Violence is oozing through the cracks of European society like pus out of a broken scab. Just when liberal opinion congratulated itself that Europe had forsaken its violent past, the specter of civil violence has the continent terrified. That is the source of the uproar over a February 7 speech by Archbishop Rowan Williams, predicting the inevitable acceptance of Muslim sharia law in Great Britain.
Not since World War II has British opinion been provoked to the present level of outrage. Writing in the Times of London, the editor of the London Spectator, Matthew d'Ancona, quoted former British Conservative parliamentarian Enoch Powell's warning that concessions to alien cultures would cause "rivers of blood" to flow in the streets of England. Times columnist Minette Marin accuses the archbishop of treason.
Coercion in the Muslim communities of Europe is so commonplace that duly-constituted governments there no longer wield a monopoly of violence. Behind the law there stands the right of the state to inflict violence, and the legitimacy of states rests on what German political economist and sociologist Max Weber once called "the monopoly of violence". Once this right is conceded to private groups, the legitimacy of government crumbles. No one appreciates this more than the British, whose tradition of protecting individual rights under law is the oldest and strongest in the West, excepting the United States, which inherited English Common Law.
By proposing to concede a permanent role to extralegal violence in the political life of England, the Archbishop of Canterbury pushed his phlegmatic countrymen over the edge. No one is better than the British at pretending that problems really aren't there, but once their spiritual leader admits to an alien source of coercion and proposes to legitimize it, they understand that a limit has been reached.
Williams' exercise in what might be termed the Higher Hypocrisy shows how deeply Europe has descended into the Dar al-Harb, or the "House of War" in the Muslim terms for all that lies outside the "house of submission", or Dar al-Islam. Europe's governments refuse to rule, that is, refuse to enforce their own laws because they fear violence on the part of Muslim immigrant communities who refuse to accept these laws. "No-go" zones proliferate that non-Muslims dare not enter. In the United Kingdom, according to evidence presented by respected journalists and public-interest organizations, Muslim community organizations, Muslim police officers and medical personnel collaborate to stop women from escaping domestic violence.
The erring spiritual leader of the Church of England persuades me that Europe's Man of Destiny is the Dutch politician Geert Wilders, who for two years has lived in hiding under constant police protection for the crime of criticizing Islam. It is a measure of the degradation of Europe's body politic that is only one means to expose the motives of Williams and his ilk, namely to draw fire from Muslims who overtly threaten violence against any public figure who questions the authority of Islam.
Contrary to his critics, Wilders is not provoking violence. The violence is already there, a matter of workaday fact in Muslim enclaves throughout Europe. In an act of great personal courage, Wilders is enticing violent elements out of the tall grass in order to expose them to public opprobrium.
It is triply hypocritical when Williams, the spiritual leader of the Church of England, speaks of sharia law as if it were a private matter of conscience between consenting parties, rather like the use of rabbinical courts by Orthodox Jews. First, he admits outright that Muslim communities combine to coerce women but pretends that this is not relevant to sharia. Secondly, he offers concessions to sharia in the first place to appease the threat of social violence on the part of Muslims. As a final insult to conscience, he cites as his authority on sharia Professor Tariq Ramadan, who notoriously refuses to condemn the stoning of women for adultery, precisely because Muslim legal rulings specifically endorse such violence.
There is overwhelming documentation that Muslim entities in Britain wield the threat and fact of violence against dissenters, particularly the most vulnerable, namely young women. The fact is so scandalous that in his February 7 address, Williams felt compelled to address it directly, in order to insist that the subject fell entirely outside the issue of law - a conclusion he must know to be false.
Dr Michael Nazir-Ali, the bishop of Rochester, warned on January 7 of the spread of "no-go" zones in England that non-Muslims dare not enter. As a result, Nazir-Ali has received death threats against himself and his family and requires protection.
The British authorities will take measures to protect bishops from the threat of violence, but they leave to their own devices thousands of Muslim women. According to a February 2008 report by the Center for Social Cohesion, Islamist groups and individuals frequently link ideas of honor with the welfare of the Muslim world. By using words such as Ird and Namus in a political context, they imply that by protecting the chastity of Muslim women, the security and collective honor of Islam and Muslim states and individuals can also be defended. This politicization of women's bodies helps create an environment where the abuse and control of women is tolerated.
Muslim communities, the report documents, terrorize women who refuse arranged marriages or otherwise break with social norms:
Almost all refuges dealing with Asian women report on the existence of informal networks which exist to track down and punish - with death if necessary - women who are perceived as bringing shame on their family and community. In many cases, women fleeing domestic violence or forced marriages have been deliberately returned to their homes or betrayed to their families by policemen, councilors and civil servants of immigrant origin.
Muslim coercion against women extends to psychiatric hospitals, the Times of London's religion correspondent Ruth Gledhill reported on February 7 (cited in Rod Dreher's indispensable Crunchy Con blog, .) Glenhill quoted a women's rights advocate as follows:
The men get tired of their wives. Or bored. Or maybe the wife objects to her daughter being forced into a marriage she doesn't want. Or maybe she starts wearing Western clothes. There can be many reasons. The women are sent for assessment to a hospital. The GP [general practitioner] referring them is Muslim. The psychiatrist assessing them is Muslim and male. I have sat in these assessments where the psychiatrist will not look the woman patient in the eye because she is a woman. Can you imagine! A psychiatrist refusing to look his patient in the eye? The woman speaks little or no English. She is sectioned (committed to a psychiatric ward). She is divorced. There are lots of these women in there, locked up in these hospitals. Why don't you people write about this?
That brings us back to the archbishop of Canterbury, who acknowledged the fact of coercion of women in his February 7 address, but insisted that because it belonged to "custom" rather than "religious law", he preferred to change the subject:
Recognition of "supplementary jurisdiction" in some areas, especially family law, could have the effect of reinforcing in minority communities some of the most repressive or retrograde elements in them, with particularly serious consequences for the role and liberties of women. The "forced marriage" question is the one most often referred to here, and it is at the moment undoubtedly a very serious and scandalous one; but precisely because it has to do with custom and culture rather than directly binding enactments by religious authority, I shall refer to another issue.
That makes a lurid lie out of Williams' bland assertion that adherence to sharia "assumes the voluntary consent or submission of the believer":
Sharia depends for its legitimacy not on any human decision, not on votes or preferences, but on the conviction that it represents the mind of God ... while such universal claims are not open for re-negotiation, they also assume the voluntary consent or submission of the believer, the free decision to be and to continue a member of the umma.
Williams was lying. His authority in matters of sharia is Ramadan, whom the Department of Homeland Security prevented from accepting an American university appointment. Ramadan set off a scandal In 2003 when he refused to condemn violence against women (calling instead for a "moratorium," that is, a temporary cessation) precisely because Islamic law sanctions such violence. The Westernized Ramadan will twist himself into a pretzel rather than disagree with Islamic jurisprudence.
