WASHINGTON — Herman Cain gives a great speech.

But some conservatives think the longshot run for president by the black Republican former Godfather’s Pizza CEO and radio host will amount to more than just talk, particularly in Iowa.

“I think Herman Cain will surprise some people,” said Ben Domenech, a conservative blogger and research fellow with the Heartland Institute.

Cain has been working hard at connecting with Tea Party activists in Iowa, a state whose caucuses play a crucial role in the nomination process because they mark the first vote on the party’s choice. Grassroots conservatives in Des Moines say Cain met with about 30 of them in July and has been back to the state numerous times since then.

“Herman’s got a lot of support under the radar. Don’t be surprised. We’ve got people on board who are under the radar who can draw a lot of people to these caucuses,” said Charlie Gruschow, the chairman of the Des Moines Tea Party, who is a Cain supporter.

Bob Haus, a longtime GOP operative in Iowa who ran former Tennessee Sen. Fred Thompson’s 2008 campaign in the state and is not affiliated with any of the current candidates, also said Cain could sneak up on the rest of the field in Iowa, where voters in the 2008 primary chose former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee over more established candidates.

Haus said he takes Cain seriously “because he takes himself seriously.”

However, at the same moment that Cain is picking up momentum, he is dealing with the first real blowup of his campaign — forced to backtrack this week after telling The Huffington Post and other reporters in Iowa on Saturday that he would not feel comfortable appointing a Muslim to his Cabinet or to a judgeship.

Following a wave of outraged comments, including some from fellow conservatives, Cain’s staff said he would not discriminate against anyone in his administration based on faith or race, in accordance with the Constitution.

“He’s going to need to learn over time how to address controversial issues,” said Colin Hanna, president of the conservative group Let Freedom Ring, who nonetheless said he is firmly backing Cain’s candidacy.

Despite the controversy, Cain has also begun to pick up some support with conservatives in Washington as well as grassroots activists. He wowed a group of conservative bloggers at a lunch held at the Heritage Foundation last week, according to Rob Bluey, the director of Heritage’s Center for Media and Public Policy, which organizes the regular blogger lunches.

“Herman Cain has a compelling life story. He worked his way up the corporate ladder to become a successful CEO and later a popular talk-radio host who promoted conservative principles,” Bluey said in an email. “His real life experiences in the business world are very relevant given the challenges facing America.”

Domenech, who attended the lunch with Cain, said that the potential candidate “speaks to the Tea Party movement not as an ambassador from the Republican establishment trying to adopt a populist approach, but as one of them.”

Much of Cain’s ability to get a hearing comes from his dynamic speaking ability. After giving an electric speech in Phoenix earlier this month, Cain won a straw poll at a Tea Party meeting of a few thousand activists, despite the fact that former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, a fellow 2012 hopeful, had also spoken at the Phoenix event.

A Gallup poll released Tuesday showed Cain with one of the highest “positive intensity scores” of all the potential GOP presidential candidates. His 19-point score ranked fourth, topped only by former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee’s 26 points and the 20 points registered by former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney and Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann.

Cain’s name recognition is still among the lowest of the Republican contenders, at 21 percent. But Gallup said the results demonstrate that Cain and Bachmann both “have the potential to be much bigger factors in the Republican primaries and caucuses than current trial-heat polling would show.”

Yet while his plainspokenness can be an asset, it is Cain’s penchant for speaking his mind that landed him in some hot water this week. He was asked Saturday if he would feel comfortable appointing a Muslim to his Cabinet or to a federal judgeship.

“I will not,” he said. “And here’s why. There is this creeping attempt, this attempt, to gradually ease Sharia law and the Muslim faith into our government,” Cain said. “It does not belong in our government. This is what happened to Europe. And little by little, to try to be politically correct, they made this little change. They made this little change. And now they’ve got a social problem that they don’t know what to do with hardly.”

