Pro-Shariah Group Launches Disinformation Campaign 
     The Islamic Circle of North America has launched a $3 million campaign to convince Americans that Shariah, the legal code of Islam, is no threat. ICNA is not exactly the best salesman.

The New York-based group, which was founded in 1968 by leaders of the Pakistani branch of the radical Muslim Brotherhood, is promoting Shariah law in a "25-city education tour" that features billboards, radio and TV ads, town hall forums and campus interfaith events.

"The plan is to clear up common misconceptions about Shariah and the Islamic faith," ICNA says. It's responding to legislative efforts to ban judges from recognizing Shariah law in Kansas, Texas, South Carolina, Georgia, Oklahoma, Florida, Louisiana, Tennessee, Arizona and South Dakota.

"Muslim-Americans are asking for the same fundamental rights to observe Shariah" as other faiths enjoy observing their tenets, ICNA asserts.

Of course, Shariah involves far more than just worship. It commands a separate political system. Unlike other religions, it seeks to substitute the U.S. Constitution with its own commandments, which discriminate against women and non-Muslims, restrict free speech, and prescribe cruel and unusual punishment, among other things.

Through groups such as ICNA, as well as the hundreds of mosques it controls, the Muslim Brotherhood teaches Muslim-Americans that Shariah is the law of the land. This is in direct contravention of the so-called supremacy clause, which states: "This Constitution shall be the supreme law of the land; and the judges in every state shall be bound thereby."

Shariah has already crept into U.S. court cases, mostly involving family law. Some heavily Muslim areas of the U.S. have become "no-go zones," where domestic abuse cases, even honor killings, are covered up.

But then, ICNA knows all this. That's why it's trying to disarm the public through a massive propaganda campaign in the U.S.

The ICNA official behind the campaign, Sabeel Ahmed, has privately told Muslims: "We should use every opportunity presented or created to sensitize non-Muslim peers and school staff with Islam and establish an environment in which everywhere a non-Muslims (sic) turn, they notice Islam portrayed in a positive way and get influenced by it and eventually accept Islam with Allah's guidance, insha Allah."

It's plain that ICNA has an agenda other than protecting religious freedom. But it goes beyond conversion of non-Muslims. Here's what ICNA is really hiding:

• The secret archives of the U.S. Muslim Brotherhood, seized by FBI agents in 2004, list ICNA among "our organizations."

• The document, found in the basement of a terror suspect in Annandale, Va., and translated from Arabic, says "their work in America is a kind of grand jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within, and sabotaging its miserable house, so that it is eliminated and Allah's religion is made victorious over all other religions."

• The same Brotherhood charter calls for the creation one day of a "Central Islamic Court" in America, according to the best-seller "Muslim Mafia."

• ICNA recently merged with a sister group — the Muslim American Society — which the Justice Department says is the U.S. branch of the Muslim Brotherhood.

• ICNA's "Great Leaders of the last 100 Years" features the late Pakistani Brotherhood leader Maulana Abul Ala Maududi, who has said: "Islam wishes to do away with all states and governments anywhere."

• It also lionizes the late Egyptian Brotherhood leader Sayyid Qutb, who stated: "Wherever an Islamic community exists, it has a God-given right to step forward and take control of the political authority so that it may establish the divine system (Shariah) on earth."

• ICNA has featured in its magazine, "The Message," the writings of the Muslim Brotherhood's spiritual leader, Sheik Yusuf al-Qaradawi, who has stated the following: "What we seek is that legislations and codes be within the limits of the flawless texts and the overall objectives of the Shariah and the Islamic message." Qaradawi, banned from U.S. entry since 1999, has also declared: "We will conquer America."

Those running ICNA's ads and plastering highways (including New York's Lincoln Tunnel) with billboards should know what they're dealing with — a subversive group running a disinformation campaign.