Six million Frenchmen watched Ramadan defend the stoning of women for the crime of adultery in a televised debate with the present President of France, Nicolas Sarkozy, then the Interior Minister. As quoted by Paul Berman in The New Republic of June 4, 2007, the transcript reads as follows, Ramadan refuses outright to say that he is against stoning adulteresses: Sarkozy: A moratorium ... Mr Ramadan, are you serious?
Ramadan: Wait, let me finish.
Sarkozy: A moratorium, that is to say, we should, for a while, hold back from stoning women?
Ramadan: No, no, wait ... What does a moratorium mean? A moratorium would mean that we absolutely end the application of all of those penalties, in order to have a true debate. And my position is that if we arrive at a consensus among Muslims, it will necessarily end. But you cannot, you know, when you are in a community ... Today on television, I can please the French people who are watching by saying, "Me, my own position." But my own position doesn't count. What matters is to bring about an evolution in Muslim mentalities, Mr Sarkozy. It's necessary that you understand ...
Sarkozy: But, Mr Ramadan ...
Ramadan: Let me finish.
Sarkozy: Just one point. I understand you, but Muslims are human beings who live in 2003 in France, since we are speaking about the French community, and you have just said something particularly incredible, which is that the stoning of women, yes, the stoning is a bit shocking, but we should simply declare a moratorium, and then we are going to think about it in order to decide if it is good ... But that's monstrous - to stone a woman because she is an adulterer! It's necessary to condemn it!
Ramadan: Mr Sarkozy, listen well to what I am saying. What I say, my own position, is that the law is not applicable - that's clear. But today, I speak to Muslims around the world and I take part, even in the United States, in the Muslim world ... You should have a pedagogical posture that makes people discuss things. You can decide all by yourself to be a progressive in the communities. That's too easy. Today my position is, that is to say, "We should stop."
Sarkozy: Mr Ramadan, if it is regressive not to want to stone women, I avow that I am a regressive.
"You should have a pedagogical posture that makes people discuss things" such as stoning women, Ramadan insisted, which is to say that were he to condemn violence against women outright, he would be unable to speak to Muslim communities.
That is Williams' source. Coming from the leader of a major Christian denomination, this depth of hypocrisy is satanic, if that word has any meaning at all.
Unlike his Church of England colleague, Bishop Nazir-Ali, Williams does not require a security detail. But it appears that every European journalist and politician who attacks Islam requires personal protection, starting with the stout-hearted Dutchman Wilders. In the cited New Republic report on Tariq Ramadan, Paul Berman reported:
When I met Hirsi Ali at a conference in Sweden last year, she was protected by no less than five bodyguards. Even in the United States she is protected by bodyguards. But this is no longer unusual. Buruma himself mentions in Murder in Amsterdam that the Dutch Social Democratic politician Ahmed Aboutaleb requires full-time bodyguards. At that same Swedish conference I happened to meet the British writer of immigrant background who has been obliged to adopt the pseudonym Ibn Warraq, out of fear that, in his case because of his Bertrand Russell-influenced philosophical convictions, he might be singled out for assassination.
I happened to attend a different conference in Italy a few days earlier and met the very brave Egyptian-Italian journalist Magdi Allam, who writes scathing criticisms of the new totalitarian wave in Il Corriere della Sera - and I discovered that Allam, too, was traveling with a full complement of five bodyguards. The Italian journalist Fiamma Nierenstein, because of her well-known sympathies for Israel, was accompanied by her own bodyguards. Caroline Fourest, the author of the most important extended criticism of Ramadan, had to go under police protection for a while. The French philosophy professor Robert Redeker has had to go into hiding ...
So Salman Rushdie has metastasized into an entire social class, a subset of the European intelligentsia - its Muslim wing especially - who survive only because of their bodyguards and their own precautions. This is unprecedented in Western Europe during the last 60 years.
Postscript: I had not intended to mention James J Sheehan's silly book on Europe's postwar conversion to pacifism, Where Have All the Soldiers Gone?, the object of many glowing reviews by soft-headed liberals, most recently by Geoffrey Wheatcroft in the February 8 New York Times. Sheehan admires modern Europe for abandoning war; it does not occur to him that Europe also has abandoned being European. Abysmal non-immigrant fertility rates condemn most of Europe's peoples to effective extinction during the next century or two. It deserves a one-word review by Homer Simpson, namely, "Doh." If there are to be no future generations, what soldier will lay down his life for them? The word "demographics" does not appear once in Sheehan's plodding account, which liberal reviewers praised as if it were a roadmap to the millennium.
Sheehan is woefully misguided. Europe may not have war, but it already has violence: its political authorities cringe and scurry and evade and lie in the face of actual or threatened violence by its Muslim communities. If its duly-constituted governments abandon their monopoly of violence to self-appointed religious leaders, the likelihood is that a river of blood will flow, just as Powell warned in 1968.
I post what I post in the hope that others might find it readworthy; and indeed they do, without me having to place my thumb on the scales in order to slimily entice them.
Re:Europe in the House of War
« Reply #1 on: 2008-02-16 23:48:08 »
I know that even neo-conservative memebots occasionally spew forth something that is somewhat correct, or at least not completely wrong. If this is from any American position, then I think that for the most part Muslims in America remain a more or less assimilating minority, even with the few bastards who made it to the cockpits back in 2001. I know that the day shall come when they are a much larger percentage of US population, at which point it think it would be a mighty wise thing for us to hug our Mexicans as well as our Mexican-Americans a bit closer. Muslims have a notorious habit of reproducing to beat all other minorities, and I think in America they are no exception. They like LARGE families. The day shall come in the US when its no longer just Christian nutjobs trying to stop the teaching of evolution, but also Muslim nutjobs trying to make sure that some female minor gets to wear her veil so that her insane male relatives will not punish or even murder her for violations of "family honor".
Re:Europe in the House of War
« Reply #2 on: 2008-02-17 04:45:54 »
[Blunderov] More Islamophobia. Certainly I think it is a nasty religion but then I think most religions are nasty. The Catholics perform ritual cannabilism every Sunday for instance. The entire edifice of Christianity is based on the absurd concept of human sacrifice. It doesn't get more primitive than that. Of course stoning to death for adultery goes beyond mere ritual but has this actually ocurred anywhere in Europe? I very much doubt it.
Sharia offers wonderful propaganda for Islamophobiacs. Even I had been influenced into believing that it amounts to savage violence in the service of religion but this is not always the case with Sharia as I discovered from a TV program that I happened across the other day. In one area of Nigeria (I think) they have Sharia law and it has resulted in the dissolution (as if they were not dissolute enough!) of the many brothels that there had been in the area and also a dramatic reduction in drunkeness and the tribulations so often associated therewith. The effects of sheer violence? Hardly. In that area Sharia amounts to "naming and shaming" in public; I saw a man receiving 50 lashes for drunkeness. The lashes were so soft they would not have disturbed a kitten. He was most discomfitted at the public attention however.
Of course one has seen just the opposite : savage beatings in Iran and very real stonings to death. Amputations in Saudi Arabia are notorious.The point that I'm making is that to hear the Islamophobes, ALL Sharia is of this this vicious and merciless nature but, like the Catholics and their ritual cannabilism, it doesn't ALWAYS manifest in this way.
A storm in a teacup. Nobody is seriously suggesting that the state surrender it's monopoly of actual violence. Ritual tribal violence is not the same kettle of fish at all as we see from the much beloved pursuit of sporting endevours. Of course there are the football hooligans who commit actual violence but not for one minute does the state throw up it's hands in horror and say "well, we allowed football so we have to accept the violence that goes with the territory". (Nor do we hear claims that the footballing "lower classes" are much more inclined to breeding than are the "responsible" members of society and that society will soon be overun with football hooligans.) The Islamophobes are attempting to make this very sly equivocation. Humbuggery. I don't buy it for a moment.
Campaigners united in Glasgow in October 2006 at a protest following a brutal assault on an imam in the city (Pic: Duncan Brown)
by Chris Bambery
Rowan Williams, the archbishop of Canterbury, gave a lecture last week on the Islamic tradition of sharia law and its relationship to the law in Britain.
His comments were unremarkable as these things go but they triggered a week long racist backlash in the press.
The Sun's readers are now being asked to "Bash the Bishop" though the paper's current campaign would perhaps be better titled "Bash the Muslims".
For what began as an attack on the archbishop of Canterbury has shifted rapidly and with grim inevitability into a yet another assault on Britain's two million Muslims.
Former home secretary David Blunkett joined the fray on BBC Radio 4's Today programme. He laid into "well-meaning liberals" who "believe that we have to accommodate something which is external to our country".
The logic of Blunkett's position is chilling. If Islam is an "external" religion then Britain's Muslims who are overwhelmingly from ethnic minority backgrounds do not properly belong in Britain.
This is only a breath away from the old racist slogan of the 1970s, "There ain't no black in the Union Jack".
Kelvin McKenzie, the Sun's former editor, appeared on a Sunday morning BBC show denouncing Islam as a "medieval" religion and slating its mistreatment of women this from a man who introduced topless darts to our television screens.
The subtext to much of this argument is that Christianity is more "enlightened" than Islam.
Except that while the Catholic church was burning people at the stake for the outrageous suggestion that the earth might rotate round the sun, Islamic Europe in Spain and Sicily helped establish science and medicine.
Another common argument from the bigots was the fate that would allegedly befall the archbishop if he were to preach in Saudi Arabia. This ignores the fact that Saudi Arabia is a key ally of the US and Britain.
Our leaders defend its royal rulers to the hilt, lavishing arms on them and greasing their palms with dollars and sterling to secure contracts.
Tony Blair went so far as to describe Saudi Arabia as "a friend of the civilised world" and justified its ban on trade unions and use of judicial torture as "their culture, their way of life".
The media hysteria was quick to branch out from sharia into a wider attack on anything deemed "Islamic".
Last weekend the Independent on Sunday ran a front page headline claiming there were 17,000 "honour" crimes against women in Britain each year. The picture was of a Muslim woman in a veil, just in case anybody missed the point.
The sources for this tale were some highly dubious extrapolated statistics provided by the Association of Chief Police Officers an institution hardly famed for its unflinching support for women's rights.
The Independent's story focused solely on Muslim cases of domestic violence. Nowhere did it mention that two women are killed each week in Britain by a current or former partner and the vast majority of these are non-Muslims.
Judicial
Then came the Sunday Times headline, "Minister warns of 'inbred' Muslims". This followed Phil Woolas, the environment minister, claiming that arranged marriages between first cousins in the Pakistani population were responsible for creating "genetic problems".
This whole furore is not about theology or the judicial system. First and foremost, it's about racism. The powers that be have proclaimed Islam to be an "inferior" religion and civilisation. And the constant tirade of Islamophobia they unleash translates into everyday bigotry and daily attacks on Muslims.
Behind this outpouring of hate is the "war on terror" led by the US and Britain. And some of the Muslim-bashing commentators are at least explicit about this link.
Matthew d'Ancona in the Sunday Telegraph writes, "We are at war with fundamentalist Islam... British troops are risking their lives against Islamic fundamentalists in Iraq and Afghanistan... Could [Williams] have chosen a worse geopolitical context in which to call for the official incorporation of sharia rules into the law of the land?"
Ever since the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were first posed as a "clash of civilisation", as a decades long crusade of Western "democracy" against Muslim "totalitarianism", Islamophobia has slowly dripped into the body politic of the US, Britain and other countries.
Here in Britain this means longer detention without charge or access to a lawyer, the bugging of defendants, increased stop and search under terror laws and constant demands on the Muslim population to prove their loyalty to a state that treats them like dirt.
We see constant US and British wars and occupations, unflinching support for oppressive regimes such as Israel and Saudi Arabia, the demonisation of Islam paraded endlessly through our media. All this is guaranteed to breed simmering anger across the globe.
The alternative is to demonstrate that Muslims and non-Muslims stand together in rejecting this "war on terror", the assault on our civil liberties and the Islamphobic slanders.
The anti-war demonstrations on 15 March should be a showcase for our response to George Bush, Gordon Brown and their ideological crusaders.
The following should be read alongside this article: » Living under an alien law
The scare stories about sharia can't hide the fact that "British justice" has always been about preserving the rule of the rich, writes Richard Seymour
The newspapers are terrified. Rowan Williams, the archbishop of Canterbury, has raised the suggestion that some forms of sharia law be introduced as a means of "constructive accommodation" with British Muslims.
The Sun raised the prospect of "medieval punishments" being inflicted on Britons, and complained that Williams was "giving heart to Muslim terrorists plotting our destruction".
The Telegraph explained to its readers that sharia is associated with "amputation of limbs, death by stoning or lashes" for such crimes as theft. Perhaps the Telegraph is concerned about its former proprietor, the convicted fraudster Lord Conrad Black. On their account, if he had been tried under sharia law he wouldn't have a limb left on his body.
However, even liberal opinion is expressing concern, arguing that Muslim women will experience reduced freedom if religious courts are allowed to adjudicate in matters of family life.
There is a further implication that what is proposed is somehow "alien". This is "a Christian country with Christian laws", according to the national director of the right wing pressure group Christian Voice. And Gordon Brown has conceded to this nationalist sentiment, arguing that "British law should be based on British values".
The scare stories have little to do with what is actually proposed. The archbishop called for allowances to be made for the practice of sharia law within the confines of English law, on a limited basis and with the mutual consent of everyone affected.
He argued, quite correctly, that there is a diversity of interpretation among Muslim jurists about what sharia entails, and endorsed the liberal variants. He pointed out that Britain already has separate arrangements for other religious communities. Orthodox Jews are entitled to work out some of their arrangements in a rabbinical court. Muslims can already choose to have disputes settled privately under sharia law. And there are already sharia-compliant products and services operating in Britain, for instance in banking.
So the hysteria is not really about anything Rowan Williams actually said. It is an expression of the Islamophobia that has been cultivated in the West as an obnoxious cultural counterpart to the "war on terror".
Meanwhile, the tabloids are several centuries behind on this scoop Britain already has a system of alien laws. It is maintained in large part by right wing bigots in outlandish medieval costumes, such as the "law lords" or the "privy council".
Drawn from a ruling class with an alien culture and values that most of us don't share our overseers in wigs and cloaks have always been rather fond of telling us how to live.
They tell us who we can have sex with, and have even been given to legislating on what kind of sex we can have; under what conditions we may be married and to whom, and when we may divorce; what we can protest about, when and for how long; when we can strike, and for what we may strike; what we can consume, and where we can consume it.
Whether outlawing homosexuality, restricting abortion, or regulating the ingestion of recreational substances, these laws have never had anything to do with the values of ordinary people.
For example, at the moment, the state is considering restrictions on a woman's right to abortion. This campaign is being driven by right wing anti-abortionists such as Ann Widdecombe MP.
The fact that state control of the female body has resulted in the deaths of women in backstreet abortions doesn't stop these people calling themselves "pro-life" but they represent a minority of the British people, and certainly a minority of women.
As usual, the trouble with the archbishop of Canterbury is not that he "went too far", but that he didn't go far enough. He rightly challenges the state's monopoly on public identity, but does so primarily in order to carve out a larger space for religious power.
One of Rowan Williams's political interventions in 2007 was to co-author a letter to the prime minister asking that Catholic adoption agencies be exempted from regulation that would compel them to consider gay people as adoptees. To put it another way he asked the state to guarantee the Catholic church's right to operate homophobic policies.
In the case of sharia law, on one level Williams isn't asking the state to withdraw, but to get more involved in the regulation of religious and personal life. He suggests that certain forms of Islam are more acceptable than others and that those variants ought to be encouraged and recognised by the state.
It is quite right that Muslims should have the same rights that any other religious group has but the best way to ensure that is for the state to keep out of our moral lives. And a good first move in that direction would be to divest the Church of England of its peculiar privileges and authority.
The following should be read alongside this article: » Sharia row triggers wider racist backlash
Richard Seymour's book The Liberal Defence of Murder will be published by Verso later this year. He runs the Lenin's Tomb website at » leninology.blogspot.com
Re:Europe in the House of War
« Reply #4 on: 2008-02-17 18:28:55 »
Clearly I'm missing something. (which is not unusual)
When I grew up in TO in the 50s and 60s we were all 1st generation immigrants from East and West Europe, the middle East and Asia. Everyones parents were Canadians and proud to be and were starting a new life. We all went to the same schools, we all did our unique cultural thing on Saturday and Sunday. When someone was a idiot we sorted them out and we had groups and gangs, but they revolved around interests not ethnicity.
I know this is no longer the case anymore.
So the Politics of Fear have succeeded; is what I've read in this thread.
Is COV Complicit in promulgating this ? or is COV indicating that it can be shown that just like the British, Scottish, Irish, Italian, Portuguese, German, Chinese, Ukrainian, African, Polish, Turkish, Greek, Persian, Pakistan and not to mention those evil Australians (and many others) have become assimilated as part of the North American experiment; (I mean it was not that long ago the Catholics were viewed as a serious threat and now they have a Pope from the 'Third Reich' and Armageddon hasn't happened (ya, I know 2012).), there has to be an up side.
[MoEnzyme]s piece on Satan and [Blunderov]s on HST points to some level of sanity out there, ... but even that greeter at WALMART or someone at a PUB in Liverpool drinking Watnee's Red Barrel is looking up at the Tele and saying this report is wrong not right, they're tell'in me porkies again.
Then again as pointed out on COV if Tony Blair becomes emperor of Europe and the Neocons get a Clinton in the white house again (just to show that the Bushes werent their only game plan) recreational pharmaceuticals may be the only answer.
Clearly I'm missing something. (which is not unusual)
When I grew up in TO in the 50s and 60s we were all 1st generation immigrants from East and West Europe, the middle East and Asia. Everyones parents were Canadians and proud to be and were starting a new life. We all went to the same schools, we all did our unique cultural thing on Saturday and Sunday. When someone was a idiot we sorted them out and we had groups and gangs, but they revolved around interests not ethnicity.
I know this is no longer the case anymore.
So the Politics of Fear have succeeded; is what I've read in this thread.
Is COV Complicit in promulgating this ? or is COV indicating that it can be shown that just like the British, Scottish, Irish, Italian, Portuguese, German, Chinese, Ukrainian, African, Polish, Turkish, Greek, Persian, Pakistan and not to mention those evil Australians (and many others) have become assimilated as part of the North American experiment; (I mean it was not that long ago the Catholics were viewed as a serious threat and now they have a Pope from the 'Third Reich' and Armageddon hasn't happened (ya, I know 2012).), there has to be an up side.
[MoEnzyme]s piece on Satan and [Blunderov]s on HST points to some level of sanity out there, ... but even that greeter at WALMART or someone at a PUB in Liverpool drinking Watnee's Red Barrel is looking up at the Tele and saying this report is wrong not right, they're tell'in me porkies again.
Then again as pointed out on COV if Tony Blair becomes emperor of Europe and the Neocons get a Clinton in the white house again (just to show that the Bushes werent their only game plan) recreational pharmaceuticals may be the only answer.
Thanks to all the best "FIN" BBS on the web
Fritz
Thanks for contributing your superior presence, for our fifteen minutes of fame. I for one am not defending people's rights to riot and pillage over teddy bears and cartoons, nor their rights to stone people to death, cut off limbs, kill their daughters for "family honor" etc, no matter which religious tradition is performing the rites. Any religioso who wants to destroy secular democratic governments doesn't get my vote no matter what group jersey they wear. If we can't discuss behavior without getting swept away in some group identity drama, then we have given up on reason as a virtue.
Re:Europe in the House of War
« Reply #6 on: 2008-02-17 20:37:58 »
Blunderov: Quote:
Sharia offers wonderful propaganda for Islamophobiacs. Even I had been influenced into believing that it amounts to savage violence in the service of religion but this is not always the case with Sharia as I discovered from a TV program that I happened across the other day. In one area of Nigeria (I think) they have Sharia law and it has resulted in the dissolution (as if they were not dissolute enough!) of the many brothels that there had been in the area and also a dramatic reduction in drunkeness and the tribulations so often associated therewith. The effects of sheer violence? Hardly. In that area Sharia amounts to "naming and shaming" in public; I saw a man receiving 50 lashes for drunkeness. The lashes were so soft they would not have disturbed a kitten. He was most discomfitted at the public attention however.
What's wrong with brothels, as long as everyone is a consenting adult? Is it supposed to impress me that a bunch of uptight prudes can crash a party instead of actually stoning people to death, or causing permanent bodily injury this time?
Sharia offers wonderful propaganda for Islamophobiacs. Even I had been influenced into believing that it amounts to savage violence in the service of religion but this is not always the case with Sharia as I discovered from a TV program that I happened across the other day. In one area of Nigeria (I think) they have Sharia law and it has resulted in the dissolution (as if they were not dissolute enough!) of the many brothels that there had been in the area and also a dramatic reduction in drunkeness and the tribulations so often associated therewith. The effects of sheer violence? Hardly. In that area Sharia amounts to "naming and shaming" in public; I saw a man receiving 50 lashes for drunkeness. The lashes were so soft they would not have disturbed a kitten. He was most discomfitted at the public attention however.
What's wrong with brothels, as long as everyone is a consenting adult? Is it supposed to impress me that a bunch of uptight prudes can crash a party instead of actually stoning people to death, or causing permanent bodily injury this time?
Both of these issues, brothels, and drunkeness are issues of public health, that's all. Nothing more. All this moronic shaming of people for being just human beings and not prophets, or whatever is just nonsense. Prostitution and intoxication are simply part and parcel of being social primates. Why do we waste time futzing about irrational ideologies that deny our baser origins and instincts? If this is what sharia law is all about, Then I'd have none of it. I accept imperfect people just fine, thank you very much. Its nothing about being sinning Christians or Muslim idealists either, its just about the reality of the human condition as we head into peak oil, global warming, civilization collapse, and the big asteroid hit. There's always a cause for alarm, not to mention the possibility of a Gamma Ray Burster . . . which Lucifer tells me is unsurvivable - - - I'm betting some of our technology shall remain. Perhaps nanobots will save our virtual selves when we upload. Possibly suffer a bit of damage, but eventually heal and survive, to thrive again another day.
There is always cause for optimism I think our global computer enhanced intelligence will factor some . . . perhaps a developed (how to recover from crash) routine can bring some, and if some, why not most of what we lost? Are you ready for AI? because I think its ready for us, and possibly not a moment too soon.
Re:Europe in the House of War
« Reply #8 on: 2008-02-18 02:01:09 »
[MoEnzyme]Thanks for contributing your superior presence, for our fifteen minutes of fame. I for one am not defending people's rights to riot and pillage over teddy bears and cartoons, nor their rights to stone people to death, cut off limbs, kill their daughters for "family honor" etc, no matter which religious tradition is performing the rites. Any religioso who wants to destroy secular democratic governments doesn't get my vote no matter what group jersey they wear. If we can't discuss behavior without getting swept away in some group identity drama, then we have given up on reason as a virtue.
But the West has a group identity we have alleged to have nurtured, with significant detours over the decades, and what I'm getting from the discussion is that we are no longer able to stand up as a group and say, these are the rules we have set out for our country and if you are staying please abide.
My other concern is what is in my faces daily in the media; I know I should not take anything at face value but it does wear you down. Here it is restated and challenged by yourself and others which is helping me to get a better understanding of why I'm feeling shitty.
If anything I am feeling very country bumkinish and have been spending the majority of my time going back through the years of posts trying to get through some of the great post/ideas you guys have offered up. COV does dialog at an intellectual level and proficiency I'm not accustomed to and sometimes failed attempts at humour are my 2 bits.
What's wrong with brothels, as long as everyone is a consenting adult? Is it supposed to impress me that a bunch of uptight prudes can crash a party instead of actually stoning people to death, or causing permanent bodily injury this time?
[Blunderov] I agree; I have nothing against consenting adults doing whatever they please within reason. The point I was making was that Sharia is not necessarily as vicious as it is sometimes painted. Sometimes it is, of course but my intention was to point out that this issue is not nearly as black and white as has been portrayed in certain Islamophobiac circles.
The streets of Europe are not about to become littered with headless corpses and amputated body parts. To imply that a modern state must necessarily abrogate its monopoly of violence by permitting some aspects of Sharia law to be practised in some communities is both mischievous and racist. The fact that the original article posted by Salamantis actually had the brass-balled effrontery to publically quote the British arch-racist Powell speaks volumes:
..."quoted former British Conservative parliamentarian Enoch Powell's warning that concessions to alien cultures would cause "rivers of blood" to flow in the streets of England."
What complete and utter crap. (This is such an egregious misrepresentation that I have to wonder if it doesn't amount to an actionable instance of "hate speech".)
Hypocrisy too. To read the article one would swear that the author was a committed feminist. And he, of course, chooses to completely ignore the rich history of very similar opressions the Christians have visited, and continue to visit, upon Western women since time immemorial. Perhaps we don't stone women to death anymore but we do protect and coddle paedophile priests. "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone" I think somebody once said...
(I sometimes think it might be nice if these "upholders" of Christian values would take the trouble to actually read the Bible they claim as the source of these values instead of just sucking them out of their thumbs but then I am a wild-eyed dreamer by nature I suppose.)
What's wrong with brothels, as long as everyone is a consenting adult? Is it supposed to impress me that a bunch of uptight prudes can crash a party instead of actually stoning people to death, or causing permanent bodily injury this time?
[Blunderov] I agree; I have nothing against consenting adults doing whatever they please within reason. The point I was making was that Sharia is not necessarily as vicious as it is sometimes painted. Sometimes it is, of course but my intention was to point out that this issue is not nearly as black and white as has been portrayed in certain Islamophobiac circles.
I don't think there is any need for Islamophobic circles to breed criticism for Islam, the publicly sanctioned brutality of Sharia law currently practiced in many Muslim states is well documented without the need of haters to add heat to the discussion.
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The streets of Europe are not about to become littered with headless corpses and amputated body parts.
Not yet. But if Sharia is based on the Quran, and many current Muslim states practice this kind of brutality with minimal criticism from other self-identified Muslims around the world, then it establishes living legal precedent for a system that Muslims understand to be universal whether executed (sometimes literally) in Saudi Arabia or any other country.
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To imply that a modern state must necessarily abrogate its monopoly of violence by permitting some aspects of Sharia law to be practised in some communities is both mischievous and racist.
I think that if a Muslim wishes to practice some Islamic tradition reflected in Sharia, as long as they don't use it as an excuse to disrupt the public life of secular pluralistic society, don't cause harm to others (including their own minor females etc.), and don't claim it to have any actual legal authority, I can live with it. However I'm willing to bet that almost any Muslim seriously interested in Sharia Law would view those conditions as unacceptable.
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The fact that the original article posted by Salamantis actually had the brass-balled effrontery to publically quote the British arch-racist Powell speaks volumes:
..."quoted former British Conservative parliamentarian Enoch Powell's warning that concessions to alien cultures would cause "rivers of blood" to flow in the streets of England."
What complete and utter crap. (This is such an egregious misrepresentation that I have to wonder if it doesn't amount to an actionable instance of "hate speech".)
I don't defend the rhetoric. I think it would have been more honest to simply name "Sharia", and "Islam", instead of talking about "alien cultures". Muslims are no longer "alien" to the UK.
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Hypocrisy too. To read the article one would swear that the author was a committed feminist. And he, of course, chooses to completely ignore the rich history of very similar opressions the Christians have visited, and continue to visit, upon Western women since time immemorial. Perhaps we don't stone women to death anymore but we do protect and coddle paedophile priests.