Cain’s staff backtracked from his comments, telling HuffPost that he did not explicitly say he would not appoint a Muslim — which would be a violation of the Constitution’s “religious test” clause in Article VI — but that rather he was responding to a question about his feelings.

The tortured spin contradicted what Cain himself said on Fox News Monday.

“A reporter asked me would I appoint a Muslim to my administration? I did say no,” Mr. Cain said.

But eventually this week Cain’s staff steered him away from standing pat.

“Mr. Cain would hire any individual based on his or her qualifications or merit,” Cain spokeswoman Ellen Carmichael said in an interview. “His sole requirement would be that he or she governs or interprets the law solely within the parameters of the U.S. Constitution.”

“Mr. Cain has worked for more than 40 years in the corporate world and he has never had a single issue with workplace discrimination. He has worked side by side with individuals of various faiths, races and backgrounds. If Mr. Cain were president he would adhere to the same philosophy,” Carmichael said.

Carmichael also said that “folks have been rallying around [Cain] because I think enough Americans understand what he said … and agree that Sharia is a concern.”

Cain is not the only GOP hopeful to speak out against the introduction of Sharia law in the United States. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum have both said Sharia should be rejected in America, and Pawlenty moved quickly this month to say that he canceled a state-sponsored mortgage program that avoided the use of interest on loans to appeal to devout Muslims.

But Daveed Gartenstein Ross, director of the Center for the Study of Terrorist Radicalization, said fears of Sharia law “creeping” into American jurisprudence are misplaced.

“I personally am not concerned with the grandiose idea that Sharia is going to become a significant strategic threat in the United States,” Gartenstein-Ross said in an interview.

Gartenstein-Ross, who in 2007 wrote a book about his past conversion to Islam and time working for a charity now designated by the U.S. government as a global terrorist entity, said Cain’s views were not “helpful.”

“This is taking an explosive political issue, making it more explosive and doing so in a way that will out right alienate the Muslim community,” he said.

Cain took criticism from other conservatives for his comments, as well.

“This is an ugly and undiluted form of bigotry,” Peter Wehner, a former White House adviser to President George W. Bush, wrote Monday for Commentary. “It assumes, against the overwhelming evidence, that every Muslim believes in the most radical interpretation of Sharia law, when in fact millions of American Muslims are fully reconciled with democracy and the protection of minority rights.”

Hannah said that Cain will have to learn how to distinguish “between radical Islam, which seems to be genuinely hostile to America and American values, and peaceful Islam, which is compatible with patriotism, American values, the free market, democracy and so on.”

Domenech said the bigger threat to Cain is Bachmann, because she will attract the support of hardcore conservative activists in Iowa who otherwise might have backed him. Interviews with activists in Iowa seemed to confirm such suspicions: Tea Party conservatives were excited about Cain, but hesitant to embrace him as they waited to see if Bachmann gets in the race.

“If he’s onstage with Gingrich, Barbour, Romney, Pawlenty, Daniels, et cetera, he’s without question the most outside person up there,” Domenech said. “Bachmann blunts his appeal a great deal by offering another rouser.”

Cain said in an interview that he thinks his biggest challenge will be fundraising.

“A lot of people want to contribute to someone that they think is going to win, rather than to somebody that they want to win. A lot of people want me to win but still don’t believe that I can win,” he said.

“But I got news for them: I have been a long shot all my life, and so being a long shot is nothing new to me.”

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By Mike Gray

. . . . all non-Christian religions ought to enjoy the presumption of religious freedom . . . the First Amendment does not explicitly protect the Islamic faith, nor does it prohibit it. The First Amendment is simply silent about the issue of Islam.

Thus Islam should enjoy only the liberty it merits, and permission, for example, to build new mosques can be revoked if Islam does in American what Islam does everywhere it exists in the world, which is labor to subvert democracy and impose sharia law. [Emphasis added] — Bryan Fischer

There seems to be widespread ignorance about, or simply a deliberate disregard of, the First Amendment, particularly with respect to the so-called “Establishment Clause”:

. . . . what the First Amendment was all about was simply prohibiting Congress from picking one denomination and making it the official church of the United States, and about protecting all Christian denominations from the intrusion of the federal government.

