-By Warner Todd Huston
The Daily Record in Baltimore, Maryland recently published a story by Brendan Kearney that oddly seems to present a conflict between a bank employing Islamic Shari’ah law with its American investments and some black American borrowers and painting it as a racist issue. Sadly, the real story, that of Islamic law being imposed on American investors, is sidelined in order to pursue the race card. (Full story reprinted at BlackEnterprise.com)
As The Record reports, a black couple in Baltimore — I identify their race because it is pivotal to how The Daily Record reports the story — had contracted with the Church’s Chicken restaurant chain to open a new outlet in Baltimore. Unfortunately for the entrepreneurial couple, as they were investing in their chicken outlet, Church’s Chicken was purchased by Crescent Capital Investments Inc., the US affiliate of the Bahrain-based First Islamic Investment Bank BSC. And, upon the restaurant chain’s purchase, these new Islamic corporate owners decided to institute Shari’ah laws upon their investments.
This caught the Beasleys new restaurant in a tough spot because pork products were on the morning breakfast menu for the Church’s Chicken chain. Because Shari’ah law principles had been imposed on the Beasleys’ new restaurant, they would be barred from serving their breakfast menu items, their corporate owners informed them. This barring from being able to serve their breakfast items, the couple maintains, contributed to the restaurant’s failure and their eventual bankruptcy.
Where the racism charge comes in is that older Church’s Chicken establishments, stores already open and operating, were grandfathered in and allowed to continue serving the pork food products. The new corporate masters decided that only new establishments would be barred from serving pork. As it happens, all the previous chicken restaurants in the area were owned by white people or people of other ethnicities besides black. As a result, the Beasleys imagined that the reason they were being prevented from selling the pork items on their menu was because of their race.
Continue reading “Islamic Shari’ah Banking, Is It Invading America?”