The Silent Jihad Against The West

By Vincent Gioia, The Post Chronicle

Anyone that cares to learn about what is going on in the world is familiar with active jihad, the "holy war", conducted with terrorism and directed at the modern world in general and western civilization more specifically. But there is also another form of jihad that is part of the deliberate effort to have Islam replace all concepts of morality and the values held dear by the rest of us. The name of this silent "fifth column" effort is "Sharia Banking". Unfortunately, Sharia Banking is increasingly accepted by western banking institutions without any real understanding of what the Muslim goal is and what is at stake in the efforts by these institutions to attract more business, profits and money to bail them out of financial messes they brought upon themselves.

Islamic Sharia banking is coming to the United States and other western nations, thanks to global banks such as Citigroup, HSBC, Deutsche Bank, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs. Great Britain is now pledging to become the Islamic banking center of the world. Clearly the headlong rush by all global banks to enter the world of Islamic banking is well underway. Why do western banks seek to participate in Sharia banking; because it gives them a chance to enter the Islamic banking industry which has over $1.5 trillion available today and is growing at a steady and explosive rate of over 15% per year.

The implications for the west, and especially for the United States, are staggeringly destructive. Islamic banking working through global banks is doing for Islam what it could never do on its own: giving legitimacy to Sharia law and infiltrating it into the fabric of western society.

For those not familiar with Sharia Banking; it is a system which creates and sells services and products that are in strict accordance with Sharia law. Sometimes it is referred to in the Islamic culture as "Sharia finance". It dictates how the practices of banking, investment, bonds, loans, brokerage, etc, are to be conducted.

To insure compliance and to become "Sharia banking" compliant, banks must hire Sharia experts to review and approve each product and practice of the bank. This is known as "halal", which has been described as "the Muslim equivalent of kosher in Judaism." There is a shortage of such Sharia experts so there is competition among banks to find such experts to sit on their boards of directors. By having an "expert" involved in banking decisions, this provides the legitimacy to each banking decision because it is made at the director rather management level. However, most of these Sharia experts" are from the radical Wahhabi school of Islam in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere, and they hold views diametrically opposed to the basic values of Western civilization.

The Center for Security has identified some of the Sharia experts sitting on the boards of U.S. financial institutions. The top twenty "advisors" include many with conflicts of interests and anti-trust issues since they sit on boards of many Islamic banks at the same time. The Center for Security identifies a couple of advisors with ties to money-laundering and terrorism:

Yousuf Quaradawi who is prominent in the Muslim Brotherhood, owns two banks himself and has issued statements in support of Palestinian attacks on Israeli citizens and has issued rulings supporting Hamas and Hezbollah jihad attacks against Israel.

Muhammad Yaqui Usami who is a radical cleric and Sharia court judge in Pakistan. He is on the board of organizations that train thousands of Taliban and jihad foot soldiers. But the most heinous thing is his complicity in the murder and suffering of countless innocent Muslims as apostates because they disagreed with his Islamic mandates.

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