There was no mention of Islam, no reference to Islam, no effort to protect the free exercise of the Islamic faith.

Since the Founders intended the First Amendment to apply only to Congress (“Congress shall make no law …”), this leaves the states free to do as they wish on matters of religious expression.

It would likely astound the current Department of Justice—which so sedulously “protects” every religion under the sun except Christianity—to learn that the states, and not the federal government, are at perfect liberty to deal with Islam and sharia law as they see fit and without necessary recourse to federal authorities.

The federal Constitution is judicially blind to religion, as stated above; the document prevents the national government from setting up its own church. Otherwise, it’s hands off! The federal government is prohibited from meddling in religion (“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof”) — and except for immigration, which is a congressional responsibility, that’s essentially it:

[It's true that] immigration is a congressional issue. But . . . states have considerable latitude in religious liberty matters, and states are thus free to ban the building of any more mosques within their borders. If states won’t do it, then local planning and zoning commissions can and must do it. And if we understand the Constitution as given to us by the Founders, there is no constitutional impediment in their doing so.

Local governments are well within their rights to protect their citizens from the encroachment of a toxic ideology that will in time threaten religious liberty and equality under the law in their own communities.

Remember that

. . . . states still maintain, in an originalist view, a great deal of latitude in matters of religious expression. They are restrained in this matter only by the strictures of their own state constitutions. From the standpoint of the federal constitution, they remain free, for example, to ban the building of any more mosques in their state, in the interest of societal security and tranquility. They would not be in violation of the federal constitution in doing so, since the First Amendment ties the hands of Congress and Congress alone.

Which also means that if a local community wishes to deny permission to have a mosque built, the locality should not be threatened with action from the federal government, regardless of whether the feds cite the First Amendment as justification for their interference.

Is this a religion — or something else?

A proper understanding of the First Amendment, in fact, precludes any federal action whatsoever. The federal government cannot give permission for, or prevent the building of, any mosque; only states and localities have that power, if their constitutions so provide.

It would be completely unconstitutional for the DOJ to sic federal prosecutors on state legislatures or local zoning boards who might wish to deny permission for building a mosque within their jurisdiction.

Nowadays the federal government behaves as if it’s the sole repository for civic virtue, too often vitiating attempts by state and local governments to exercise their constitutional rights. In this context, for the feds to prosecute localities for denying permission to build mosques would not only result in a violation of their constitutional rights but also be an attempt to enforce religious conformity, something that’s clearly beyond the purview of the First Amendment.

By the same token, it should be obvious how unconstitutional it is for the federal government to attempt to restrict religious practice by banning prayer, creches, and displays of the Ten Commandments anywhere in the United States, at any time and for any reason. Religion is not the proper concern of the national government.

As Bryan Fischer puts it:

. . . . we are at a place where truth about Islam is now considered hate speech, as if criticism and disagreement were by definition expressions of hatred. This demonization of free speech must stop.

Fischer’s article is here.

JUNEAU — Palmer Republican Rep. Carl Gatto has set off a political firestorm with a bill aimed at stopping what he deems as the potential of Islamic religious law — Sharia — trumping the U.S. Constitution in Alaska courts.

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Carl Gatto

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Gatto said he has strong support of Mat-Su area tea party groups and has received nearly 500 emails and phone calls from places like New Zealand, Poland and Israel in support of his bill. It’s part of a push nationally by conservative state legislators, with similar measures introduced in more than a dozen states.

A Muslim group in Anchorage says Gatto is spreading an anti-Islam message and the Alaska Civil Liberties Union argues the bill could have unintended legal consequences. The Alaska Department of Law, meanwhile, testified it’s hard to see the bill having any real effect as U.S. law already reigns supreme in Alaska’s courts.

