What Happened to Harvard’s ‘Veritas’?

by David Meir-Levi

The official seal of Harvard University bears the four Latin words “Veritas Christo et Ecclesiae” (“the truth of Christ and the church”). Today, most reproductions of Harvard’s seal omit the last three words. But it seems that all too many of Harvard’s faculty and governance have decided to ignore the first one as well.

The present writer’s assessment of Harvard’s hosting extreme anti-Israel hate-fest events, and of its programs that provide almost exclusively anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian propaganda of a deeply misleading and often mendacious nature masquerading as educational outreach for high school and college students, demonstrated Harvard’s official institutionalization and legitimization of Islamic anti-Israel, anti-Jewish and anti-American ideologies, and its promotion of these ideologies to its students and others.

Perhaps the most egregious example of this figurative erasure of “veritas” from Harvard’s vision of its august educational mission is Justice Elena Kagan’s energetic efforts to promote the advancement of Islamic Sharia law in the form of Sharia finance studies during her tenure as Dean of the Harvard Law School.

But to understand the dangerous, perhaps even treasonous, nature of Kagan’s actions, one must first review why Sharia finance and Sharia law are problematic for any Western institution.

Sharia finance includes the Islamic legal requirement that 2.5% of the principal of any investment be donated annually to charitable institutions, that recipients of their investment are fined 7% for transgressions of Shariah law (and the 7% is donated to charity), and that the principal be invested only in projects compliant with the rules of Shariah.

The decisions as to which projects are compliant, which recipients have transgressed, and which charities receive the fines and the 2.5% contributions, are made by Shariah Compliance Boards appointed by the financial institution. Such Boards may include radical Muslim extremists who routinely designate terrorist-linked entities to receive their charitable donations. So Sharia finance regulations have the potential to create a new and lucrative channel for funding terrorism against Israel, against the USA, and against any country targeted by Muslim terrorists.

But there is another and even more threatening aspect of Sharia finance.[1] Shariah (lit. a path, a way) law is the product of Muslim jurists who use the Qur’an, the extra-Qur’anic accounts of Mohammed’s teachings, analogical reasoning, and consensus to create Muslim law. Unfortunately, this 1,400 year-old process has created a body of jurisprudence that is fundamentally opposed to the concepts of human equality and personal freedom that are the foundations of Western civilization.

Requirements of Shariah law that are most antithetical to Western society include:

• Condoning the murder, preferably by stoning, of women for sexual transgressions or even for the accusation of sexual transgressions;
• Condoning forced marriages and marriage of under-aged girls;
• Condoning wife beating and marital rape;
• Establishing women’s legal status in courts to be literally half of a man’s (it takes two female witnesses to counter one male witness in court);
• Requiring that female heirs receive only half of what males receive;
• Requiring women to cover all of their body except hands and face;
• Encouraging polygamy;
• Prohibiting Muslim women from marrying non-Muslim men;
• Prohibiting homosexuality, with punishment of flogging or execution;
• Prohibiting alcoholic beverages, gambling, music, much Western art;
• Use of lex talionis (literally an eye for eye, tooth for tooth) as legal punishment;
• Amputation, flogging, crucifixion, stoning and decapitation for a variety of crimes, many of which would be considered non-capital offenses or even torts by Western standards;
• Death for insulting or criticizing Islam, Muslims, Mohammed, the Qur’an, Sharia, or Allah;
• Requiring execution or assassination of Muslims who convert out of Islam;
• Creating the dhimmi status for non-Muslims: a sub-class non-citizen denied civil and human rights;
• Establishing the worth of a non-Muslim’s life as less than a Muslim’s;
• Prohibiting the execution of a Muslim for the murder of a non-Muslim;
• Requiring eternal jihad and exhorting Muslim leaders to abrogate treaties with non-Muslim countries if doing so will advance Jihad;

So Shariah is based upon a religious ideology that embraces the suppression of women, gender apartheid, religious apartheid, cruel and unusual punishment, the denial of basic Western freedoms of speech, thought, conscience, religion, and choice of life partner, and the maintenance of an eternal supremacist religious war against non-Muslims until Islam is the only, or at least the supreme, religion in the world.

Add to that the Global Sharia Movement,[2] with its own YouTube channel and Facebook pages, whose goal is the total islamization of the world, implementation of Shariah and abolition of democracy. Unreal as this may sound, nearly 300 people attended a 2009 conference in Boston to participate in the Khalifah Conference on “The Fall of Capitalism and the Rise of Islam” organized by Hizb ut-Tahrir (HT), whose alumni include 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the late Iraqi terrorist leader Abu Musab az-Zarqawi and some would-be Hamas suicide bombers. HT declared a new Caliphate, with its capital in Gaza City, in 2006; and it now seeks to establish that Caliphate and Shariah over the entire world.

