Via CBN:

A group of Muslims in northern Texas has created what may be the first official Shariah law system in the United States.

The new Shariah tribunal in Irving, Texas, is trying to assure Americans they’re not planning to follow the type of Shariah law practiced in Muslim countries.

There has been a growing impulse among muslims living in America to establish sharia courts. This is not surprising. Wherever Islam exists as a minority religion, its followers eschew cultural assimilation and seek to keep 8th century practices originating in the Arabia desert as their cultural norm. Take, for instance, the suppression of free speech in Dearborn, Michigan, because blasphemy. The attempt by muslim students to prevent the showing of the film American Sniper. And rape as a team sport in the British city of Rotherham. Several US states have sought to ban sharia, but these laws have been overturned, in some cases, and the proponents ridiculed as a phobe-du-jour (I lose track of the phobias that underlie any disagreement with liberal orthodoxy). The argument runs to the effect that sharia law would not be used in criminal cases, it would only be used in cases of arbitration where all parties agreed to the rules to be used.

Contrary to what critics would have you believe, this is not an inconsequential problem. For proof of that we need only look at Britain where sharia courts have taken over predominantly muslim communities and have essentially eradicated an vestiges of Western concepts of justice or equality.

In 1996, in a virtual surrender to political correctness, Britain passed the Arbitration Act. This allowed civil disputes to be decided under sharia law and the sharia court findings would be enforceable by British courts. Now a report has been compiled by a member of the British House of Lords, Baroness Caroline Cox. The report, titled “A Parallel World: Confronting the Abuse of Many Muslim Women in Britain Today,” shows how women under sharia are just as much an abused underclass in Britain as they would be in any other godforsaken, Third World, Islamic craphole.

According to the report, however, many Muslim bodies are using the Arbitration Act to support the claim that they are able to make legally binding decisions for members of the Muslim community, when in fact the law limits their role to that of being a mediator to help reach an agreement. “The mediator is not a judge or an arbitrator who imposes a decision,” the report states.

The report shows how Sharia courts often fuse the concepts of arbitration, in which both parties agree to submit their dispute to a mutually agreeable third party for a decision to be made, andmediation, in which the two parties voluntarily use a third party to help them reach an agreement that is acceptable to both sides.

On top of this lies the problem of “jurisdiction creep,” whereby Sharia courts are adjudicating on matters well outside the arbitration framework, such as by deciding cases relating to criminal law, including those involving domestic violence and grievous bodily harm.

As a result, Muslim women, who may lack knowledge of both the English language and their rights under British law, are often pressured by their families to use Sharia courts. These courts often coerce them to sign an agreement to abide by their decisions, which are imposed and viewed as legal judgments.

Worse yet, “Refusal to settle a dispute in a Sharia forum could lead to threats and intimidation, or being ostracized and labelled a disbeliever,” the report states, and adds:

“There is a particular concern that women face pressure to withdraw allegations of domestic violence after they make them. Several women’s groups say they are often reluctant to go to the authorities with women who have run away to escape violence because they cannot trust police officers within the community not to betray the girls to their abusing families.”

The report shows that even in cases where Muslim tribunals work “in tandem” with police investigations, abused women often withdraw their complaints to the police, while Sharia judges let the husbands go unpunished.

If you doubt the propensity of muslim groups to use threats and intimidation to enforce conformity of thought and practice, you need look no further than the actions of the organizer of the U. Mich. American Sniper bullying to punish a fellow muslim who went off the ideological reservation.

The report documents how sharia has crept into the marriage system and many muslim women never have their marriage registered with civil authorities. Divorces are then carried out under sharia law leaving the woman with no rights of any kind. The establishment of this parallel system of civil courts has led to the rise of polygamy and the enforcement of female-genital mutilation.

This problem is not a trivial one, though Snopes.com, it its never ending effort to facilitate asshattery, tries to make the case that it is by bringing up other instances of arbitration being governed by religious principles. It is an exercise in burning strawmen. We have enough data from Britain and enough experience with the antics of CAIR and various other muslim groups to know that the culture they seek to foster in those communities is not only at odds with that of the culture at large (not all bad, by the way) but it is hostile to the principles of governance that currently hold sway in the United States. We now know that women, particularly new immigrants, are captured by this vulgar and inhumane system of laws and subject to being treated as chattel — the reason that many of them left thir home countries in the first place.

One would think that the American left would be up in arms over this but they aren’t. Their allegiance to multiculturalism is supreme and their hatred for American values on par with that of CAIR. Were sharia only used in arbitration between willing, consenting parties I’d have few objections. But we know that is not how it will be used. This abusive system of sharia courts began in Britain in precisely the same way that it is being introduced into the United States.  We need to act to stop this nonsense before we are France or Britain.