Sharia Does Not Mean What Newt Gingrich Thinks It Means

[moonshaz]

One country that officially endorses the Muslim legal system is one of the politician’s favorites-Israel.In response to the latest terrorist atrocity, Newt Gingrich, the former speaker of the House, and quite possibly the next secretary of state, suggested that the U.S. should investigate American Muslims to ascertain their level of commitment to

Comments

[that_which]

That was a big part of the problem. It didn't start as a colony of a european country. King Leopold took it over with mercenaries on his own dime and held it for something like thirty years before the rest of Europe stepped in (imagine how bad it had to be in an african colony for Europe to investigate human rights abuses before WW1). There were literally no laws protecting those people. Some estimates put the death toll at 20 million.

The outright enslavement and murder of the congolese got better after Belgium took over, but the people essentially had no rights to speak of until the end of their colonial status, and not all that much after, sadly, revolutions being what they are.

What makes Gingrich particularly evil here is that at the time when he was writing, the right wanted intellectual cover for working with (Joseph) Mobutu Sese Seko, the very nasty but reliably capitalist strongman who took over in the sixties after the west meddled with them for a while and got some people assassinated. What Gingrich did was carry forward the case that the congolese were uneducated because the congolese were ineducable. Clearly, Mobutu had to break a few eggs dealing with people like that, right?