Tim Donnelly’s preposterous campaign attack undercuts our ability to speak out against violent jihadism: Tim Rutten
The unpleasantly idiosyncratic world ad-libbed into being by Republican gubernatorial candidate Tim Donnelly only occasionally intersects the reality inhabited by the rest of us.
Still, even by the San Bernardino County assemblyman’s airy standards of factuality, this week’s attack on GOP primary rival Neel Kashkari set something of a new low among the malicious fantasies in which Donnelly regularly traffics. In a post on his Facebook page — Donnelly’s campaign is too ill-funded to buy attack ads — the Tea Party favorite alleged Kashkari once advocated imposing the Islamic legal and social code called Sharia on the United States.
His rival, Donnelly wrote, “supported the United States submitting to the Islamic, Sharia banking code in 2008 when he ran TARP. Sharia is “the seditious religio-political-legal code authoritative Islam seeks to impose worldwide under a global theocracy.”
As his source, for this “revelation,” the lawmaker cited a 6-year-old Op-Ed piece by Frank Gaffney, who served in the Defense Department during the Reagan administration, and has made a second career out of peddling conspiracy theories, particularly those with an Islamophobic bent. Apart from questioning President Barrack Obama’s American birth, Gaffney has alleged that the Muslim Brotherhood has infiltrated not only the current administration, but also leading mainstream conservative organizations. He has charged that the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein was behind the Oklahoma City bombing and testified for the xenophobes attempting to legally block construction of a mosque in Tennessee.
In his 2008 piece for the Washington Times, Gaffney darkly speculated that a plot to impose Sharia was underway because Kashkari, who served as an assistant Treasury secretary under his one-time Goldman Sachs boss, Henry Paulson, during the George W. Bush administration, had been asked to deliver the opening remarks at a conference on Islamic finance. At that desperate time, of course, Kashkari headed Treasury’s Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP), leading a bailout of the nation’s leading banks in a fashion Paulson subsequently has called “flawless.”
So-called “Islamic banking” involves financial institutions that employ various strategies to accommodate Islam’s proscription of lending money for interest. Since they hold more than $800 billion in assets, there was some thought at the time that those entities might have a role to play in stabilizing the world’s capital markets. In any event, all Kashkari did was to welcome participants to a conference titled “Islamic Finance 101.”
To Gaffney, it was all evidence of another dark conspiracy involving militant Islamists and their American fellow travelers: “Thanks to the extraordinary authority conferred on Treasury since September, backed by the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP),” he wrote, “the (Treasury) Department is now in a position to impose its embrace of Sharia on the U.S. financial sector.” Concerns over the intentions of the Treasury Department, armed with what Gaffney called “unprecedented coercive power” over the financial system, “are only heightened by the prominent role Assistant Treasury Secretary Neel Kashkari will be playing in ‘Islamic Finance 101.’” Gaffney wrote. “Mr. Kashkari, the official charged with administering the TARP fund, will provide welcoming remarks to participants. Presumably, in the process, he will convey the enthusiasm about Sharia-Compliant Finance that appears to be the current party line at Treasury.”
Now, why Kashkari — who philosophically is a self-described “life-long advocate of free market economics” and a libertarian on most social issues and professionally has spent his entire career in the upper reaches of American finance — would want to impose an interest-free financial system and an early medieval social code on the world’s leading economy is anybody’s guess. That, however, hasn’t deterred Donnelly, whose only inhibition seems to be against feeling shame. As he told one interviewer this week, “Given the recent stories and protests about the outrage of the discriminatory nature of Sharia law, we’re horrified that Kashkari would support Sharia anything.”
Now, our system being what it is, desperate office-seekers, which Donnelly certainly is, are likely to engage in desperate acts. Usually, though, they deploy a sufficient degree of rat-like cunning to lend them at least a degree of plausibility. What’s particularly offensive about Donnelly’s ploy is its transparency. It’s a charge not intended to be fully believed, but instead designed to draw — through association with Islam — the attention of California’s right-wing voters to Kashkari’s exotic name and olive complexion. As a one-time chieftain of the anti-immigrant Minutemen, Donnelly is comfortable trolling the fetid swamps of lingering xenophobia. Attempting to introduce such sentiments into the California gubernatorial primary is despicable.
In this case, they’re also particularly grotesque. Kashkari, a practicing Hindu, is the son of Indo-American immigrants — his mother a physician, his father a professor of electrical engineering. Both are Kashmiri Pandits, Hindus of Brahmin cast driven in recent years from their historic homes in that lovely mountain vale by the pressures of militant Islam. None of that, one supposes, matters to Donnelly or to the fringe of California voters to whom this sort of nonsense seems designed to appeal.
One of the worst things about the sort of vulgar anti-Islamic sentiment on which people like Gaffney and Donnelly like to draw is that it undercuts the necessary intellectual and political work required to oppose both Islamic fundamentalism in the form of theocratic Sharia and its physical expression in jihadism. It was heartening this week to see local entertainment and political organizations flocking to the boycott of the Beverly Hills Hotel and Hotel Bel-Air, whose owner — the Sultan of Brunei — has announced he intends to force his country into Sharia with its inhumane punishments (stonings and amputations) and discrimination against women and gays.
Similarly, the world has at last the will to do something about the kidnapping of hundreds of Nigerian schoolgirls by the murderous jihadist cult Boko Haram, whose name translates roughly “Western Education Forbidden.” According to the terrorist militant’s leader, the gang intends to sell the girls into sexual slavery, which apparently is a more suitably Islamic state than literacy. Until international pressure began to mount, the kleptocratic Nigerian central government seemed willing to shrug off the girls’ abduction from their boarding school, along with the subsequent kidnapping of more than a dozen other schoolgirls in the nation’s remote northeast.
Western governments need to be unremitting in their opposition to both fundamentalist Islamism and violent jihad, but — as we saw this week in California — their moral standing to wage this struggle is undermined by prejudice against all forms of Muslim religiosity at home.
Tim Rutten is a columnist for the Los Angeles News Group. ruttencolumn@gmail.com.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Tim Rutten is a columnist for the Los Angeles News Group. Reach the author at ruttencolumn@gmail.com
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