Once the financial markets have hopefully calmed down, this development is likely to gain much greater significance:
Five sharia courts have been set up in London, Birmingham, Bradford and Manchester and Nuneaton, Warwickshire. The government has quietly sanctioned that their rulings are enforceable with the full power of the judicial system, through the county courts or High Court. Previously, the rulings were not binding and depended on voluntary compliance among Muslims.
What has been predicted has come to pass. As I discussed on a previous post while attacking the Archbishop of Canterbury and a senior UK judge on the matter, this move undermines the core principle of a free society, namely, that all are equal under the rule of law, and that a polycentric legl code, while fine in theory, tends to be unacceptable in practice if some people, such as Muslim women, are at risk of being coerced by their families into submitting to such courts. Given that in matrimonial disputes, men are favoured over women under Muslim law, this development is bad for women. Now, where is the chorus of complaint from feminists?
The article continues:
Muslim tribunal courts started passing sharia judgments in August 2007. They have dealt with more than 100 cases that range from Muslim divorce and inheritance to nuisance neighbours. It has also emerged that tribunal courts have settled six cases of domestic violence between married couples, working in tandem with the police investigations.
In tandem?
The rulings of arbitration tribunals are binding in law, provided that both parties in the dispute agree to give it the power to rule on their case.
That has to be the crucial point, but the worry must be that women, for example, will face considerable pressure in marital disputes to submit – that is what Islam means – to sharia law. The whole point about everyone being under the same legal code is that pressure is at least lessened somewhat.
This comment was telling:
In a recent inheritance dispute handled by the court in Nuneaton, the estate of a Midlands man was divided between three daughters and two sons. The judges on the panel gave the sons twice as much as the daughters, in accordance with sharia. Had the family gone to a normal British court, the daughters would have got equal amounts.
Well, exactly. Now that the Tories are miles ahead in the opinion polls, it would not be too much to ask for a future Tory administration to shut these courts down if it can be shown that parties to a dispute had been under any duress to accept them in the first place. Also, where children are involved and therefore the child is clearly not able to consent, such rulings should be declared inadmissable, period. The same point would apply to any other network of courts or arbitrators from any other religion, for that matter. For example, as far as I understand it, Jewish courts do not have binding powers if they are at odds with the existing UK ones.
At the very least, this development plays straight into the hands of bigots of all stripes, including the Far Right, of course. Equality before the law may sometimes be an empty phrase, but it touches on a vital principle in jurispudence in a free society.
On the contrary, it is no big deal. There’s nothing magical about sharia, for good or bad, and such courts of course cannot exclude the law of the land. If it is no good to them as a voluntary dispute resolution procedure then people will end up in the common law courts anyway. If they choose to submit to some sharia court because of genuine personal belief, even when it is to their disaadvantage, then I don’t see how it is my business.
Well if such courts cannot exclude the law of the land, why should people elect to go to a sharia court rather than a regular English, Welsh or Scottish one, Guy? The fact there is demand from Muslims (mostly men of course) for such courts is precisely so that they can get something they would not get under the Common Law, such as being able to get much better treatment.
And yes, I suppose that in theory these courts are still “voluntary” but as I said, the plight of Muslim women and their relative lack of power in a relationship is likely to mean that such courts reinforce what is already a problem. To suggest otherwise strikes me as downright naive.
Sorry to be blunt but this is definitely a public interest issue, given the asymmetric treatment of women under sharia and their situation at the present time.
“this move undermines the core principle of a free society”
Has free society been undermined by UK Jewish Beth Din courts which have been active for over 100 years?
If they choose to submit to some sharia court because of genuine personal belief
No chance of coercion, eh?
The problem as I see it is that you can’t have two legal philosophies and two systems of courts and hope to have a working country. Though I suppose you could break Britain up into earldoms and let the earls pick whatever system happens to appeal to them. That might work.
Well, that’s me fucked then. My dad’s muslim, I’m C of E. Under Sharia, that makes me apostate and I must be put to death.
Now, I can avoid Birmingham, Bradford, Manchester and Nuneaton but London would be a bit tricky as it’s where I work. Perhaps I should ask my employers to let me telecommute full time, so’s I don’t get murdered?
NB – I’m not making this up.
JP,
I blogged this one myself. A while back. You been busy with the financial world collapsing 😉
The key point is enforcement. The assorted organs of the state have been for a coupla years actually enforcing these sharia rulings. Remove that and it’s just a bunch of men with beards spouting off.
The second key point (ref Mark Y’s comment above) is the huge difference between the Beth Din and these Islamoloons. The former really are not a problem externally (internally – well, Jewish law is not my forte – so I dunno) but Islam is expansionistic and Siddiqi the geezer behind the sharia courts sees this as a start, not an endpoint. He would like to expand into the realm of criminal law for example. I would bet my testicles on that. It’s a first step to getting choppy, stony and whippy. I don’t see the Beth Din up to that sort of antics. The last time UK Jewry generally behaved in a depraved manner was in the fevered imagination of Oswald Mosley.
Of course choppy, stony and whippy are already here (honour killings) but allowing sharia decisions to be legally enforceable is shining a big green light in front of the bastards who are playing a big game of “slowly, slowly, catchee monkey”.
One last thing. Islamic and UK inheritance laws are clearly different. Why would any woman freely consent to the former when it was blindingly obvious she’d get a better deal from the latter?
Presumably Guy would have opposed the Married Womens’ Property Act on the grounds that if women did not wish to cede their property to a husband then they should avoid marriage?
The fact is that Sharia is an import from backward, inferior and disfunctional societies that would negate hundreds of years of Western progress.
Or as V S Naipaul put it “they come here from their own benighted counties”.
So what? Business has legally binding private arbitration. This is no one else’s business. Are they being forced against their will to engage with Sharia Courts? If not it is not a matter of concern.
I want a system of privatised non-state law. Sharia Law is just a competing system.
Sorry, should be “countries” of course!
No intention to denigrate Humberside etc.
So, private arbitration services are bad how? If a woman can be pressured into letting a Shari’ court arbitrate surely she can be coerced into not reclaiming her rights at all.
On the other hand, many Muslimas that would never go to a secular court (for various reasons) might have an easier time going to a Shari’ court, which is better than nothing (and yes, women do have rights under Shari’a).
Well, those people applauding this are demonstrating the point where libertarianism eats itself. I’ve argued this before, and appear to be about to do so now; those who discuss polycentric and non-state law don’t really have a grasp of reality. IMHO of course.
Read through any discussion on it and you’ll find hidden between the lines an unstated assumption of western society and western values acting as a guarantor of decent behaviour by the various private laws, courts and police forces. There is an invisible Higher Power which drives all these courts to act much like ours already do. The discussions are normally based on relatively trivial matters without ideological problems- Alice defrauds Bob, Charlie infringes Dave’s property border. Nobody wants to get around to who is acting as guarantor of all this once you’ve effectively abolished the state.
Because let us be clear here, the unified legal system defines a society, and if you have parallel legal systems, you have parallel societies trying to share the same geographical space. You need separate law making bodies, separate means to constitute them, separate parliaments, and people living in different societies next door to each other. And frankly anyone who thinks that’s going to work is in La La Land.
It’s not just a matter of girls living under a grotesque mediaeval system in a supposedly free western country. It’s that individualism and individual rights are a fundamental of our society, and if they don’t apply to all that society no longer exists. Libertarianism- like socialism or conservatism- defines a particular relationship between the citizen and the state, and thus only has any meaning when there is a citizen and state to discuss. Which is why you can’t apply it to non-citizens when discussing say immigration either. If you try to abandon that, the concept of a-sorry- collective known as the nation, or the state, or what have you, you have nothing left to discuss. The polycentric law becomes an abolition of that unified polity, unless you have some Higher Power above the polycentric law systems, in which case it isn’t polycentric any more, is it? If not, you must allow- indeed, cannot prevent- an unlimited number of legal systems (and thus, separate societies) forming, until the point of a separate law for each person is reached, which is anarchism. And anarchism doesn’t work, because once you abolish the state, the power vacuum will be filled by those who there is now no power to stop.
Gangs become tribes, they fight each other, somebody gains the most power and announces they’re King Of Nuneaton or President Of Hampstead. Anyone who wants a fuller understanding of that process, and the violence it entails, may like to read a history book.
Excelletn post Ian. I am struck by the lack of reaction from the Left over this – if white middle-class women were being exploited and treated in the same way as Muslim women are under Sharia, there would be a ferocious outcry.
What the Left dresses up as Multiculturalism is simply a racist disregard for Muslim women. They simply aren’t important enough to merit such lofty rights as equality before the Law.
I cannot agree Johnathan. If people want to submit to binding arbitration using idiotic Sharia law, hell, or Klingon law for that matter, why is it appropriate to say they cannot?
As long as the courts do not try to impose penalties that are themselves illegal (such as cutting off people’s hands) within the overarching boundaries of national law, then it is just another market decision by private individuals. The fact *we* find Islam and all its works appalling is neither hear nor there, just so long as no one if bound to it without prior consent.
Nothing to see here, move along.
Ohhhhhhhh yes it is, Perry.
This is rather like the left using the fact some people make ‘excessive’ amounts of money in their opinion to justify the state’s actions in confiscating that money.
I do not care if you find Sharia ‘ickky’ (I certainly do) because if both parties agree to be bound by private arbitration, it is none of your biz to tell them they cannot. As long as they stay within the boundaries of wider law, it is a private matter.
I don’t know what this wider law of yours is, Perry. Clearly the sharia courts are offering a different menu of decisions based on non-English law, otherwise they wouldn’t be sharia courts. Sentencing for instance appears to be based on trying to guess what a seventh century cult leader would want, as with all the rest of the system, rather than on English sentencing guidelines. The legal precedents used aren’t English, they’re sharia. And I wonder on what basis you’re going to define limits to sharia.
