For about fifteen minutes, I admired Governor Christie, the elected executive of the state of New Jersey. I liked the calm way in which he stood his ground against the notorious union bullies. He was witty and disarming in his forthright responses.

The burnish has worn off, and now it seems that only brass remains. The first big exposure of his political ambition was that unnecessary and egregious opinion offered when a New Jersey state employee was fired for burning some pages of a Koran..

This was a public act, performed on 9/11 in New York City, while the man was not working and could therefore be considered acting in his capacity as a private citizen. While I’ve never gotten the point of burning books, the man was free to do so. However one may dislike his brief performance,he did nothing unlawful.

But Governor Christie, instead of remaining judiciously silent, publicly approved of his being fired. That was the defining moment: Christie was obviously trolling for votes in the Muslim communities of New Jersey. Pandering. Fortunately, despite his approving call-out, the man was reinstated with back pay and damages. Had Christie reached down and annulled that firing, he’d have saved his state $25,000.00 in pain-and-suffering damages plus another $25,000.00 in legal fees paid to the ACLU. But that’s simply the price of pandering, and Governor Christie is willing to have New Jersey’s taxpayers left on the hook — his hook — for fifty thousand dollars. I wonder how much more they’ll have fork over before this man is done.

Thus it is consistent with his political strategy that he wouldn’t see fit to interfere with or expound upon the decision a family court judge made to permit a Muslim to seriously beat his wife. This judge overrode New Jersey law when he arbitrarily (and illegally) refused to grant the ex-wife a restraining order so as to prevent another series of physically damaging rapes by her former husband. Surely that serious breach of law deserved Christie’s attention?

Andrew McCarthy gives background on this one:

a Muslim woman from Morocco who was serially raped and beaten in New Jersey by the Muslim man to whom she was wed as a teenager — one of those arranged marriages common in Islamic cultures. A New Jersey judge declined to give her a protective order, though. Under sharia, a man cannot rape his wife: “A woman cannot carry out the right of her Lord til she carries out the right of her husband,” declares one relevant hadith (Ibn Majah 1854). “If he asks her to surrender herself she should not refuse him even if she is on a camel’s saddle.” Or, as S.D.’s husband translated this sharia tenet as he forced himself on her, “This is according to our religion. You are my wife, I [can] do anything to you. The woman, she should submit and do anything I ask her to do.”

Based on this, the judge (who, thankfully, was later reversed) reasoned that the husband couldn’t be criminally culpable. According to the New Jersey court, “He was operating under his belief that it is, as the husband, his desire to have sex when and whether he wanted to . . . consistent with his practices, and it was something that was not prohibited.”

Carried to its logical conclusion by this judge’s shoddy reasoning, the barbaric specifics of sharia law could easily include any number of other sharia-specific “practices”. For example, the man could acquire another wife, and another — and beat them all, because this is “consistent with his practices, and…not prohibited.”

[The rulings of family court judges in this country are often as bizarre as this one and as equally arbitrary. But that’s another story for another time. This is about the infiltration of sharia into New Jersey with the help of its chief executive]

Mr. McCarthy says that he’s not “a fan” of the various anti-sharia legal initiatives which have gotten off the ground in several states. Here’s his solution instead:

If Americans examined the classical interpretations of sharia, core tenets of which are antithetical to Western liberalism, you wouldn’t need to pass a law against it; it would be discredited. But that is an examination government officials like Governor Christie — taking their cues from the Clinton, Bush, and Obama administrations — seem determined to make sure we never have. It’s a religion of peace; now move along, there’s nothing else to see here.

That opening clause, with its outsized conditional IF is the deal-breaker for most of us. When does Mr. McCarthy think Americans are suddenly going to stop watching television and begin examining “the classical interpretations of sharia, core tenets of which are antithetical to Western liberalism…”? They’re not ever going to do that.

However, this is precisely what citizens want their state legislators to do. That’s what they pay them for. And when those legislators put the proposal into a referendum for voters to decide, they vote like the Swiss, Mr. McCarthy.

Given the Gramscian slant of all our public institutions and their obvious collusion with Salafist Islam, when do you think this “discrediting” will begin? And by whom will this movement to discredit sharia be led? Will it be The New York Times and other MSM jornolists leading the charge? How about our Muslim Brotherhood-infiltrated professional bureaucracies? Perhaps the universities which now accept millions of Saudi petrodollars for their endowed chairs devoted to Middle Eastern “studies”? Or maybe we can depend on our “hearts-and-minds”-compromised military leadership?

Seriously, Mr. McCarthy? You fought a mighty battle to put away a murderous terrorist and you won. In other words, you used the law to put him away. Those of us who see the inroads sharia is making just want our current laws to be reinforced against the poundings of this 7th-century barbarism masquerading as “law”. Sunshine is useless when our enemy is a totalitarian oppressor whose fury is bent toward blinding us all.

