Christie's Sharia Crap

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie this year appointed a Muslim attorney, Sohail Mohammed, to a Superior Court judgeship in Passaic County. Mohammed was the lawyer for Mohammed Qatanani, a Muslim Brotherhood​ operative who pled guilty to membership in the jihad terror group Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood. But when questioned about the wisdom of the appointment, Christie stoutly defended Mohammed and went out of his way to slam opposition to Sharia in the U.S. as “crap.”

What is actually “crap” is the idea that Chris Christie is fit to be President of the United States.

“Ignorance is behind the criticism of Sohail Mohammed,” Christie declared, without bothering to explain how “ignorance” provoked Qatanani’s guilty plea, or involvement in Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood, or Mohammed’s other ties to Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas-linked individuals and groups. But Christie’s most egregious statements came after a followup question about the spread of Islamic law, Sharia, in the United States. “Sharia law has nothing to do with this at all. It’s crazy!” Christie sputtered. “The guy—Sohail Mohammed—“is an American citizen!” He declared that “this Sharia law business is just crap … and I’m tried of dealing with the crazies.”

Listening to all that from Christie, you’d get the idea that Sohail Mohammed is being unjustly maligned out of “hatred,” “bigotry” and “Islamophobia”—and that any concern about Sharia in the U.S. is just another manifestation of the same thing. Never mind that courts in 23 states have already used Sharia as a factor in their deliberations, despite its contradictions of American law on the freedom of speech, the freedom of conscience, equality of rights for women, and more.

Never mind that the Muslim Brotherhood, with which Sohail Mohammed’s client Mohammed Qatanani was involved, is dedicated in its own words, according to a captured internal document, to “eliminating and destroying Western civilization from within and sabotaging its miserable house … so that Allah’s religion is victorious over other religions.”

A manifesto for sedition and subversion? Sure. But only if you’re one of the “crazies” who fall for that “crap.” Christie knows better—or at least he knows something. Christie knows, according to terrorism expert Steve Emerson, all about Mohammed Qatanani’s unsavory ties: “I know for certain that Christie and the FBI special agent in charge had access to information about Qatanani’s background, involvement with and support of Hamas.” Yet even as he knew this, Christie called Qatanani “a man of great good will” and “a constructive force”—and defended Qatanani from Department of Homeland Security attempts to deport him. Emerson rightly called this “a disgrace and an act of pure political corruption.”

It is hard to fathom the moral calculus of a politician like Christie as he affects high moral dudgeon over the venomous Islamophobes who dare to criticize his friend Sohail Mohammed and to take issue with Sharia law’s rejection of fundamental American principles. But not all that hard. New Jersey has one of the largest Muslim populations in the United States, and Christie knows which side of his bread is buttered. Nonetheless, he cannot be excused on this basis. This shameless pandering for votes, as hallowed a practice as it is in American politics, comes at far too high a price in this instance.

If that is not immediately clear, imagine if Christie had appointed as a judge someone who was an attorney for the Ku Klux Klan, or the Aryan Nations. The analogy is not hyperbole: Remember, the Muslim Brotherhood says of itself that it is dedicated to “eliminating and destroying Western civilization from within.” If Christie had done this, the mainstream media would never have let him get away with the moral indignation he put on at his press conference last Wednesday. But as it is, the Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) effusively thanked Christie, and liberals are falling over themselves to congratulate him for his supposedly courageous stand against the knuckle-dragging anti-Sharia crowd. They have found in Christie yet again—just the kind of conservative they like: one who panders to the leftist agenda while adopting a posture of taking the moral high ground against the benighted right-wingers who are actually standing for freedom and human rights.

And they’re right: Chris Christie is indeed their man. A man who is radically unfit to be President of the United States, in 2012 and at any time.