A conspiracy-peddling lawyer drove 201 anti-Sharia bills in 43 states
Evidence
David Yerushalmi works as the legal counsel for CSP. He was also actively involved in the Cordoba House controversy as legal counsel for Stop Islamization of America. In June 2011, Yerushalmi wrote a widely cited report in Daniel Pipes’s Middle East Forum journal Middle East Quarterly that claimed that 80 percent of US mosques promote or support violence. Perhaps his most important contribution to the Islamophobia network is that he laid the legal basis for the anti-Sharia campaign. Yerushalmi co-authored with Frank Gaffney a CSP report titled Shariah: The Threat to America that became a central vehicle to consider banning Sharia’s use. Between 2010 and 2017, as many as 201 bills were introduced in forty-three states to ban the use of Sharia. — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 680
Categorization
Category: Causal Relationships
- SEED: A profile of Yerushalmi as the legal architect converting anti-Muslim propaganda into actual legislation — the move from think-tank reports to 201 state bills is a concrete case study in how fringe ideology reaches statute books.
Related
- One lawyer’s fabricated report seeded two hundred anti-Sharia bills across states. (similarity 0.92)
- A single template anti-Sharia bill was introduced 216 times in 43 states (similarity 0.81)
- A single boilerplate template authored by David Yerushalmi underpins most US anti-Sharia bills. (similarity 0.81)
- A false 80 percent mosque statistic powered the anti-Sharia legislative campaign. (similarity 0.81)
- Funded think tanks drafted template anti-Sharia laws making belief a felony (similarity 0.79)
- Anti-sharia bills sought to criminalize mosque attendance by defining Islam as ideology (similarity 0.79)
- At least 120 anti-Sharia bills have been introduced across 42 US states since 2010. (similarity 0.78)
- Twenty-three states adopted an anti-sharia model bill authored by a fringe conspiracy theorist. (similarity 0.78)