This first implementation is, though veyr significant, relatively minor. But once “it works at this level, it should be taken up to a higher one” is declared, as it will be for sure, then what argument are you going to use? How are you going to draw your line in the sand? When are you going to say “sorry, that’s not acceptable”? How can you argue that 10% is wrong, when you applauded 5%?
And, in general, converting the universalism of English Law into a polycentric, or quasi-polycentric system, is not “a prvate matter”. You’re talking about profound changes to the basis of our national culture.
But I have to say, most people who argue the “who cares?” line don’t actually believe culture exists, let alone have any interest in the idea of a nation as a meaningful entity. Which is fine, until all the nice western nations you unthinkingly relied on for your everyday freedoms have embraced diversity to such a degree that they no longer meaningfully exist and, suddenly, there’s nowhere left to run to.
So you think a Sharia court in UK can cut off people’s hands?
Private arbitration in which both parties agree to be bound by a third party who is not a judge sitting in a wig is nothing new in Britain.
No, and don’t try to evade the discussion by pushing it to an extreme for the purposes of ridicule.
A judge is a judge, regardless of whether he wears a wig or not. A private judge is a private judge. Tribunals are courts, even if not called courts. Just as they who make laws are governing even if they don’t call themselves a government *cough* The EU *cough*.
And do you not think domestic violence cases are somewhere beyond the everyday meaning of “arbitration” already?
At least the Sharia is based on something concrete. Law in Britain is being made up as they go along, based on some weird mashup of existing UK legal principles *loosely* based on anglo common law and the completely alien and, in many respects, contradictory Code Napoleon.
From where I’m sitting, Sharia isn’t the problem – the anarcho-tyranny we’ve descended into thanks to British Law is.
We already have children who have to eat halal food to accommodate the dietry needs of others. Workers have been asked not to eat in the presence of Muslims during Ramadan.Several Christian holidays have been down graded so not to offend Muslims.
How long will it be before Sharia is imposed on us all in the name of equality?
If our customs and laws are unsuitable and we must change to suit the Muslim community,what exactly are we getting in return.
BTW How is the Libertarian Party of the KSA doing?
Of course that might be true, but if sharia courts are set up, develop a following, then the pressures on women in Muslim areas will grow to accept them and submit to their rulings. This thing will develop a momentum of its own. And however much I am wary of “slippery slope” arguments, this is one area where I think that even if sharia courts could be, strictly speaking, able to work without great difficulty, their existence could presage further calls for their scope to extend towards the criminal law.
Marital disputes where, for example, violence may have occured is not something that can be simply dealt as an arbitration issue, as Guido Fawkes seemed to suggest in drawing a parallel with private business arbitrators.
Yes, the ravings of a mediaeval cult leader. Nothing makes a better fundamental for a justice system than basing it entirely on the question, “What would Mohammed do?”
Remember, for instance, the difference between western and islamic thought. In the west, we answer the question, “is terrorism acceptable?” by applying rational thought and reasoning an answer. In Islam, you go through the Koran and associated texts to see whether Mohammed approved it or not. That’s it. If he said yes, it’s fine. No further thought needed.
According to the link (Telegraph?) at Nick and Cats’ site, these shar’ia courts have already heard a half-dozen domestic violence cases and disposed of them without imposing anything that I’d recognize as a sentence.
Unless UK law is radically different from US on this matter, “domestic violence” is a criminal matter. And at least every place that I’ve been, “DV” is not a substantive crime on its own but rather a term for a set of facts surrounding another crime (usually some variant of assault, “Actual Bodily Harm” or some such in UK legalese). Meaning, every place I’ve ever been, the only way to avoid jail is to not actually be convicted.
The article was weak on further details, but I’d really love to know just how many of those six defendants were actually innocent and how many entered pleas of “Not guilty by reason of some defense that doesn’t actually exist in the UK’s laws but only in Islamic law.”
And now, cue the capital-L Libertarians who seem to think that family violence is a contract issue.
It was not an attempt at ridicule, it was a fair response to your rather weird remark…
Okay Perry, look at it this way. Ask yourself which of these is most likely, based not on libertarian ideals but on your practical knowledge of the world and the left-statist, hegemonically multiculturalist society in which we actually live-
(a) The Wider Law will restrain sharia courts.
(b) The Wider Law will be reshaped to accomodate sharia courts.
Ian B, the law in Britain has at its heart, `What would the mythical reasonable man do?’
If you think that’s an improvement on Sharia, or indeed any different at all, I’ll have some of what you’re smoking.
You also entirely ignore my other assertions which were the real point of my post. British Law is now not based on anything at all – it’s simply become the law of the gun and the Government has all the guns. The rich and powerful and taking the money and running and bugger the rest of us.
IMNSVHO too many people are busy arguing philosophy to apply the tools the Enlightment gave us and take a hard look at what is actually going on around us.
You can’t build any useful system of laws unless you start from a set of fundamental moral principles that you stick by like them or not.
Well actually yes that is better than sharia. If you can’t comprehend why a legal system that can adapt to circumstance is better than a legal system which attempts to encapsulate the mental state of one man a millennium and a half ago, you’re welcome to some of my Golden Virginia if it’ll wake you up a bit.
