The Dallas Morning News attack on Mayor Beth Van Duyne

Several times last week, the Dallas Morning News has attacked an elected official in Texas, Irving Mayor Beth Van Duyne, for publicly discussing her opposition to efforts that promote shariah law in her community via an “Islamic tribunal.” In so doing, your paper has maligned a conscientious and courageous public servant and misinformed readers about the larger problem you have wrongly and dismissively described as a “shariah flap.”

As the Morning News should know from its own, extensive coverage of the largest terrorism financing trial in U.S. history, the 2007-2008 Holy Land Foundation prosecution in Richardson, the Islamic tribunal is but one element in what the Muslim Brotherhood calls “civilization jihad” against our country – a strategic, long-term and stealthy effort to “destroy Western civilization from within.” The Morning News should be praising, not criticizing, Mayor Van Duyne for raising awareness about, and working to defeat, such a threat.

Interestingly, in another editorial back in 2005, the Morning News expressed concern about one of the tribunal’s self-described “judges,” Dr. Yusuf Kavakci, the imam of the Dallas Central Mosque:

The mosque’s imam, Dr. Yusuf Kavakci, has publicly praised two of the world’s foremost radical Islamists, Yusuf Qaradawi and Hasan al-Turabi, as exemplary leaders. Dr. Kavakci also sits on the board of the Saudi-backed Islamic Society of North America, described in congressional testimony as a major conduit of Wahhabist teaching. Yet, Dr. Kavakci tells The Dallas Morning News he rejects Wahhabist teaching. Something doesn’t add up.

In fact, what the Holy Land Foundation trial established is that Islamic supremacists will misrepresent their true intentions and purposes in order to advance this civilization jihad. The people of Irving – and those of Texas and the United States, more generally – owe their mayor a debt of gratitude for telling the truth about the dangers of sharia