NRO's Andrew McCarthy Schools New Jersey Governor Chris Christie on Sharia Law

New Jersey Governor Chris Christie made a very ill-advised appointment earlier this year. He nominated Sohail Mohammed as Superior Court judge in Passaic County, NJ. Then, late last month, Christie gave a press conference on the day of Mohammed's swearing in. During that press conference, the indignation the New Jersey governor has directed toward teachers unions was turned on a significant contingent of the Tea Party that expresses concern over Sharia law. Christie called anyone with those concerns 'ignorant' 'crazies' who were pushing sharia 'crap.'

NRO's Andy McCarthy fired back at Christie. McCarthy is more than qualified to do so. He was a prosecutor against the blind sheikh after the 1993 WTC bombing.

Via National Review:

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.

And similarly, you are to understand that there’s nothing else to see in the matter of Sohail Mohammed’s elevation to the bench. He is, Christie blustered, a solid American citizen and an “outstanding lawyer” who “played an integral role in the post–September 11th period in building bridges between the Muslim American community in this state and law enforcement.” Ah yes, “building bridges” — code for “Muslim outreach,” the law-enforcement strategy that started in the Clinton years, picked up steam in the Bush years, and has become the backbone of Obama counterterrorism.

Like many bad ideas, this one began with the best of intentions. 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.

Nice idea on the drawing board, utterly wrongheaded in practice. You see, 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’s why, as Governor Christie ought to understand, sharia concerns can’t be dismissed as “crap.” They help us sort out the pro-American Muslims we want to empower from the Islamists. When we dismiss these concerns, we end up building bridges to all the wrong people, as government has done, to its repeated embarrassment, 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.

Governor Christie would have you believe opposition to Mr. Mohammed was sheer bigotry: “It’s just unnecessary to be accusing this guy of things just because of his religious background,” he railed to reporters. It’s a narrative Christie fans would like to help cement. It’s not true.

For the record, Sohail Mohammed is not just an attorney. He served as a board member for an Islamist organization, the American Muslim Union, which, as Commentary’s Jonathan S. Tobin and terrorism expert Steve Emerson have shown, has a checkered past of rationalizing jihadist attacks and supporting jihadists.

The entire article is a must-read. McCarthy leaves the reader wondering where Christie's loyalties lie.

READ IT HERE.

Here is the video of Christie that initiated McCarthy's piece: