Offensive and Defensive Lawfare: Fighting Civilization Jihad in America's Courts

Lawfare – the use of litigation and other judicial instruments to achieve policy outcomes – has long been employed by the U.S. progressive movement. In recent years, it has become a favored weapon of the Left’s allies in the Muslim Brotherhood and other parts of the global jihad movement in America. In particular, organizations in this country that front for the Brotherhood and its Palestinian franchise, Hamas, such as the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), have wielded lawfare both strategically and tactically. Their focus typically involves efforts to create and promote victimization narratives for Islam. They seek to silence their critics and put the American public and policy-makers on the defensive in the face of the global and domestic threat from a jihad or holy war, driven by the dictates of the Islamic supremacist doctrine known as shariah. In advancing this agenda, the Muslim Brotherhood uses our own laws and courts for such purposes as intimidating and otherwise suppressing any who dare challenge Islamic supremacism. A steady stream of lawsuits filed by Muslims in this country works to achieve such outcomes and to normalize shariah by: insinuating it incrementally into our legal system; advancing the claim that Islamic law ought to be treated as superior to our basic freedoms; and gaining acceptance for anti-constitutional Islamic tenets related to equality, women’s rights, free speech and more. One of the nation’s leading, most steadfast and supremely skilled opponents of such lawfare is David Yerushalmi, Esq. Mr. Yerushalmi is the co-founder and Senior Counsel of the American Freedom Law Center, a public interest law firm specializing in pro bono representation of exponents of religious and other freedoms. He also serves as the General Counsel for the Center for Security Policy and is the author of this important new contribution to the Center’s Civilization Jihad Reader Series: Lawfare: The Jihad’s Use of Litigation to Undermine American Freedoms – and How to Defeat It. As important as David Yerushalmi’s accounts of how the jihadists wage lawfare against American and such liberties as freedom of speech are his recommendations about an offensive lawfare strategy for defending the U.S. Constitution and our legal system from any further encroachment by Islamic law. Given accelerating attempts by the shariah forces to advance their agenda, this monograph could hardly be more timely. Nor could the topic have found a better champion to lay out this pro-democracy, countervailing lawfare strategy than Mr. Yerushalmi – a brilliant attorney who specializes in litigation and risk analysis, especially as it relates to geo-strategic policy, national security, international business relations, securities law, disclosure and due diligence requirements for domestic and international concerns. He is also an experienced combatant in the lawfare wars with CAIR and other entities – governmental and private sector – that seek to enable, or at least excuse, the perpetrators of what the Muslim Brotherhood calls “civilization jihad.” With this new monograph, the Center for Security Policy hopes to underscore the importance of the lawfare battlespace to defending the Constitution and foundational American principles against shariah. Mr. Yerushalmi, along with co-author and co-founder of the American Freedom Law Center, Robert J. Muise, Esq., has provided us an initial blueprint on how to use the courts, both defensively and offensively, to thwart the shariah threat. We at the Center and our pioneering legal colleagues, like Mssrs. Yerushalmi and Muise, are convinced that we nonetheless have no choice but to counter the jihadists’ lawfare and to wage it effectively in our own right in defense of the Constitution and the people whose freedoms it guarantees.