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Just two days after the election, the Bush Administration's Treasury Department is treating members of Congress, the staff of U.S. banking regulatory agencies, the Department of Treasury and others in the White House to a high profile forum on Islamic finance, AKA Sharia Finance. The purpose of the meeting is, according to Treasury, "to help inform the policy community about Islamic financial services, which are an increasingly important part of the global financial industry. The Department of the Treasury, working with Harvard University's Islamic Finance Project, will host speakers from academia and industry to share information on the development of Islamic finance, both in the United States and globally."
The man in charge of the seminar is Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Neel Kashkari. Kashkari is a 35 year old Indian American born of Hindu parents in Stow, Ohio. And he is the man in charge of managing the $700 billion takeover of American banks and mortgage institutions that will be participating in the government funded bail out of the mortgage industry. One of his first public orders of business, however, is to teach regulators, Congressional aides and anyone else who will listen at the White House how Sharia finance works. Apparently, the federal government is planning to partner with Sharia money to offset tax dollars in buying up stock in America's financial and mortgage institutions.
One of the main speakers is Rice University's Mahmoud El Gamal, who recently wrote in his own blog, "The quest now is to integrate our thought not only as fully American but also as fully Muslim in the internal American thought processes about financial regulation, international relations, and other areas of political discourse, without being dismissed off-hand as being somewhat alien to our homeland of choice." Another featured speaker is Islamist and Sharia law expert Yusuf Talal DeLorenzo, chief Sharia officer at Sharia Capital. In January, DeLorenzo condemned Islamists who tried to approve non-Sharia compliant investments as Sharia compliant.
DeLorenzo told the Dinar Standard in an interview, "My view is that they have made a serious mistake. So serious, in fact, that in my paper on the subject I have called their decision the Doomsday Fatwa." In other words, DeLorenzo is a strict interpreter of Sharia law when it comes to investment. He most likely also requires at least 2.5 % of the returns from such investments to be distributed to Islamic charities-proven in the past as a way to launder money to terrorists bent on the destruction of America. Sharia investment should not even be considered in the lexicon of US government finances, yet the Bush Administration is touting it. Jesus said in Matthew 24:4, "Take heed that no man deceive you."
