Shariah OK with Obama’s top lawyer

President Obama has tabbed the former dean of Yale Law School, Harold Koh, to become the legal adviser for the State Department. Among numerous questionable and controversial statements, Koh has said that the “war on terror” — a term which the Obama Administration has already quietly abandoned, was “obsessive.” And in a 2007 speech, according to a lawyer who was in the audience, Koh opined that “in an appropriate case, he didn’t see any reason why sharia law would not be applied to govern a case in the United States.”

Asked for comment, a spokeswoman for Koh waved the incident away: “I had heard that some guy…had asked a question about sharia law, and that Dean Koh had said something about that while there are obvious differences among the many different legal systems, they also share some common legal concepts.”

Probably Koh has something in mind akin to what the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, was thinking when he made his notorious statement that Islamic law was “unavoidable” in Britain. Williams didn’t mean that Britain would become a Sharia state, but only that Muslims could have recourse to private Sharia arbitration for marital disputes, inheritance matters, and the like. Stonings and amputations? Of course not. “Nobody in their right mind,” said Williams, “would want to see in this country the kind of inhumanity that’s sometimes been associated with the practice of the law in some Islamic states; the extreme punishments, the attitudes to women as well.” But, he concluded, the idea that “there’s one law for everybody…I think that’s a bit of a danger.”

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