One of the greatest problems the west currently has is it’s full of people who love to eulogise other cultures and how much more, y’know, real they are and how we have so much to learn and we don’t believe in anything really, do we? but never have the balls to actually go and live in them.
My question is why all this pandering and accommodation to the Muslim minority? On a cost benefit basis the amounts spent on accommaditing Muslims are not justified.
They cost the public more than their contribution to the public good. End of story.
Imposing their idiotic no-nos on the rest of society is ridiculous. If Muslims want to live in a pig and dog free paradise let them find one and not clamour to change the UK to their specifications.
Jeez, it’s as bad as trying to argue with Americans.
Take a look around you. British Law is now, as a matter of practical application, not based on anything at all. They’re trying to reconcile English common law with the Code Napoleon to make the European superstate look as tho it will fly.
Habeas corpus – dead.
Double jeopardy – dead.
Need I go on? Actually, it’s obviously pointless me going on because you just don’t get it and, I suspect, never will.
You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him think.
As a Law graduate, I’m with Johnathan and Ian B.
There can be only one Law, not parallel systems with different results and verdicts
This is the thin end of the wedge.
As Nick M said, this is just the beginning. Our Muslim friends will be looking to expand these courts exponentially.
They are indulging in Lawfare on all fronts.
Testing all the time. The Court cases over Jihabs etc, the calls for hate speech laws.
Drip drip drip.
And the Left appear to be cheering them on.
John Pate-
Your criticisms of what’s happened to English Law are entirely valid and I’m sure everyone here pretty much agrees with you. Nonetheless, that doesn’t make it “no better than sharia” and we’re not going to fix it by just throwing it away, nor by promoting the ideologically driven lunacy of pick’n’mix law.
Separate point- just out of interest, what happens when something is a crime under one system but not another? Under English Law adultery is merely grounds for divorce. Under sharia, it is actually a criminal offence (and a capital crime in that glorious testament to the wisdom of Islam, Iran, for instance). How exactly are we supposed to maintain a legal tradition in which everyone is equal before the law, when the criminality or not of an act is to be judged, to all practical purposes, by one’s ethnic origins, and even strictly by one’s religious affiliation?
You don’t understand what shari’a is and how it is supposed to work.
I think the momentum will do more to transform shari’a than to transform society. Shari’a, much like Jewish jurisprudence and common law, is an open system that is capable of adapting to changing circumstances… and recognition of Shari’ arbitration services will be a efficient catalyst for the process outlined, for example, in this report.
Nails it.
Despite what people here seem to believe we don’t have to let anyone who wants to come here in. If the consequence of accepting Islamic immigration is this, then it’s high time we admitted we made a big mistake and stopped intensifying it
But you’re a yid, don’t you see how hypocritical you’re being?
I see that anti-Jewish violence increases in direct proportion to Islamic immigration. I see that the attitude of Muslim immigratns is categorically different from that of Jewish ones and that insitutions will inevitably change in reflection of this fact.
But what if we decided that Jewish courts of arbitration posed the same risk as you think Muslims ones do?
Well, then I’d leave, what the hell do you think I’d do?
The route for enforcing Sharia court decisions is the Arbitration Act. This law is set up primarily in the context of commercial dispute resolution. Its application to areas like family law and criminal acts like violence is far outside the scope of its original intent. As a minimum any UK court asked to enforce a sharia judgment should ask very searching questions about the quality of evidence and level of legal representation available to the parties, and if there is any deviation from the standards required under UK law and court standards it should refuse to enforce the “judgment”.
Perry said:
“So you think a Sharia court in UK can cut off people’s hands?”
Ultimately, yes. That is indeed their goal.
Yes I do. If you thinkI’m factually wrong, please explain why.
No it isn’t, because it is inherently constrained by the muslim religious texts, and its entire system depends on them. It cannot make any decision which contradicts the Quran. It can attempt to reinterpret the Quran etc, but if a hadith says “Mohammed says you must not wear an orange hat on a tuesday”, that’s it, no orange hats on tuesdays. Indeed, it’s really just a game of “Mohammed says, put your hands in the air…”
If Mohammed hasn’t said it, you then try to guess what Mohammed would have said by what he did. But it is no way an “open system”. It’s strictly boxed.
To be clear, polycentric legal systems have “worked” up to a point, for example in the Ottoman empire and to an extent the late Roman empire.
They have all necessitated, and in a sense supported, an absolutist governement wielding arbitrary and frankly terroristic power.
Would you really, Gabriel?
Suppose one were to say this- “Jewish courts have been an anomaly which was no practical problem in the past. However, they are now being used as a precedent for other groups to crowbar their own court systems. As such, we will abolish the anomaly and have every British citizen subject to the same laws and courts.”
Is that really so objectionable? If you really won’t give up Jewish courts, you are being hypocritical to refuse Muslim ones- even if, as we probably both agree, in practical terms the two are quite different due to the different natures of the underlying religions.
