Vexatious Islamic lawfare is a constant problem for Western judicial administrations. Islamic groups use both criminal and civil law to silence critics of Islam or gain social advantages for Islam and for Muslims. Sadly too often such attempts at special pleading or whining are taken seriously by the courts and this has sometimes been to the detriment of others including many non Muslims.

However there has recently been a court case in the state of North Dakota in the USA where false claims of ‘Islamophobic’ behaviour by prison staff has been well and truly busted. A group of Muslim inmates at the Cass County Jail had their claims that they were fed pork whilst incarcerated was thrown out of court by U.S. Magistrate Alice Senechal who said that the case the inmates had brought was one in which they had ‘failed to follow procedures, including responding to information requests, and failed to meet deadlines’. In other words this is a nothingburger of a case and one where the prison authorities could easily prove that the gaol had had a ‘no pork products’ dietary policy from at least a year before these complaints were made.

One aspect of this story which worries me however is the claim that a Muslim corrections officer stirred up the prisoners by showing them food packaging labels that listed pork as part of the ingredients list. If this is they case then maybe the prison authorities in North Dakota should be examining this employee closely as this doesn’t look to me like a responsible thing for a prison officer to do?

The newspaper for the local area where this case occurred, The Grand Forks Herald, described the case surrounding the pork claim and also detailed the alleged involvement by the Muslim prison officer’s in possibly helping to stir up the situation in the prison with Muslim prisoners.

The Grand Forks Herald said:

In their complaint, the inmates said the jail’s pork-free declaration was intended to deceive. “We believe their declaration of being a non-pork facility was a lie to calm our worries of being fed pork in any form,” the complaint said.

In an interview in July 2016, one of the plaintiffs, Uyin Alau, told Forum News Service that he and other inmates learned the jail was serving them pork from a Muslim corrections officer, who brought them labels and recipes from the jail’s kitchen that listed pork products as ingredients in inmates’ meals.

Until then, the inmates had believed they were not being fed pork, Alau said in the interview. The corrections officer who allegedly tipped off the inmates was not named in the lawsuit, which sought $100 million, a public apology and the firing of jail staff who were allegedly involved in serving the pork-free

This looks so much like it was a waste of time case, probably designed to intimidate prison officers and prison authorities into buckling to these prisoners demands, but thankfully this time it has not worked. The local prison authorities were able to prove that the prison was operating a pork free menu for everyone and these Muslims therefore had no grounds for their complaint.

On this occasion a sensible judge did the right thing and saw that this case was groundless, but there are other judges in other nations and jurisdictions that have caved in and put the rights of criminals above others. In these places the ‘human rights’ card has been played far too often by dangerous Muslim criminals and jihadists, to either gain advantage whilst incarcerated, or evade eventual deportation from countries like the UK.

The decision by US Magistrate Alice Senechal is a victory for both common sense and justice. Let us hope we see more judicial decisions in cases like this where justice, although delayed for a shockingly long period, nearly two years, is not just done but seen to be done.