The piece reads like a gushing celebrity profile in Vogue magazine. However, this blog on the controversial Women's March organizer Linda Sarsour appears on the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) website.
Sarsour's controversial status is not unwarranted. She has unapologetically advocated for Sharia law in the United States, threatened former-Muslim activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali on Twitter and, just last week, called on American muslims to use "jihad" as a form of resistance to the Trump presidency.
It's strange that an organization which promotes "civil liberties" would write such a glowing profile of someone who advocates for radical Sharia law.
Sharia law is radical. Countries that institute the legal system, such as the Maldives, sentence rape victims to public beatings. Here in the United States, pockets of those adherent to the code in Michigan subjected over 100 young girls to brutal genital mutilation. And those are just the cases we know about.
The ACLU sees itself as a champion of gay rights--so much so that they have argued cases against a baker and a florist who refused to cater same-sex weddings due to religious reasons. I guess, for those at the ACLU, it is discrimination for a christian to refuse to bake a cake for an gay man but not discrimination for a radical muslim country to literally execute the same person.
That is not an exaggeration. In countries under Sharia law, homosexuality is a crime punishable by death or, in lesser cases, public beatings. Just this week, it came to light that in the muslim state of Chechnya in Russia massacred and executed 27 gay men.
This is the type of legal system that Sarsour told Rachel Maddow Muslims must be allowed to practice for "religious legitimacy." Interestingly, she tells Maddow that Muslims seeking to practice Sharia in the U.S. are coming from oppressive regimes that ban freedom of speech. Well, yeah. That's Sharia law.
But you would not get this from the ACLU profile. According to its author, Ali Gharib, Sarsour is a down-to-earth feminist you'd like to grab a coffee with. She is a victim of an intrusive and bigoted New York police force which "betrayed" after 9/11 when the NYPD when they used unauthorized surveillance on her community :
We were letting them in the front door, and they were coming in the back door,” she says. Sarsour and other Muslim community leaders in New York City asked the ACLU and allied legal groups to figure out the strongest possible challenge to unlawful police spying.
True, the ACLU is trying to highlight their National Security Project and this is not to say unlawful surveillance is not a real issue. But the cognitive dissonance involved in separating Sarsour from what she advocates is astounding.
Do women and LGBT individuals in communities under Sharia law need their civil liberties protected? The ACLU just applauded someone who does not think so.
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