Weigel

A nice, weird, depressing catch from Sam Stein from the new Newsweek poll:

A full 14 percent of Republicans said that it was "definitely true"that Obama sympathized with the fundamentalists and wanted to imposeIslamic law across the globe. An additional 38 percent said that it wasprobably true -- bringing the total percentage of believers to 52percent. Only 33 percent of Republicans said that the "allegation" (asNewsweek put it) was "probably not true." Seven percent said it was"definitely not true." The rest (eight percent) either didn't know theanswer or didn't read the question.

Way back in May 2009, I attended a conference on "Islamic Lawfare" hosted at the Mayflower Hotel in D.C. The point of the event was to expose how wealthy Muslims were using "legal jihad" to silence criticism of their faith and, sneakily, to prepare America for sharia law. One of the speakers was Frank Gaffney, who has also called sharia the "seditious religio-political-legal code authoritative Islam seeks to impose worldwide under a global theocracy." Gaffney is one of several influential commenters who has argued that this can be brought about by America giving up its legal sovereignty to the International Criminal Court. And you can't understate how widespread the fear of this has become. As Lee Smith helpfully explains, however, it's a bunch of nonsense .

It is surpassingly strange that a concept revived byIslamists as a political tool may now be serving a similar purpose inthe United States, where sharia is no more likely to affect theAmerican way of life than the burial rituals of the ancient Egyptiansare likely to influence our funerary rites. When the organizer behindthe lower Manhattan Islamic center, Imam Feisal Rauf, says that theU.S. legal system is "sharia-compliant," he is not preparing the wayfor a regime of lashings and beheadings; he is engaging in a species ofinter-Muslim apologetics—which are also pro-American, even if in aroundabout way.

So that's where this is coming from.