College Professor: "Sharia is Here, and it's Spectacular"

The Nutty Professor isn't just a movie any more. To paraphrase Seinfeld, a Muslim professor this week admitted that "Sharia is here, and it's spectacular." As the Daily Caller notes:

At a panel discussion on Islam and terrorism at Florida Atlantic University, a professor on the taxpayer-funded school’s faculty praised the Sharia law practice of cutting off the hands of criminals who steal.

The words of wisdom concerning the notorious Islamic penal code came from Bassem Al Halabi, an electrical engineering and computer science professor at Florida Atlantic University.

In countries in the Middle East where Sharia law is not practiced, Al Halabi said, people “die in dozens and hundreds every day because of organized crime. People kill people — other people — for steal [sic] pizza for 10 dollars. So when Islamic Sharia is saying about capital punishment — so even though it sounds very severe, but if that is the solution to prevent any crimes, then it still has a lot of rules and regulations.”

Al Halabi then defended cutting off criminals’ hands

“I will just mention one and stop here, which is: let’s say cutting the hand off a person if they steal,” the Florida Atlantic professor continued. “It sounds very severe. It sounds very barbaric, I know. But if it takes one or two people to have their hands cut off and then there’s no more stealing in the whole nation, that’s a much better resolution than having hundreds of people die every day.”

Al Halabi also assured attendees at the event that “Sharia is being practiced in the United States.”

“We at the Islamic Center of Boca Raton, we practice Sharia — if someone doesn’t know,” he said.

The Eighth Amendment to the constitution prohibits cruel and unusual punishment. It's been a part of the common law tradition for hundreds of years, and was adapted by our founders to bind the hands of an all powerful government that would use such displays to strike fear in the hearts of a dissenting public. It derives from the same tradition of skepticism about the nature of man that the Second Amendment does.

It's true that what Al Halabi describes is an effective deterrent. Sharia has many such effective deterrents. For instance, when a woman is raped, countries that practice Sharia make sure it never happens again by brutally whipping THE WOMAN hundreds of times and sending her to prison. Sharia ensures that anyone who publicly expresses doubts about their Islamic faith is summarily executed. To be sure, there's few more effective ways to deal with criminals.

Here's the thing: these punishments are prehistoric atrocities that only continue to thrive in barbaric, decaying societies. They have no place in the American legal or philosphical tradition. They're an affront to civilization. If Al Halabi and others think they're so great, there are plenty of other places they can go live.

Source: AAN