Actually, shari’a allows quite a bit of leeway in this, and applications of Islamic law that contradict the literal meaning of Qur’an scripture are possible and acceptable. Hadiths are even less authoritative than the Qur’an as they rely on hearsay stories.
As Radwan A. Masmoudi wrote in Struggles Behind Words: Sharia, Sunnism, and Jihad, “…shariah is also subject to interpretation and to the ever-changing needs of society. Muslim scholars have the responsibility of prioritizing the needs of the society and of coming up with the right solutions. […] Imam al-Ghazzali [1058-1111] wrote that “the purpose of the law (shariah) for human beings is fivefold: the preservation for them of their religion, soul, intellect, offspring, and property.”
Two examples can illustrate this point. Fifteen years after the death of Prophet Mohammed, Caliph Omar ibn-al-Khattab stopped cutting off the hands of thieves because he argued that they had a legitimate need due to hunger and/or poverty. He justified his apparent contradiction of a verse from the Quran by saying that the principle of justice and fairness is supreme. Similarly, the councils of Muslim ulamas in Europe and the United States decreed in 2000 that it was permissible for Muslims residing in the West to buy houses with mortgages and to pay interest on these loans. This contradicts a clear Quranic teaching against interest (riba), but was justified by well-known and respected Muslim scholars, who argued that such permission was necessary for Muslims to meet their financial and social needs in the West.
These examples show that shariah is not fixed in time. True understanding and implementation of shariah requires change and adaptation based on the changing circumstances and needs of the society. This process of ijtihad was very common in the first three centuries of Islam but unfortunately was stopped in the fifth century. Modern attempts to restart ijtihad have so far been modest and not very successful. Proper use of ijtihad can bridge the gap between the secularists and the Islamists and offer the right solutions to the needs of Muslim societies today.”
If the principle and purpose of shari’a is the protection of humans’ “religion, soul, intellect, offspring, and property”, it’s a lot better than what we have now.
Why, then, do we need “Islamic Banking” to avoid the muslim prohibition on interest?
The prophet (bpuh) says at this point in a debate on the internet one is required to quote Wikipedia…
“Ijtihad is mainly associated with the Shi’a Muslim Jafari school of jurisprudence. The “gates of ijtihad” were “closed” in the 10th century in Sunni fiqh, meaning that ijtihad is not practiced in Sunni Islam, and Sunnis, unlike Shi’as, have to follow rulings interpreted in the 10th century.”
and
“In the words of Joseph Schacht: “hence a consensus gradually established itself to the effect that from that time onwards no one could be deemed to have the necessary qualifications for independent reasoning in religious law, and that all future activity would have to be confined to the explanation, application, and, at the most, interpretation of the doctrine as it had been laid down once and for all.“
One thing everyone is forgetting is that Muslims are allowed to beat their wives. If John Doe here owes me money and I am allowed to beat him to get him into the court at the back of my alley where me and my buds will adjuducate a proper penalty then there is really very little voluntary in John Doe’s act of choosing my alleyway as his source of arbitration.
Mo wouldn’t even intervene against a wife beater when his favorite wife (the little girl he was diddling at the time) begged him to. He told her that she would do better to think on what caused the man to beat his wife in the first place.
Really, it is hard to think of anything horrific that isn’t explicitly allowed to the followers of Allah… at least the male ones.
And if people in the UK are so far removed from reality that they can’t see the consequence of allowing a system of law to flourish that is based on the personal morality of an illiterate man who engaged in brigandry, murder, pedophilia, rape and slavery and whose philosophy has caused poverty and violence everywhere it has been propagated then there is really no use in discussing anything.
The Muslims intend to outbreed you and to increase their hold on all of your institutions until they have control… at which time you will be allowed to convert, pay the jizya, or die. This is what the Koran says must be and it is quite explicit. Your hope is that they don’t take their religion seriously enough to follow all of it tenents. In other words, you hope that they abandon their principles as easily as you do yours.
I wish you the best of luck with that.
Yeah. I wouldn’t be bitter about it as I would if you got your way regarding your foreskin obsession, but I’d leave for somewhere more commodious.
A hypocrite is one who acts a persona contrary to their real nature. Whether I do this or not is neither here nor there.
What you mean is that I am inconsistent measuring by a standard that you think is important and I don’t. Which I am.
Because Islamic law is pluricentric and not all Muslims accept the decisions of the ‘ulamas. Besides, they only allowed paying interests on mortgage loans.
And lots of Muslims, especially those living in the West don’t agree that the gates of ijtihad are closed, as evidenced by this decision.
I am thinking some of the people here arguing that women who simply don’t want to be coerced to the Sharia Way should choose not to agree to be ruled by these courts don’t actually understand Domestic Violence.
DV is a system of coersion in itself. It usually involves brainwashing and/or intimidation by the perpetrator. So, why would someone who has already been minimized, trivialized, maybe even brutalized by an emotional and maybe physical bully suddenly grow the emotional maturity to choose a court other than the one being forced upon them? Our modern western system, imperfect as it is, has a main component in it about protecting the vulnerable party. I don’t see how this whole Sharia mess supports that.
English.
That raises an important point about all this. Aren’t we talking about civil courts here? Nothing I’ve read suggests that these courts will be ruling on criminal cases at all.
…yet. That’s what worries me. We know Islam’s MO. Once these courts have been established, it’s almost certain there will be a push to expand their scope from some quarters.
Sam do keep up 😉
As has been mentioned by Sunfish, and others,
6 of these cases have been domestic violence.
Now Islam is cool with beating up on women, but my civilisation has progressed to a point where it is not.
We have laws against it.
You can go to jail for it.
Yet none of these six husbands has been banged up or suffered the stigma of a Criminal conviction.
Why?
Gutless appeasment is why.
It’s their Culture Innit!
Well I want to live in a country, that when I hear bloody mahem coming through the wall from next door, a bit of a domestic going on, and I ring the Police, they respond and arrest those needful of arrest.
I dont need to be told,
Well yes ordinarily if your white, we would arrest you.
But they have resolved it under Sharia Law and she got a really good deal in goats for the bruising!
For fucks Sake!!!
“As long as the courts do not try to impose penalties that are themselves illegal (such as cutting off people’s hands) within the overarching boundaries of national law, then it is just another market decision by private individuals. The fact *we* find Islam and all its works appalling is neither hear nor there, just so long as no one if bound to it without prior consent.”
Why would they be illegal then if two people agree with cutting hands? Why that you think that it will work
saying to Sharia courts you can do this but you can’t do that?
The pratical result of this will be the autoexclusion of one community. They will have their live specially those that get Goverment money that are already autoexcluded from economy and work will be also autoexcluded from other references.
Why would she go to court at all, indeed? And wouldn’t she rather go to an Islamic court than to a secular one? Having disputes between believers settled by unbelievers according to the unbelievers’ rules is strongly discouraged in Islam (as it is in Christianity, btw).
As a matter of fact, you can’t do anything about DV unless the victim wants to fight back. But a devout Muslima is not going to rebel against DV if she is thinks it’s all fine according to Islamic law. Islamic counselors and Islamic courts are most likely to be able to help her without compromising her faith.
While I found lucklucky’s post to be somewhat unclear, the repeated use of the word “autoexclusion” helped to crysalise, in my mind, that which worries me most – on a purely selfish and peronal level.
I hinted at it in my (admittedly somewhat hyperbolic) post above. It’s autoinclusion (if, indeed, that is a word).
While I regard myself as being in no way, shape or form any part of a muslim “community”, it is clear to me that many muslims (including liberal ones – i.e. those who don’t want to punish with violence my alleged apostacy) do see me as being irrevocably part of such.
With that in mind, I do not believe it to be unreasonable for this news to spark fear of future coercion in my mind.
Now, in a sense it’s no skin off my nose – I’m moving to Texas. But I’m fairly sure that I’m not the only one in this situation….
Anonymous Ungodly Self-Manipulator-
I can’t figure out whether you’re being deliberately obtuse or just not looking at the bigger picture. What is being created here is a form of apartheid. It will be the norm, the default, for muslims to go to “their own” court, the expected thing. They will get “their own” form of justice, not English justice. They will be locked into an imposed collective, which is what multiculturalism leads to, the enforcement of separation. This isn’t choice.
Besides all else, you are confusing “Muslim”- a person who personally believes in Islam, with “Multiculturally muslim”- a person who is officially designated muslim by others. Maybe our muslima isn’t actually very devout. Maybe she wants to be just a normal citizen who happens to be muslim. But now she is officially stamped “muslim” by the state. The police treat her not as a citizen, but as a “muslim citizen”. And remember, this won’t affect just wives. It will affect dependents, children, the elderly, anyone whose choice of court to attend will be decided by others. Do young muslims deserve the lesser standard of protection that Islam offers than other youngsters? Do we just say, “its their way” because of their bad luck to be born to Deobandi parents?
This is about locking people into groups, not giving individuals choice. Muslimist activists want muslim zones, with muslim schools, muslim politicians and councils, muslim police, muslim courts. All officially recognised and inviolable. Do you really not see what is happening?
What is all this fuss about? What will be achieved by all the emotive discussion and hot air being vented here?
As has been demonstrated elsewhere on this forum, it would seem that Islam is not going to go away and that we had all better get used to it.
The Quran and Sharia’h law will become fundamental components of UK society, and they will become dominant, because they must. Why? According to the word of Allah in the Koran, Islam must become the dominant religion in any country or society in which it finds itself. Islam = Quran + Sharia’h law.
Whether you feel Islam is regarded as an export from a “benighted country” is largely irrelevant. It has already been imported to the UK and it is unlikely to be reduced or eradicated. On the contrary, clearly it is growing by the “guile” method (“softly, softly catchee monkee”), as directed by Allah. Certainly, none of the great minds on Samizdata have been able to come up with a solution to this except to punch someone in the face.
Islam is about belief and submission. That belief is far stronger than anything you kaffirs (non-believers) can come up with. Allah knows that a place in hell has already been reserved for you. You cannot argue with the absolute law and infallible word of Allah. Allah knows all.
Instead of decrying the quiet introduction of Sharia’h law into UK legal system, this could be a time for rejoicing in the fulfilment of the word of Allah. The benighted country could be the UK, and Allah’s word has been brought by the very people the British welcomed to their shores, and it will free the British people through Islam. The British will perhaps one day be able to thank their Islamic brothers for this.
By the way, the original post by Johnathan Pearce would seem to have been incorrectly tagged “Middle East & Islamic”. A more correct tag might be “Midlands and Islamic”. (Move with the times, Johnathan.)
Ian B,
all of your arguments can analogously be applied to the Battei Din, the Orthodox Jewish rabbinical courts. Yet those institutions have worked pretty well for some 100 years in the UK now.
Frankly, “arbitrators that a certain socioreligious group has a strong cultural preference for are OK, even when they discriminate against women. Unless they happen to be Muslims, in which case Britain is DOOMED” doesn’t strike me as a very compelling argument. The slippery slope has already proved to be not so slippery after all.
Allah knows that a place in hell has already been reserved for you. You cannot argue with the absolute law and infallible word of Allah. Allah knows all.
I’m going to Wales tomorrow, for a week,
with my 85 year old mother!
How do you know these things oh Slarti!
Blessings be on his Bartfarst!
Sorry RAB, I do tend to skim through long threads like this.
It’s hard to generalize – I know several Muslims and get along well with them; they don’t seem to be the “chop off their hands” type – but I think the trouble is that while an acceptance that, should they clash, the temporal law of the land takes precedence over religious law is more or less universal among both practitioners and clergy of most faiths – hence why most people have no problem with Jewish courts – that can’t be said with any certainty of Islam. It may be true of a large number of “ordinary” Muslims – my acquaintances, for example – but we’ve heard too many clerics calling for Sharia to supplant “the law of man” both here and abroad for us to be sure that they’ll settle for their courts taking the same low profile as the long established rabbinical ones.
So I tend to agree with other commenters: the danger is that Muslims will feel pressurized by those who “know better” to submit to these courts, even against their better judgment; that to accept the courts and laws “of man” is to be a bad Muslim. And that’s the road to a de facto parallel Muslim state.
Look folks, basically everything Ian B has said.
Everything!
The Islamist agenda is clear. They have not been coy about it.
The first phase is to maintain the “Islamic Integrity” of the imiigtrant population.
The second is to expand that community by further immigration and breeding (Yes, Aisha, you will marry your cousin from Islamobad that you never met and give birth to his kids ad infinitum whether you like it or not).
The third is to set-up a parallel system and to de-facto and de-jure seize control of areas and then (back to 1&2) iterate the process.
The end goal is taking over completely. It’s in the fucking Qu’ran!
Sorry folks. This is the thin end of a slippery slope. And it must stop full fucking stop.
Or Europe will get fighty again. And it will not end well. The average European (I live near Manchester, I used to live in Manchester, Stepney, Nottingham, Leeds…) is getting fucked off. It will all end in tears.
I am a reasonable, liberal person, but I have seen posters hailing the “Magnificent 19” in my city and frankly I wanted to burn the fucking mosque down.
I understand many Brits have their heads in the sand about sharia, but didn’t realize Mr. Perry de H is one of them. There will not be anything “voluntary” about this. In the culture of “honor killings” and women having fewer rights than the menfolk, anything involving domestic disputes will be ruled in favour of men. It is surprising that you guys would like to wait until Sharia starts cutting off hands before you get serious about this!
Nothing to see here, move along? well get your head out of your arse, you will see what is here.
Sam Duncan
Most probably aren’t. Some are probably the Muslim version of the average Episcopalian: show up at the mosque for hatch, match, and dispatch, and otherwise don’t worry about it. And culture probably matters here: most of the Muslims I know are Bosnian or Albanian, and don’t have the cultural history of stoning supposed adulteresses and beheading infidels.
(Actually, the ones I know well enough to socialize with, when they think of the West they think of the people who protected them from slaughter at the hands of Chetniks.)
Meaning: I don’t know what I mean. I’m probably Islamophobic by Guardian-reader standards (if I hear someone yell “Allahu Akhbar” in a public place my weapon’s coming out for damn sure) but that’s not really a fear of individual Muslims. It’s weird and I couldn’t say what it actually means.
Slartibartfast:
AGNTSA.
The rest of us aren’t going anywhere. People who wish to live amongst us may live by the rules of civilized people or they will have a tough row to hoe. But I don’t propose to grow a beard, cease looking at women, or give up beer and pigmeat because some illiterate 6th-century pedophile took the brown acid in some cave.
Anonymous Wanker:
First: read Romans ch. 13, dumbass.
Second: The reason for taking DV to court is because crimes involving domestic violence are CRIMES. They are acts prohibited by law, for which penalties are prescribed by law, and for which procedures for handling them are also established in law.
And FWIW, discretion is typically removed from the victims in this case, because of the brainwashing involved.