Although the Catholic Church may have been overly protective of pedophilic priests, I've never heard any dogma of their institution claiming that pedophilia was moral, necessary, devinely required, or publicly endorsed. The abuses that modern Islam heaps on women are often thus publicly claimed. In any case I'm no defender of Christian institutions either, but for the most part lately I don't hear them claiming the weight of actual law for their stupidities.
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"Let he who is without sin cast the first stone" I think somebody once said...
(I sometimes think it might be nice if these "upholders" of Christian values would take the trouble to actually read the Bible they claim as the source of these values instead of just sucking them out of their thumbs but then I am a wild-eyed dreamer by nature I suppose.)
Although the Catholic Church may have been overly protective of pedophilic priests, I've never heard any dogma of their institution claiming that pedophilia was moral, necessary, devinely required, or publicly endorsed. The abuses that modern Islam heaps on women are often thus publicly claimed. In any case I'm no defender of Christian institutions either, but for the most part lately I don't hear them claiming the weight of actual law for their stupidities.
[Blunderov] A fair point. And if there is ever to be a reformation of Islam it could well begin with the dignity and rights of women IMO.
Thinking about it, perhaps those Islamophobes that are SO concerned about the dignities and rights of Islamic women should, for the sake of consistency, be making the exact opposite argument; that the "clash of civilizations" (TM) ought rather be encouraged in order for Islam could be influenced for the better by the broader European societies into which they have migrated. Why does the assumption seem to be that this could never happen? In Denmark for instance the local Muslims have agreed to exercise restraint in the face of the republication of the famous Muhammed cartoons. Doesn't seem like much I grant. And it is rather arrogant of them to assume that this is something at all within the ambit of their discretion. But it is a little bit of progress and it does rather highlight the dubiousness of the assumption of which I spoke.
A Question of Honour: Police Say 17,000 Women Are Victims Every Year
Ministers are stepping up the fight against so-called 'honour' crime and forced marriages. Detectives say official statistics are 'merely the tip of the iceberg' of this phenomenon. Brian Brady investigates
Up to 17,000 women in Britain are being subjected to "honour" related violence, including murder, every year, according to police chiefs.
And official figures on forced marriages are the tip of the iceberg, says the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO).
It warns that the number of girls falling victim to forced marriages, kidnappings, sexual assaults, beatings and even murder by relatives intent on upholding the "honour" of their family is up to 35 times higher than official figures suggest.
The crisis, with children as young as 11 having been sent abroad to be married, has prompted the Foreign and Commonwealth Office to call on British consular staff in Bangladesh, India and Pakistan to take more action to identify and help British citizens believed to be the victims of forced marriages in recent years.
The Home Office is drawing up an action plan to tackle honour-based violence which "aims to improve the response of police and other agencies" and "ensure that victims are encouraged to come forward with the knowledge that they will receive the help and support they need". And a Civil Protection Bill coming into effect later this year will give courts greater guidance on dealing with forced marriages.
Commander Steve Allen, head of ACPO's honour-based violence unit, says the true toll of people falling victim to brutal ancient customs is "massively unreported" and far worse than is traditionally accepted. "We work on a figure which suggests it is about 500 cases shared between us and the Forced Marriage Unit per year," he said: "If the generally accepted statistic is that a victim will suffer 35 experiences of domestic violence before they report, then I suspect if you multiplied our reporting by 35 times you may be somewhere near where people's experience is at." His disturbing assessment, made to a committee of MPs last week, comes amid a series of gruesome murders and attacks on British women at the hands of their relatives.
Marilyn Mornington, a district judge and chair of the Domestic Violence Working Group, warned that fears of retribution, and the authorities' failure to understand the problem completely, meant the vast majority of victims were still too scared to come forward for help. In evidence to the home affairs committee, which is investigating the problem, she said: "We need a national strategy to identify the large number of pupils, particularly girls, missing from school registers who have been taken off the register and are said to be home schooled, which leads to these issues. Airport staff and other staff need to be trained to recognise girls who are being taken out of the country.
"We are bringing three girls a week back from Islamabad as victims of forced marriage. We know that is the tip of the iceberg, but that is the failure end. It has to be part of education within the communities and the children themselves."
Women who have been taken overseas to be married against their will are now being rescued on an almost daily basis. The Government's Forced Marriage Unit (FMU) handled approximately 400 cases last year 167 of them leading to young Britons being helped back to the UK to escape unwanted partners overseas. And it is not just women who are affected. Home Office figures show that 15 per cent of cases involve men and boys.
In an attempt to crack down on the crimes being committed in the name of honour, police are to introduce a new training package that will give all officers instructions on handling honour cases. In addition, detectives are believed to be conducting a "cold case" style review of previous suicides amid suspicions that cases of honour killings are more common than previously thought.
Almost all victims of the most extreme crimes are women, killed in half of cases by their own husbands. Sometimes murders are carried out by other male relatives, or even hired killers. The fear that many thousands are left to endure honour violence alone may be supported by the disturbing details of the incidence of suicide within the British Asian community. Women aged 16 to 24 from Pakistani, Indian and Bangladeshi backgrounds are three times more likely to kill themselves than the national average for women of their age.
A report published last week by the Centre for Social Cohesion found that many women felt unable to defy their families and therefore "suffer violence, abuse, depression, anxiety and other psychological problems that can lead to self-harm, schizophrenia and suicide". James Brandon, co-author of Crimes of the Community: Honour-based Violence in the UK, said: "The Government is still not taking honour crime seriously. Until this happens, the ideas of honour which perpetuate this violence will continue to be passed on through generations. Religious leaders, local authorities and central government must work together to end such abuses of human rights."
The human cost of honour crime was vividly captured in a haunting video message from murdered Banaz Mahmood, who revealed how her own father had tried to kill her after she abandoned her arranged marriage and fell in love with another man. In the grainy message she told how he plied her with brandy the first time she had ever drunk alcohol pulled the curtains and asked her to turn around.
The 19-year-old fled, but less than a month after making the grainy video on a mobile phone, Banaz was dead. Her naked body was found buried in a yard in Birmingham in 2006, more than 100 miles from her London home. She had been raped and tortured by men hired by her uncle to kill her. Mahmood's father, uncle and one of her killers were sentenced to a total of 60 years in jail for the murder.
And the fatal potential of honour disputes was laid bare last month when a coroner said he was convinced that a Muslim teenager who feared she was being forced into an arranged marriage by her parents had suffered a "vile murder." Ian Smith said the concept of an arranged marriage was "central" to the circumstances leading up to the death of 17-year-old Shafilea Ahmed, whose decomposed body was discovered on the banks of the River Kent at Sedgwick, Cumbria, four years ago. After running away from home in February 2003, Shafilea told housing officers: "My parents are going to send me to Pakistan and I'll be married to someone and left there." The tragic story of the bright teenager who wanted to go to university and study law is far from the only example of the anguish suffered by British teenagers in recent years.
Toafiq Wahab, British consul in Dhaka, Bangladesh, recalls a "rescue mission" to recover a 17-year-old who called his office from Sylhet. "We had to track her down and 36 hours from taking that call, we had turned up at her house with an armed police escort," he said. "The house was filled with over 20 of her relations, most of whom were from Britain and stunned to see me. They obviously did not want her to leave. We simply asked her if she wanted to leave and go back to the UK in the presence of all her family and she agreed. I then spoke to the family and explained what we were doing and tried to make them understand. In the end, we had to get the police to assist in helping us to leave."
Former Bradford policeman Philip Balmforth, who works with vulnerable Asian women, said he saw 395 cases of forced marriage in the city last year. "I had a case of a 14-year-old girl at school," he recalled. "The teacher tells me that the girl claims to have been married. So I went along to the school with a Muslim colleague. We saw the girl. We asked her a few questions and we were not sure. Then the girl said: 'If you don't believe me I have the video at home.'"
In Bradford alone, a total of 250 girls aged between 13 and 16 were taken off the school rolls last year because they failed to return from trips abroad. Campaigners suspect many were victims of forced marriages.
"If contacted by concerned young British men and women in the UK, the FMU provides free and confidential advice on the potential dangers of being forced into marriage overseas and precautions to take to help avoid this happening," said a Foreign Office spokesperson last night. "If we learn that a British national overseas is being forced into marriage, or has already been forced into marriage, we look at various means of consular assistance ranging from action through the courts to rescue missions."
"The FMU can also help to arrange accommodation for victims for when they return to the UK and can refer victims to counselling and supports groups, legal centres, and so on.
"When it is necessary, the FMU and our embassies and high commissions work closely with the police and judiciary overseas in order to organise emergency rescue and repatriation missions."
Britain's hidden scandal
The kidnap victim
In June 2000 Narina Anwar, 29, and her two sisters claim they were tricked by their parents into going on a family holiday to a remote village in Pakistan, where they were held captive for five months in an attempt to force them to marry three illiterate villagers. The sisters fled to Lahore and contacted the British High Commission, which persuaded their parents to hand over their children's passports so they could return home.
The 'slave'
Gina Singh, 28, sued her former mother-in-law for £35,000 in 2006 after she was forced to work 17 hours a day around the house. Ms Singh, from Nottingham, was forbidden to leave the house on her own after an arranged marriage in 2002.
The runaway wife
In 1983, Zana Muhsen and her sister Nadia, from Birmingham, were pushed by their father to visit Yemen and forced to marry. Zana, now 35, escaped eight years later. Her father had sold her for a few thousand dollars. The experience is recounted in her book, 'Sold'.
The murder victim
Surjit Athwal disappeared with Bachan Athwal, her mother-in-law, after a family wedding in India in 1998. Her body was never found. Bachan later boasted that she arranged for her son, Sukhdave, to murder Surjit after finding out that she was having an affair.
The attempted suicide
Shafilea Ahmed was the victim of a suspected honour killing. The 17-year-old's body was found months after she had returned from a trip to Pakistan in 2003. On the trip she drank bleach. The coroner said he saw it as a 'desperate measure' to avoid a forced marriage.
There are moments when public debate in Britain appears to take place in a vacuum. As the Archbishop of Canterbury gave a convincing impression yesterday of a man suffering the torments of the Inquisition, the debate was moving away from his actual observations about Islamic law, sharia, to the question of his fitness (or otherwise) to hold his office. Rowan Williams claimed that his remarks about the unavoidability of adopting some aspects of sharia in this country had been misunderstood, prompting an interesting response from his critics: the cleric was a brilliant man, they said, but his utterances were simply too opaque for hoi polloi (especially the media) to comprehend. This prompts an obvious question if no one understands what the Archbishop is saying, how do they know how intelligent he is? but it also diverted attention from something much more important. Williams's clarification of his remarks seemed to suggest that he wasn't calling for a parallel legal system for Muslims, more a recognition of something that is already happening. Yet there has been a strange reluctance to ask a real expert who has seen the way sharia operates in this country: someone like Rahni Binjie, project manager of Roshni Asian Women's Aid in Nottingham.
Binjie was interviewed in a major study of honour-based crime published by the Centre for Social Cohesion last week, and argued that Islamic leaders are reluctant to grant divorces to women who have children. "This is because the community sees the family structure as being of so much importance," she said. Her colleague Tanisha Jnagel said that the Islamic Sharia Council hears both sides but relies on religious texts to decide whether a divorce should be granted: "In our experience, this isn't going to result in a solution which is fair for the woman." According to the study, Crimes of the Community: Honour-Based Violence in the UK by James Brandon and Salam Hafez, women are being forced to stay in violent marriages as a result. "Many women from the Muslim and Sikh communities report that they have difficulties gaining religious divorces from their respective religious leaders," they say.
This will come as no surprise to Britain's agunot, or "chained women", who have been denied a religious divorce in Orthodox Jewish courts; even if they obtain a civil divorce, they are still married under Jewish law and any children they have with new partners will be mamzer, or illegitimate. Last week an Islamic Council in Leyton, east London, revealed that it had handled more than 7,000 divorces, but did not say what proportion was refused.
As soon as you look at the actual operation of religious law in this country, the picture looks less rosy. Even if the Archbishop didn't have in mind barbaric punishments such as stoning women to death for adultery, there is plenty of evidence that sharia courts are a means of consolidating patriarchal power in societies where Muslim women have begun to demand the same rights as men. The Department for Work and Pensions recently made an astonishing decision to pay state benefits to Muslim men for each of their wives, as long as the marriages were contracted legally abroad. Bigamy is illegal in Britain and the spectacle of the Government colluding in the practice of polygyny not polygamy, for Muslim women cannot have four husbands is a signal that ministers are losing their moral compass on the subject of women's rights.
We are only just beginning to realise the extent of violence against women from ethnic minorities. Last week, Commander Steve Allen, who leads for the Association of Chief Police Officers on honour-based violence, gave evidence to the Home Affairs Committee. Responding to a question about whether forced marriage and "honour" crimes are under-reported in this country, Allen responded with a single word: "Massively". He believes the real level of violence might be 35 times higher than the number of cases (around 500) reported each year to the police and the Foreign Office forced marriage unit.
If a woman is running away from her parents or a violent husband, mosques and sharia courts are not the obvious place for her to turn to get justice. The Centre for Social Cohesion study contains a startling insight into attitudes in one British mosque, reported by Mohamed Baleela, a team leader at the Domestic Violence Intervention Project in Hammersmith, west London. "Last time I talked about marital rape in a mosque," he said, "I nearly got beaten up. Because we said that the law makes it illegal to rape your wife, someone got up and hit me because he was ignorant of the law."
There is an argument, and it is a compelling one, that we should all be subject to the same laws. People who look favourably on a parallel system of religious courts for civil matters claim they do no harm if all parties consent to their use. This, of course, is the crux of the matter: how can we know that women from traditional and religious families have given consent when they are under huge pressure from relatives? They may be threatened into accepting the authority of a religious court, just as hundreds of young women (and some young men) are coerced into getting married against their will.