Now comes Governor Christie’s crony executive decisions, and they’re definitely getting some well-deserved sunshine. With all the negative publicity, The Fat Man’s not so funny anymore…and he certainly isn’t amused. Mr. McCarthy continues his examination of Governor Christie’s decision to install an upstanding citizen, coincidentally a Muslim, to New Jersey’s court. He explains the problems encountered here:

Media questions about the Mohammed appointment were the provocation for Christie’s outburst. “Ignorance is behind the criticism of Sohail Mohammed,” the governor thundered. He complained that disquiet over the appointment owed solely to a toxic combination of irrational bias (because Mohammed is a Muslim) and ignorance (because the fact that a lawyer defended people detained in the 9/11 investigation, as Mohammed did, does not mean the lawyer sympathizes with the terrorists).

As far as they go, both these assertions are true. But, as we’ll see, they don’t come close to telling the whole story. There are Muslims in the United States who despise the West, and there are patriotic American Muslims who embrace the West, some of whom serve honorably in our military, are key assets to our intelligence community, and have enabled us to infiltrate terror networks, thwart plots, and save lives. The question is how to figure out which is which.

Indeed. That is the crucial question, and it is happening in more places than just New Jersey. How do you sort out the baddies and prevent, as well as you can, their grab of the political, judicial, and academic steering wheels? Especially how do you do that when you have a chief executive who throws temper tantrums and resorts to name-calling when his judgment is questioned?

This “sharia-law business is crap . . . and I’m tired of dealing with the crazies!”

This language is unbecoming the elected leader of a state. He ought to perform more due diligence before he starts hyperventilating.

Since lawyer McCarthy has spent more time in the bowels of the terrorism groups in this country, he’s more credible than a governor looking for votes:

When the Islamic-terror onslaught started in the early 1990s, it was treated as a crime problem. State and federal law-enforcement agencies had precious little intelligence about the Muslim communities in which terrorists insinuated themselves. The solution: reach out to Muslim leaders, show them we see this as a “violent extremism” issue, not an Islam issue, and they’ll share information with us.

I remember that period. After the failed attempt to take down the Twin Towers in Manhattan, President Clinton didn’t even show up to voice his concern. It was left to the police and to the local district attorneys to figure out what to do next. Which might be why the New York City Police Department went on to develop such an excellent anti-terrorism team and published their findings.[pdf]

Now other cities come to New York for training. Had Washington not been such an EPIC FAIL concerning its duty to ensure civilian safety, perhaps New York City would not have needed to work so hard. They knew they were the epicenter. Thus, from the feds’ failure (can anyone say “Department of Homeland Bureaucracy?) came an important local understanding and implementation. In the final analysis, local is always better.

As Mr. McCarthy notes, the problem for all of us is Muslim leaders. The average Muslim tends to be pro-American. But in the face of the militants, he’d better be quiet. I completely understand that decision to be quiet. We get emails from people who have slowly become more conservative in their views but dare not tell family, friends or employers for fear of losing jobs and/or bonds of affection. They’re not delusional: look at Fjordman’s position. Just a ratcheting up of the hatred, a deeper demonization by those in charge:

…the problem is Muslim leaders. Rank-and-file Muslims in the U.S. tend to be pro-American and supportive of counterterrorism efforts, albeit quietly so. That’s because they are intimidated by the leadership in the mosques and Islamic centers, which tends to be heavily influenced by the Muslim Brotherhood, and thus anti-Western, anti-Israeli, anti-Semitic, anti-assimilationist, and wedded to the fundamentalist, classical interpretation of sharia.

That sums it up pretty well.

So what about this Sohail Mohammed, the guy Governor Christie is pushing on the citizens of New Jersey?

Mr. McCarthy knows him only too well. And he knows the terrorists that Mr. Mohammed has served. You can get the full details on him and on his colleagues here (scroll down). As McCarthy says, when we dismiss valid concerns we “end up building bridges to all the wrong people, as the government has done for two decades”:

That is how we end up “partnering” with the likes of Abdurrahman Alamoudi and Sami al-Arian (both ultimately convicted, with their ties to terrorism duly exposed); Salam al-Marayati, the Muslim Public Affairs Committee leader who argued that Israel should be at the top of the 9/11 suspect list; and such Islamist organizations as CAIR and the Islamic Society of North America, which, though not indicted, were shown by the Justice Department to be co-conspirators in the Holy Land Foundation terrorism-financing case.

In the end, Mr. McCarthy makes a reasoned plea that stands in stark contrast to the governor’s pandering appointment and his blustering crudeness when questioned about the wisdom of this appointment.

So sad to see Governor Christie revealed as just one more pol on the make. New Jersey citizens deserve better than this, and I hope they get it. Discourteous bluster is merely a cover for fear: it’s a form of cowardice.

Now that the cat is out of the bag, the Governor can expect the same treatment from reporters that he dishes out to them.