Gatto said he grew up in New York City, where his Italian neighborhood clung to technically illegal customs like giving a child whiskey to help with illness. But the world of other immigrants is different, he argued.

“I’m more concerned about cultures that are vastly different from European immigrants, who come here and prefer to maintain their specific laws from their previous countries, which are in violent conflict with American law,” Gatto said. “That’s the issue that I am worried about.”

Gatto’s proposal, House Bill 88, says Alaska courts can’t apply foreign law if it would violate an individual’s rights guaranteed by the Constitutions of the United States or the state of Alaska. Gatto doesn’t have examples of Alaska courts imposing Islamic Sharia law but said his bill is determined to make sure that it doesn’t happen.

A member of the Islamic Community Center of Alaska sent an email addressed to Gatto saying 4,000 to 6,000 Muslims live peacefully in Alaska and asking him to “please do not ignite hate and misunderstanding.” Another Muslim from Anchorage, Lamin Jobarteh, said Muslims follow U.S. law. There is no Sharia law in Alaska, he said.

“There is nothing like that. We have a harmonious relationship with everybody here,” said Jobarteh, who said he’s originally from Gambia and has lived in Anchorage for the past 17 years.

It’s become an issue throughout the nation. Oklahoma voters in November approved a ban against state judges considering Islamic law in making their court decisions. The ban is tied up in court.

The sponsor of the Oklahoma ban pointed to a family court judge in New Jersey citing a man’s Islamic faith in denying a restraining order to a woman who said she had been raped by her husband. The ruling was overturned by a higher court.

A model for the anti-Sharia bills around the country came from an Arizona attorney named David Yerushalmi. The Anti- Defamation League has called him a bigot for past writings such as, in an article commenting on murders of blacks by blacks in New York, said it appeared to be a “relatively murderous race killing itself” and that “Muslim civilization is at war with Judeo-Christian civilization.”

Yerushalmi said in an emailed response this week that his words have been twisted, that he doesn’t countenance racism and that “Sharia is an objective and knowable legal system that is offensive to our constitutional liberties.”

The Council on American-Islamic Relations called on Gatto to drop his invitation for Stop Islamization of America Executive Director Pamela Geller to testify at a Wednesday hearing on his bill, saying she leads a hate group.

Gatto shrugged off the request. “Anybody can make a statement that if they are opposed to your point of view they’re a hate group,” he said.

A New York Times profile of Geller that ran last fall described the growing influence of her website, Atlas Shrugs, and her posting of doctored photos of Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan in a Nazi helmet and suggestion that the State Department was run by “Islamic Supremacists.”

Geller testified Wednesday by telephone to the Alaska House Judiciary Committee, which Gatto chairs.

“How can anyone oppose a law that seeks to prevent foreign laws from undermining fundamental Constitutional liberties?” Geller said.

Geller maintained “surveys in the Muslim world” show most Muslims want a unified caliphate with a “strict al-Qaida-like Sharia.” She spoke of Muslim polygamy, jihad in support of Sharia, and said Muslims have demanded special accommodation in U.S. schools, workplaces and government.

Anchorage Democratic Rep. Lindsey Holmes objected.

“I’m getting very uncomfortable with what I see is some fairly negative testimony against a large segment of society. I think we’re getting off into some pretty dangerous, divisive territory,” Holmes said,

Geller responded that “I don’t think I did anything offensive, I merely stated the facts.”

Activist and former Muslim Nonie Darwish testified in support of the bill, talking about oppression of women in her home country of Egypt. Sam Obeidi, an Anchorage businessman, told the committee that American Muslims respect the U.S Constitution, and that Sharia was being mischaracterized.

Anchorage Democratic Rep. Max Gruenberg said the bill as written wouldn’t apply to criminal law, and asked a lawyer for the state whether she could see a scenario where the bill would make any difference in how the laws are being applied in Alaska.

“I’ve had difficulty figuring out how it could ever be applied,” said Assistant Attorney General Mary Ellen Beardsley.

Anchorage Rep. Holmes and ACLU of Alaska director Jeffrey Mittman said the bill could cause unintended problems with international contracts that are drawn up between individuals and corporations.

Gatto’s own Italian-American forebears faced discrimination in this country from those who came before. According to numerous historical accounts, Italians, arriving in waves from the 1880s to the First World War, were at times seen as vastly different from the Northern Europeans who settled earlier.

Among the prejudices were the connection of ordinary Italians to the Mafia, leading to a notorious lynching of 11 Italian immigrants in Louisiana in 1891. Congress passed several bills in the era designed to stem immigration from southern and eastern Europe, culminating in the quotas of the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924. During World War II, fears that some Italian immigrants would support Mussolini led to the internment of several hundred, while 10,000 were ordered to leave sensitive military areas of the West Coast.

Herman Cain has drawn fire from a Muslim advocacy group after he slammed Sharia law and the spread of the Muslim faith in America.

Continue Reading

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) accused Cain of “bigoted speech” after the Atlanta businessman told a blogger that he would not appoint a Muslim to his cabinet or as a federal judge if
elected president.

Asked whether there would be a place for a Muslim appointee in Cain’s administration, Cain flatly said “No.”

“There is this creeping attempt to gradually ease Sharia law and the Muslim faith into our government. It does not belong in our government,” he told a Think Progress blogger.

He continued, “The role of Islam in America is for those that believe in Islam to practice it and leave us alone. Just like Christianity. We have a First Amendment. And I get upset when the Muslims in this country, some of them, try to force their Sharia law on the rest of us.”

Ibrahim Hooper, the Council on American-Islamic Relations’ national communications director, told CNN that Cain’s words were “even going beyond the almost routine Muslim-bashing we see coming from the right wing of the political spectrum.”

“Even post 9/11 you didn’t have this level of mainstreaming of anti-Muslim hate as you have now,” Hooper said.

Cain, who is an associate pastor at an Atlanta church, has previously joined the ranks of Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum in shooting down the Islamic religious law, saying it has no place in America.

Tennessee has become the latest state to join in the wave of anti-sharia crusade. Late last month, legislators in Tennessee introduced a radical bill that would make “material support” for Islamic law punishable by 15 years in prison. The proposal indicates a dramatic new step in the conservative campaign against Muslim-Americans. If passed, activities like praying at the mosque or not having alcohol at an event could be classified as felonies.

Drastic as it may seem, this move is in no way new. In November, voters in Oklahoma approved a state constitutional amendment designed to ban Sharia in the state. The amendment was gravely misguided in that the fact that there was no effort to impose Shariah law in Oklahoma in the first place and that even if there was, the First Amendment would prevent it did not render the amendment unnecessary to Oklahoma voters. 70 percent of them backed the wacky measure, the “Save our State Amendment,” at the polls. However, U.S. District Court Judge Vicki Miles-LaGrange’s Nov. 29 ruled to put a temporary stop on the amendment. Other states should have taken note of this strong move by a federal court, and dropped the sharia hysteria. Reports point to the movement beginning even earlier, with a man named David Yerushalmi, an Arizona-based attorney who many see as a white supremacist who has previously called for a “war against Islam” and tried to criminalize adherence to the Muslim faith. He drafted a sample bill at the request of the American Public Policy Alliance, a right-wing organization established with the goal of protecting American citizens from “the infiltration and incursion of foreign laws and foreign legal doctrines, especially Islamic Shariah Law.”

Unfortunately, the crusade moved full speed ahead. While a number of states including Wyoming, Georgia, South Carolina and Missouri, have filed legislation seeking to keep Sharia out of the courts, Tennessee is going much further by attempting to outlaw it entirely.  Senate Bill 1028, introduced by State Sen. Bill Ketron, gives the state Attorney General authority to designate “Sharia organizations,” defined as “two (2) or more persons conspiring to support, or acting in concert in support of, sharia or in furtherance of the imposition of sharia within any state or territory of the United States.” Anyone who provides material support or resources to a designated Sharia organization could be charged with a felony and face up to 15 years in jail. The bill goes much further, defining traditional Islamic law as counter to constitutional principles, and authorizing the state’s attorney general to freeze the assets of organizations that have been determined to be promoting or supporting Sharia.  CAIR and the ACLU called for lawmakers to defeat the bill. “Essentially the bill is trying to separate the ‘good Muslims’ from the ‘bad Muslims,’” said CAIR staff attorney Gadeir Abbas in an interview with Mother Jones. “Out of all the bills that have been introduced, this is by far the most extreme.” 

The bill – drawn up by conservatives with ties to opponents of a planned Islamic center two blocks from New York City’s ground zero and efforts to expand a mosque 30 miles southeast of Nashville – would face constitutional hurdles if enacted.

Nevertheless, it represents the boldest legislative attempt yet to limit how Muslims worship.

Muslim groups fear the measure would outlaw central tenets of Islam, such as praying five times a day toward Mecca, abstaining from alcohol or fasting for Ramadan.

“This is an anti-Muslim bill that makes it illegal to be a Muslim in the state of Tennessee,” said Remziya Suleyman, policy coordinator for the Tennessee Immigrant and Refugee Rights Coalition.

The bill’s sponsor, Republican Sen. Bill Ketron of Murfreesboro, said the proposal exempts the peaceful practice of Islam but seeks to condemn those “who take Shariah law to the other extreme.” He said it would give state and local law enforcement officials “a powerful counterterrorism tool.”

Ketron, who has successfully pushed through bills tightening restrictions on illegal immigrants, said he expects the Shariah measure will become law.

For now, supporters of the measure are working to bolster it against any constitutional challenges, which may be an impossible task, said First Amendment Center scholar Charles Haynes, who called it a “really distorted understanding of Shariah law.”
 
“It’s unconstitutional to even suggest that such legislation should be passed,” he said. “Trying to separate out different parts of Islamic law for condemnation is nonsensical. Shariah law, like all religious law, is interpreted in a great many different ways.”

Shariah is a set of core principles that most Muslims recognize as well as a series of rulings from religious scholars. It covers many areas of life and different sects have different versions of the code they follow.

At least 13 states have bills pending that would bar judges from considering Shariah in legal decisions, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures, but none of those proposals is as strict as what Tennessee is weighing.

Ketron said he and House Speaker Pro Tempore Judd Matheny, R-Tullahoma, were given the bill by the Tennessee Eagle Forum, who got the bill drafted by Yerushalmi.

Yerushalmi  also runs the Society of Americans for National Existence, an organization that claims following Shariah is treasonous.

Yerushalmi has written for years in conservative media about what he calls the danger of Shariah and its central role in Islam. He has represented Pamela Geller, who leads the group Stop Islamization of America and is one of the most vocal critics of a planned Islamic center two blocks from New York City’s ground zero.

Yerushalmi also represented Stop The Madrassa, a group that opposed a public school in Brooklyn established to teach Arabic language, culture and history. He is one of the contributors to the report “Shariah: The Threat To America” by the Center for Security Policy, a think tank led by Frank Gaffney, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense in the Reagan administration.

 Last year Gaffney testified at a court hearing on the Islamic Center of Murfreesboro. The hearing was intended only to determine if local officials violated the state’s open meetings law in approving the site plan, but the mosque’s foes used the opportunity to argue it was part of a plot to expand Shariah law in the U.S.

Sarah Thompson, a spokeswoman for the Islamic Society of North America

“The way that it’s worded makes the assumption that any practice of Islam is a practice of terrorism,” said Sarah Thompson, a spokeswoman for the Islamic Society of North America. “And that’s a dangerous line to walk. It excludes the millions of Muslims that are practicing peaceably from the ability to do so.”

(The Associated Press contributed to this report)