but only if that Muslim first repudiated Sharia law.
Appearing last Tuesday in Columbia, South Carolina, Gingrich was asked if he would ever endorse a Muslim running for president.
“It would depend entirely on whether they would commit in public to give up Sharia,” Gingrich said.
“A truly modern person who happened to worship Allah would not be a threat, a person who belonged to any kind of belief in Sharia, any effort to impose it on the rest of us, would be a mortal threat,” Gingrich told the crowd.
Gingrich said he is “totally opposed” to Sharia law being applied in American courts and favors a federal law that “preempts” its use. Gingrich has repeatedly condemned Sharia law on the campaign trail this year. The issue has become a very popular one among many conservatives.
Gingrich had a very negative view of Sharia, saying the, “rising Islamization of Turkey has been accompanied by a 1,400 percent increase in women being killed.”
“When you look at the application of Sharia in places like Iran, when you look at churches being burned in Nigeria and Egypt, and that the decline of Christians in Iraq from 1.2 million, when the Americans arrived [in 2003], to about 500,000 today, I think it depends entirely on the person,” he said.
“If they are a modern person integrated in the modern world and they are prepared to recognize all religions, that’s one thing. On the other hand, if they’re Saudis who demand that we respect them while they refuse to allow Christians to worship in Saudi Arabia, that’s something different,” he said.
Later in the day during a question and answer session in Aiken, South Carolina, Gingrich also called the Ground Zero mosque “a deliberate and willful insult to the people of the United States who suffered an attack by people who are motivated by the same thing.”
“I think the time has come for us to have an honest conversation about Islamic radicalism. I don’t think we should be intimidated by our political elites, and I don’t think we should be intimidated by universities who have been accepting money from the Saudis and who, therefore, now have people who are apologists for the very people who want to kill us,” Gingrich said.
Gingrich won the South Carolina Republican primary Saturday with 40 percent of the vote to 28 percent for Mitt Romney.
Gingrich’s words on Sharia brought an angry retort from the largest Muslim civil liberties group in the United States. Calling Gingrich “one of the nation’s worst promoters of anti-Muslim bigotry,” the Council of American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) said:
“Newt Gingrich’s vision of America segregates our citizens by faith. His outdated political ideas look backward to a time when Catholics and Jews were vilified and their faiths called a threat,” said CAIR Legislative Director Corey Sayolor in a statement.
“The time for bias in American politics has passed and Newt Gingrich looks like a relic of an ugly era,” Sayolor said.
Pointing to the religious freedoms guaranteed by the First Amendment, CAIR defended Sharia law as a set of beliefs that “teaches marital fidelity, generous charity and a thirst for knowledge,” and mandates that Muslims respect the law of the land in which they live.