Thus the most dire and truly existential threat from Sharia is not merely its incompatibility with Western society, but its function as the calling card for Muslim extremist movements that seek to insinuate themselves into Western institutions to gain legitimacy for themselves and their ideology in order to facilitate their jihad and the ultimate triumphalist ascendancy of Islam.Yet this is what Kagan supported and advanced at Harvard for almost a decade, with no apparent opposition from faculty or administration.

Kagan’s support for Sharia at Harvard began in 2003 when she personally officiated over the establishment of an Islamic Finance Project at the law school. The project’s purpose is to promote Shariah-compliant finance (SCF) by enlisting in its service some of the nation’s most promising law students.

Kagan’s support for Sharia was again demonstrated later that same year when she whole-heartedly endorsed Professor Noah Feldman’s promotion of the Muslim Brotherhood and Shariah by honoring him with the endowed Bemis Chair in International Law. Feldman’s position on the importance of promoting Sharia law in the USA and giving it legal status and prestige alongside our own secular laws was well known.[3]

Kagan went on to even more vigorously promote Sharia Finance at Harvard when the Harvard University Islamic Finance Project hosted the Ninth Harvard University Forum on Islamic Finance, in March of 2010.

That same year she lobbied strongly against ROTC on Harvard’s campus, because of the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, which she felt discriminated against homosexuals. But her supposedly principled concern for the equality of homosexuals in our armed forces stands in sharp contradistinction to her promotion of Sharia law and her quiescent acceptance of Prince al-Waleed bin Talal’s $20,000,000 gift in 2005 to fund a professorial chair at Harvard for the study of Islam and Sharia Law, the same Sharia law that legislates the execution of homosexuals[4]. Is she simply an egregious unadulterated hypocrite, or is there some other inducement to her self-contradictory behavior? Certainly a professor of her rank and background cannot be clueless to the dangers of Sharia for homosexuals, and for all other non-Muslims as well.

Today there are three Saudi-funded institutions at Harvard for the study of Sharia law, thanks in part to Kagan’s energetic efforts.

Unless Kagan, now a supreme court justice, and her cohorts at Harvard are abysmally ignorant of the all-too-many core characteristics of Shariah that are an anathema to Western civilization, and ignorant as well of Shariah’s role as the “calling card” of Islamist terrorists, they are intentionally shilling for the same Muslim terrorists who have attacked our country and its allies, and who seek to destroy our democratic institutions and impose Islam on the West.

Shilling for the enemy in time of war is treason.

Notes:

[1] Unless otherwise noted, the following summary of Sharia law draws from the following sources, in which there are additional references and citations:

http://www.newsrealblog.com/2010/04/19/harvard-sharia-finance-laughing-all-the-way-to-the-westbank-and-selling-american-women-into-slavery-part-i/; http://www.shariahfinancewatch.org/blog/2010/07/19/elena-kagan-will-she-tolerate-shariah-she-did-at-harvard/; http://creepingsharia.wordpress.com/2012/01/18/muslims-harvard-shill-for-islam-celebrate-sharia-law-its-desirable-chilling-effect-in-us/; and http://frontpagemag.com/2011/08/30/shilling-for-shariah/

[2] Probably the most thorough documentation of the threat of Shariah to the USA is Frank Gaffney’s book Shariah: the Threat to America (CSP, 2010), published by his Center for Security Policy (CSP). The CSP’s website devoted to the question of Shariah in America, http://shariahthethreat.org/, offers a 17-chapter survey of the issues summarized above.

[3] See http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/16/magazine/16Shariah-t.html?pagewanted=all and http://harvardcrcl.org/2010/12/02/harvard-prof-noah-feldman-okla-anti-sharia-law-almost-certain-to-be-struck-down/ and

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C9QToVB6QaI for Feldman’s position on Sharia as a legal system to be implemented in America; and http://frontpagemag.com/2011/08/30/shilling-for-shariah/ for the problems inherent in Feldman’s position.Feldman’s speech on receiving the award was revealing: he advocated for an international, “outward interpretation” of the Constitution that could “require the U.S. to confer rights on citizens of other nations,” and allow for an “experimental Constitution.” In other words, change our constitution and current legal system to accommodate foreign sensibilities.

[4] For more details on this issue see: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/jun/21/courting-shariah/;

http://www.shariahfinancewatch.org/blog/2010/07/19/elena-kagan-will-she-tolerate-shariah-she-did-at-harvard/;http://mediamatters.org/research/201006170031; and Dick Morris http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=38175

David Meir-Levi

Source: http://frontpagemag.com/2012/03/20/what-happened-to-harvards-veritas/

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