wealth in the US is in the hands of too few and that the masses are thus dependent on those evil “interest” bearing financial instruments. Echoing things we hear from Leftists in the West, he calls on the rich to pay their “fair share.” How? Through a system to be named later, but modeled after “zakat.”
Rather than relive all that we have written about zakat on SFW blog, we encourage readers to click on the “Zakat” keyword category on the left hand column of the page. To sum up Younus’s solution to America’s debt problems: stop paying and receiving interest and impose a 2.5% tax on everyone (presumably on top of the local, state and federal taxes we all already pay).
Thanks Dr. Younus, but we’ll pass.
FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Christopher Holton is a Vice President with the Center for Security Policy. He can be reached at Holton@centerforsecuritypolicy.org. The information contained this article was derived from Sharia Law and Financial Jihad: How Should America Respond?, a special report co-sponsored by the Center for Security Policy and the McCormick Foundation.
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