One lawyer’s fabricated report seeded two hundred anti-Sharia bills across 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: The fabricated-80-percent-mosque-stat-to-law pipeline is a clean case study for an essay on how conspiratorial numbers harden into statutes.
• SHARE: Someone following legal-policy mechanics would enjoy the single-authored stat-to-legislation lineage.

Related

• A conspiracy-peddling lawyer drove 201 anti-Sharia bills in 43 states (similarity 0.92)
• A false 80 percent mosque statistic powered the anti-Sharia legislative campaign. (similarity 0.90)
• Anti-Sharia legislation spread across 43 states via one network’s fabricated data (similarity 0.84)
• A fabricated statistic about mosques seeded two hundred anti-Sharia state bills (similarity 0.82)
• A single template anti-Sharia bill was introduced 216 times in 43 states (similarity 0.80)
• Anti-sharia bills sought to criminalize mosque attendance by defining Islam as ideology (similarity 0.80)
• At least 120 anti-Sharia bills have been introduced across 42 US states since 2010. (similarity 0.80)
• Twenty-three states adopted an anti-sharia model bill authored by a fringe conspiracy theorist. (similarity 0.79)
• Funded think tanks drafted template anti-Sharia laws making belief a felony (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• A fabricated statistic about mosques seeded two hundred anti-Sharia state bills #corroborates (0.92) — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 692