While banishing ROTC from Harvard, Kagan welcomed the Harvard Islamic Project in her first year as law school dean

What is not so well-known is Dean Kagan's contemporaneous approval of and promotion of a little-known but richly endowed Harvard Law School program called The Islamic Legal Studies Program. What does all this have to do with Elena Kagan and her principled stand on "Don't Ask, Don't Tell?" It has a lot to do with honesty, integrity, and Harvard's vaunted advocacy for human rights.

The Harvard Islamic Legal Studies Program was made part of Harvard Law School in 1991 with significant funding from distinctly undemocratic sources, mainly from the Gulf States. The program purports to be a research program "that seeks to advance knowledge and understanding of Islamic law." The program works closely with the Harvard Islamic Finance Project, which became an official part of the Law School in 2003, the same year Professor Kagan was awarded the title of Dean.

But is it strictly a "research program"? A few times a year, the directors of the Finance Program take groups of promising Law School and Harvard Business School students to the Middle East on junkets to learn the intricate and arcane practices of Sharia Compliant Finance. Many of these promising students go on to work for such banks and investment firms as the Kuwait Finance House, HSBC Amanah Bank, and the Abu Dhabi Islamic Bank. The intertwined programs, it would seem, go far beyond mere "research" projects. Shariah Finance, it should be noted, is the Islamic approach to investing, mortgage lending, and a host of other money-related practices. Along with its prohibitions on interest accrual and trading in commodities such as pork, alcohol, and gambling is an overarching negative view of homosexuality. Negative, that is, to the point of advocating violence against gays.

Whatever dim views one may hold on the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy of the U.S. Military, the policy pales in comparison to the outright calls to violence enunciated by some of the Islamic world's most prestigious and powerful Shariah advisors.

Case in point: Meet Sheikh Muhammed Taqi Usmani, former appellate court judge in Pakistan, a Deobandi (one of the most extreme Pakistani schools of Islam, associated with the Pakistani Taliban)-trained jurist and chief Shariah advisor to the HSBC Amanah Bank, one of the world's largest and richest banks and one of the sponsors of Harvard's Islamic Finance Project. Among other delightful quotes from Sheikh Usmani:

For a non-Muslim state to have more pomp and glory than a Muslim state itself is an obstacle, therefore to shatter this grandeur is among the greater objectives of jihad (from Islam and Modernism)

Also from Usmani's book: "Killing is to continue until the unbelievers pay jizyah (subjugation tax) after they are humbled or overpowered."

Apparently, these kinds of medieval barbarities did not rise to the level of immorality embodied in the military's "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy.