The new sexy English schoolgirl's uniform if things don't change soonOnce again, the so-called religion of peace is rearing one of its Hydra heads. Sharia Law, the uber-conservative strict set of rules that governs Islam, is once again in the news after a 37-year old American businesswoman, a married mother of three, was arrested in the Saudi Arabian city of Riyadh and held for a day, interrogated, strip-searched, and made to sign false confessions.
Her alleged crime? Sitting with a male business colleague in a Starbucks.
Yeah, you read that right. I am
NOT kidding.
The woman, who declined to give her full name for fear of retribution (and rightly so) from these zealot fruitbags, is married to a prominent businessman, has lived in Saudi Arabia for 8 years and is a managing partner for a finance company. When the power to their office went out, she and her work colleagues all went to a nearby Starbucks to use the wireless internet connection. She sat in a curtained booth with her business partner in the café's “family” area, the only seats where men and women are allowed to mix, since in Saudi Arabia, public contact between unrelated men and women is strictly prohibited.
“Some men came up to us with very long beards and white dresses. They asked ‘Why are you here together?'. I explained about the power being out in our office. They got very angry and told me what I was doing was a great sin,” recalled the woman.
The men were from the Mutaween, Saudi Arabia's Commission for Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, a police force of several thousand men charged with enforcing dress codes, sex segregation, slave-like subjugation of women as second-class chattel, and the observance of prayers. They took her cell phone, pushed her into a cab and drove her to Malaz prison in Riyadh. She was interrogated, strip-searched and forced to sign and fingerprint a series of confessions pleading guilty to her “crime”.
“They took me into a filthy bathroom, full of water and dirt. They made me take off my clothes and squat and they threw my clothes in this slush and made me put them back on,” she said. Eventually she was taken before a judge. “He said 'You are sinful and you are going to burn in hell'. I told him I was sorry. I was very submissive. I had given up. I felt hopeless,” she said.
Her husband had to call in favors from his political contacts to find where she was and secure her release. Very few women in Muslim countries have that luxury. She was later visited by a representative from the American Embassy, who promised to file a report. That report, if ever written at all, will be laughed at by the Saudi government and then promptly ignored, and we’ll go back to the status quo of kissing the royal Saudi ass to keep oil flowing.
Under Sharia Law, pretty much everything is outlawed except praying and subservience. (
Yeah, I made a blanket statement about another religion. So what? I’m already an infidel.)
This set of codes allows for cutting off the hands of someone suspected of thievery, for unmarried fornicators to be whipped with canes and adulterers to be stoned to death. It cites that homosexuals must be executed, and drinkers and gamblers should be whipped. Islam allows husbands to hit their wives even if the husbands merely fear she’s just being uppity. And here’s a good one: Islam orders death for Muslims and possible death for non-Muslim critics of Mohammed and the Koran and even Sharia itself. So, that means if you criticize Islam, doom on you and we’ll come after you.
Looks like I just invited a Jihad down on myself. I say BRING IT ON.It’s often claimed that Islamic societies have fewer incidents of fornication and adultery because of these strict laws, and customs like women wearing veils over their faces, abaya headscarves, or even full bodybag burkhas, or keeping separate from men in social settings. But these results of fewer incidents of sexual “crimes” have negative effects in other areas, such as the oppression of women. Generally, Sharia restricts women's social mobility and rights the more closely Sharia Law is followed. For example, in conservative Saudi Arabia women cannot vote, cannot drive, cannot be treated in a hospital or travel without the written permission of a male guardian. They cannot study the same things men do, and are barred from certain professions. In Iran women's testimony counts half that of men and far more women than men are stoned to death for adultery.
Here’s some more examples of peace and tolerance:
In February 1998 the Taliban, who once ruled in Afghanistan, ordered a stone wall to be pushed over on three men convicted of sodomy. Their lives were to be spared if they survived for 30 minutes and were still alive when the stones were removed.
In its 1991 Constitution, Iran adopted the punishment of execution for sodomy. This might be why President Ahmedinijad claimed on his visit here last summer that there are no homosexuals in Iran. No shit, buddy…you killed them all.
In April 2005, a Kuwaiti cleric said homosexuals should be thrown off a mountain or stoned to death.
On April 7, 2005, it was reported that Saudi Arabia sentenced more than 100 men to prison or flogging for “gay conduct.” These homosexuals were lucky. Most of Islam would have executed them.
In December 2004, an Amnesty International report stated that:
“An Iranian woman charged with adultery faces death by stoning in the next five days after her death sentence was upheld by the Supreme Court last month. Her unnamed co-defendant is at risk of imminent execution by hanging. She is to be buried up to her chest and stoned to death.”
In December, 2007, a 57-year old man killed his 16-year old daughter in an “honor killing” in Mississauga, Ontario, Canada. The teen had recently clashed with her family after ceasing to wear Islamic headgear and adopting a more Western style of dress.
Last year a 19-year old Saudi woman was abducted and gang-raped by seven men, and a court in Saudi Arabia sentenced her to 90 lashes because she was in a car with an unrelated man before she was abducted. She met a high school friend in his car to retrieve a picture of herself from him. Two men, armed with knives, got into their car and drove to a secluded spot where five others waited. The young woman had the courage to appeal the sentence and publicize her story in the media. And so the court increased her punishment to 200 lashes and six months in jail. Her lawyer, a prominent human rights defender, was suspended and faced a disciplinary hearing. However, under a barrage of world criticism, the Saudi King pardoned the girl.
In 2002, 15 Saudi schoolgirls died when officers of the morality police would not let them out of their burning school building - and barred firefighters from saving them - because the girls weren’t wearing the headscarf and black cloak that all women must wear in public.
In 2001, Iranian officials sentenced three men to flogging for illicit sex and for drinking alcohol.
In 2005, in Nigeria a Sharia court ordered that a drinker should be caned eighty strokes.
In 2005, in the Indonesian province of Aceh, fifteen men were caned in front of a mosque for gambling. This was done publicly so all could see and fear. Eleven others were scheduled to undergo the same penalty for gambling.
In 1989, Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa (legal decree) to assassinate Salman Rushdie, the novelist who wrote “The Satanic Verses”, which includes questions about the angel Gabriel's role in inspiring the Koran.
In 2005, The Muslim Council of Victoria, Australia, brought a lawsuit against two pastors for holding a conference and posting articles critiquing Islam. Three Muslims attended the conference and felt offended, and brought the suit. Appallingly, they won.
In January 2008, a Belarus court sentenced a newspaper editor to three years in prison for reprinting a caricature of the Prophet Mohammed that sparked worldwide riots when it was initially published in a Danish newspaper last year. According to the Associated Press, “less than 1 percent” of the population of Belarus is Muslim. Nevertheless, it appears that Sharia law has been instituted in the former Soviet republic.
Sharia law is also trying to keep criticism of Islam from being printed in American books and media outlets. Saudi billionaire Khalid bin Mahfouz has filed lawsuits through British courts over articles, books, and publications that were critical of Islam or showed Islamic funding of global terrorism.
The Supreme Court has defined (in
New York Times v. Sullivan, 1964) libel or slander by a journalist as stating or writing falsehoods or misrepresentations that damage someone’s reputation, and in cases of public figures doing so with malice. Under Sharia, by contrast, libel constitutes any oral or written remark offensive to a complainant, regardless of its accuracy or intent. Slander “means to mention anything concerning a person that he would dislike, whether about his body, religion, everyday life, self, disposition, property, son, father, wife, servant, turban, garment, gait, movements, smiling, dissoluteness, frowning, cheerfulness, or anything else connected with him,” according to “Reliance of the Traveller: The Classic Manual of Islamic Sacred Law Umdat”.
That means Sharia regards even the truth as slander if its subject dislikes the facts. Now applied through foreign courts, Sharia law interpretations of libel are undermining the viability of the American press. Though Mahfouz never proved merits in any libel case, he has threatened or sued more than 35 journalists and publishers (including many in the U.S.) through Britain’s High Court, and exacted fines, apologies and retractions from all but one. Way to go, Britain.
Unfortunately, in many western countries with large Muslim populations there have been calls to allow and adopt Sharia law, at least for the Muslims, but since they also want to forcibly convert everyone to be Believers that means they want it to apply to everyone. The call has been especially loud in Britain, and it galls me that the Brits have been pretty spineless in not nipping that crap in the bud. Even the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, said today that it was inevitable that Sharia law would come to England for Muslims to handle their own family affairs and that it “seems unavoidable” that elements of Islamic law be accepted into the British legal system. The head of the Church of England believes that officially sanctioning Sharia will improve community relations and aid integration. What a load of crap, your Holiness. You’ve just given them ammunition to make England less English and more Islamic.
Sharia law should be opposed for imposing of theocracy over democracy, its abuse of human rights, its institutionalized discrimination, its denial of human dignity and individual freedom of thought, its punishment of alternative lifestyle choices, and for the severity of its punishments. There is a naïve notion going around that if you display tolerance everyone will live peacefully side by side, singing “Kumbaya” and roasting marshmallows. This nation was indeed founded upon religious freedom, but when “tolerance” starts to impede upon the values that our nation was based upon and puts our other basic freedoms at risk, I gotta say “Whoa, hold up”. Separation of church & state means we also need to keep religion from ruling every aspect of our society.
I don’t doubt that most Muslims are peaceful folks and that we can all get along just fine. It’s the radical fundamentalists that I have a problem with, and archaic repressive laws from their religion, (or frankly anyone’s religion) trying to impose their will upon free-thinking peoples everywhere. Keep Sharia law out of American society, or American society will cease to exist.
Special thanks to James Arlandson of The American Thinker and Alyssa Lappen of Pajamas Media for providing much of my information.