The few cases that hit the headlines are unbearably tragic: 17-year-old Shafilea Ahmed from Warrington, Cheshire, drank bleach when she was confronted with an unwanted suitor in Pakistan, and later disappeared from her parents' home. Her body was found five months later in a river in Cumbria and a coroner ruled last month that the student had been the victim of a "very vile murder".
Another young woman, 20-year-old Banaz Mahmod from south London, was raped and murdered by Kurdish hit men hired by her father and uncle when she left an unhappy, arranged marriage and fell in love with another man. The notion that young women like Shafilea Ahmed and Banaz Mahmod would be helped by an expansion of Islamic law in this country is laughable; indeed the European Court of Human Rights ruled in 2003 that sharia is incompatible with the fundamental principles of democracy and European values. Secular law protects people's right to practise their religion, but it also protects them from aspects of their faith which are unjust and oppressive.
Only someone as out of touch with modern Britain as the Archbishop of Canterbury could possibly think otherwise, or line up so willingly with the forces of reaction. Just because someone looks like an Old Testament prophet, he doesn't have to think and speak like one as well.
"You can barely use the word sharia because of what people associate with it." How right Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, turned out to be. The idea of finding "a constructive accommodation with some aspects of Muslim law", of which he spoke in a BBC Radio 4 interview last week, is one that triggered a reaction not wholly related to his actual words. But if he knew that sharia was a word susceptible to misunderstanding, surely he should have known how important it was for him to be clear.
It was no use Dr Williams protesting that he was not talking about the "brutal and inhuman and unjust" forms of sharia as practised in Saudi Arabia or countries where women are stoned for adultery if they are raped. The problem is that, even if we take out the stoning, the chopping off of hands and the "honour" killing, a code of law that claims its authority from long-standing religious tradition is likely to be reactionary in general and restrictive of the rights of women in particular. Dr Williams acknowledged at one point in his lecture that "questions of the status of women and converts" in sharia were "neuralgic". But if he were not talking about that kind of sharia, it was unclear what he was saying.
Thus he allowed many people to read a subtext to his words, which is that there is "one law for us and another law for them". It is a widespread sentiment, tinged with racism, and anyone in a position of leadership ought to be careful not to provide unwarranted support for it.
Nor is it any use Dr Williams's supporters or, more accurately, those people of goodwill who sought to understand what it was that the Archbishop might have been trying to say pointing out that some religious courts are allowed to arbitrate on questions of marriage among orthodox Jews. The point is that no special amendment has been made to UK law to allow these courts to function. There can be no objection in principle to religious authorities that set themselves up as arbitration or mediation services; the question is whether their clients take part on the basis of informed consent.
Indeed, as the Archbishop said in his interview: "It would be quite wrong to say that we could ever license a system of law for some community which gave people no right of appeal, no way of exercising the rights that are guaranteed to them as citizens." That would seem to go to the heart of the issue. The worry about religious courts Jewish or Muslim is that they resist equal rights for women, and it is difficult to define where voluntary submission by women ends and coercion begins. Instead of proposing further "accommodation" of religious law, we should be more robust in policing that boundary.
This is the same issue in forced marriages, which, as we reveal today, have been massively under-reported in this country. The scandal of "honour" killings is the visible extreme end of a subculture which oppresses women, and which draws on the authority of religion, as Joan Smith points out today. This situation has come about partly because of a well-meaning attempt to accommodate the cultures of immigrants, of which Dr Williams's lecture seems to be a part. Recently, significant liberal voices, such as that of Trevor Phillips, chairman of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, have insisted that there must be limits to this ill-defined multiculturalism. What was remarkable about the Archbishop's intervention was that he did not engage in this argument at all.
So let us do it for him. The law in a liberal democracy should apply to everyone equally, as far as possible, with exceptions in only the most difficult cases for conscientious objectors. That includes Sikhs riding motorcycles, or doctors who refuse to carry out abortions. It should not include turning a blind eye to forced marriages, or to the use of arranged marriages as an immigration scam; nor should it include paying state benefit to multiple wives.
In each case, the current of thinking, even among liberals and among liberal British Muslims, is away from the direction suggested so nebulously by Dr Williams. The Association of Chief Police Officers is taking "honour" killing and forced marriages more seriously than ever. Ann Cryer, the left-wing MP for Keighley, has been harrying a government that appears to lack any sense of urgency over arranged marriages that amount to a form of people-trafficking from Pakistan.
On every issue where there is tension between religion and state, the Government needs to be encouraged by defenders of liberal democracy to insist on the primacy of universal rights. The Archbishop was well-intentioned but unwise to allow himself to be allied to the pre-Enlightenment elements of another faith by trying to go in the opposite direction.
The ringleader of a plot to kidnap and decapitate a British Muslim soldier has been jailed for life.
Parviz Khan pleaded guilty to the scheme and to supplying equipment to terrorists on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. He was handed a minimum 14-year sentence at Leicester Crown Court and was told he might never be released. Four men involved in the plot were sentenced with him.
But it was Khan, who claimed to be a full-time carer for his elderly mother, who was the prime mover in the Birmingham-based terror cell. The trial heard that Khan developed into an extremist obsessed with the speeches of Osama bin Laden and the jailed cleric Abu Hamza.
In between visits to Pakistan between 2004 and 2006 he stocked up on fundamentalist propaganda, including films of beheadings and footage of the September 11 and July 7 attacks.
He even tried to indoctrinate his own young children. A bugging device planted at his home in Alum Rock recorded him teaching one child how to carry out a beheading. He was also claiming benefits of more than £20,000 a year during the time he plotted to snatch a serviceman off the streets and behead him "like a pig".
Zahoor Iqbal, 30, of Perry Barr, was jailed for seven years for his part in the supply chain. Basiru Gassama, 30, of Hodge Hill, was jailed for two years and now faces deportation over his failure to disclose information. Mohammed Irfan, 31, of Ward End, and Hamid Elasmar, 44, of Edgbaston, were given four years and three years and four months respectively for helping to supply equipment.
Re:Europe in the House of War
« Reply #13 on: 2008-02-19 07:57:04 »
"The Home Office is drawing up an action plan to tackle honour-based violence which "aims to improve the response of police and other agencies" and "ensure that victims are encouraged to come forward with the knowledge that they will receive the help and support they need".
[Blunderov] Excellent. These women would have no chance of relief if they were living in Islamic countries. Let the memes abound.
Re:Europe in the House of War
« Reply #14 on: 2008-02-19 18:11:10 »
I watched BBCs 2005: The Power of Nightmares again.
The meme it puts on the table relating to the politics of fear and the synergy between the UK/US governments and terrorists, furthering each others causes; makes me believe these continual cans of gasoline that get dumped on the fires of concern we should all have over our safety and way of life are contrived and manipulative ... or am I giving the governing powers to much credit ?
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