Teen Vogue, which is striving to overcome its shallow reputation to become a prominent political voice for America's youth, has published an editorial deriding the recent March Against Sharia protest as "hate speech."
Writing in Sunday's online edition of the fashion mag, Firdaus Arastu and Asma Uddin, the Director of Strategy for the Center for Islam and Religious Freedom, claim that sharia is nothing to be afraid of:
For many Americans, it sounds scary — we hear tales of a system where hands are chopped off and adulterers are stoned. But this is not the sharia of America. Sharia is a set of legal rules that deal with a range of issues from the minutia of washing hands and feet to purify oneself before prayer to inheritance rules. It’s also about spirituality.
Totally innocuous, then, except for the hand-chopping and stoning parts. Oh, and the part about putting apostates to death, not to mention the killing of homosexuals. And then there's the second-class citizen status of dhimmi infidels, and some other questionable stuff, but otherwise, totally not scary. Got it.
You know what the writers do want you to consider scary? The "anti-Muslim," "hateful speech" embodied in the previous day's March Against Sharia which took place in 25 cities across America. That protest was sponsored by freedom fighter Brigitte Gabriel's nationwide ACT for America organization, which the editorial writers hasten to point out has been declared a hate group by the ever-watchful Southern Poverty Law Center. The SPLC, as every conservative knows, is a leftist smear group which labels any opponent of sharia law and of fundamentalist Islam as a hate group.
The Teen Vogue writers' solution to such "anti-Muslim" "hate" is to drive out the “bad” speech with “good”: "[T]o overcome polarizing speech, we need unifying speech. This good speech can include educational efforts. For example, on the question of sharia — the topic of Saturday’s marches — there is wide space for people to learn more about what sharia is."
Americans already have a pretty good idea what sharia is, Teen Vogue -- that's why we refuse to let it take hold here.