I hate to use a loaded term like ‘brainwashing,’ but I don’t have one that fits better. Being a victim of crime changes how people think. Being a victim of pattern-and-series crimes like (the average) DV changes how people’s minds work, even more so. (IMHO the real crime isn’t the broken bone but the psychological harm, but that’s a little more involved and is beyond the scope of this discussion.) At any rate, I don’t believe that it’s possible for a DV victim to decide to nolle a case without coercion being a factor.
If you want an actual frightening prediction: imagine that someone decides that, since the courts won’t punish a given class of offender, the actor might as well exact ‘street justice’ in the belief that this is the only justice that will happen with a given criminal or criminals of a given religion or ethnicity.
Such an environment could logically derive from public perception that the established institutions which we depend on for public safety or for justice are incapable of providing any chance of either.
There’s a name for that. Like ‘Somalia.’
My point is simple: – I want to stop Islamic suicide bombers killing people in England. How do I do it?
The first step is to stop radicalisation, but where does that take place? It takes place where people are immersed in Islamic culture, in other words in a parallel (to the western) society.
A parallel society is where the people wear different clothes, eat different food, have different schools, courts, and live somewhere else.
So to stop radicalisation bring the Muslims into western society so it becomes the norm, or fight tooth and nail to westernise them.
My money is on Islam because it believes and modern western society breeds passiveness- that is people who will not get off their fat arses to do anything
Well, and you go read the starting verses of 1 Corinthians ch. 6.
The right of consenting citizens to resolve their disputes in whatever manner they deem acceptable is fundamental to a free society. And if Islamic marriage counseling can relieve the courts, more power to them.
Now DV is a nasty issue, but secular courts can’t really do more than slap a fine and a restraining order on the perp either… I think an integrated approach that involves the whole community is much more likely to succeed and to prevent future cases.
Oh, and Somalia isn’t doing bad in comparison, despite the repercussions from their civil war. Seems the absence of government isn’t such a bad thing after all. But I digress.
My my…great reading.
Think on it for a while.
Had we not had the foresight in allowing hundreds of thousands of mediaeval primitives into this culturally & demographically suicidal excuse for a country……….
……..what on earth would we talk about?
Wanker,
The whole point your opponents here are trying to make is exactly about “consent”. A cursory reading (and I’ve done much more than that) of Islamic scripture and law is enough to know that that consent is almost ccertainly not “informed”. Try and walk a mile in that niqab and see how you feel.
Try imagining (as RonB, above, certainly seems to be able to) what it is like to be brought up like that in an Islamic ghetto like the ones I know first hand in Manchester or Tower Hamlets. There are women there who have lived here for decades and speak virtually no English, sometimes (rare) none at all. How could they possibly make an informed choice as to which legal system to adjudicate their divorce or handle their inheritance case?
RonB’s Parallel Universe thing is absolutely right. That is the Islamists first goal – keeping the wagons circled. Keeping Western corruption out. And Sharia courts are a way of doing this par excellence.
PS. Christianity has nothing to do with it. The Anglosphere is secular (don’t come back with the established Church of England argumnet, please – it’s a joke).
These arguments tend to revolve around the same plughole every time; fundamentally about what the correct characterisation of islam in western countries is. You end up with two camps which for want of better terms we could call “panickers” (that’s me then) and “apologists”. Panickers believe there is a crisis, apologists say there is no crisis. So, it’s down to an argument about whether there is a crisis to address at all.
This is not dissimilar to arguments about, say, global warming. Greens say there is a crisis and something must be done, skeptics (that’s me then) say there is no problem to address. But that skeptic argument doesn’t answer the question, “what should we do if the crisis did exist?” And that is a reasonable question to ask. Even if CO2 is entirely harmless, it’s not beyond the realms of possibility that some other global environmental threat could arise. Libertarians are still left with the question of what they would do if some profound market externality arose.
So back to Islam, we can argue all day about how to corretly characterise Islam; whether it’s no problem at all and there are just a few mad buggers making it look bad, or whether it’s infested with a desire to subvert and destroy the non-islamic world. My colours are nailed to the mast on that one, of course.
But it still leaves the hypothetical question; if there were millions of immigrants entering Europe with a desire to gradually impose their own society upon it, what would be the correct response?
Of course it’s a terrible thing that these environments exist. But do you really believe that those women, unable to make an informed choice as to which legal system to choose for their divorce or their inheritance case, are going to go to court at all and reclaim their rights? They’d have to be suicidal to go to a secular court.
But if they go to an Islamic court, their community will respect its verdict. Moreover, the issues are going to get dragged into the open. Islamic law isn’t so bad, compared to the tribal-hyperpatriarchal mindset of some Muslims.
Don’t fool yourself, the parallel universe, with Islamic courts and all, will exist whether officially recognized or not. You can either keep them down and reinforce their sense of separation and alienation or recognize them and give them a chance to adapt to Western circumstances.
PS. Of course Christianity has got nothing to do with it. I was just pointing out an analogy in how believers are supposed to settle their disputes.
It will, but it doesn’t have to exist, and it certainly should not be state sponsored. Remember, we’re not a libertarian society that allows people to do their own thang, however much we samizdatistas may wish for that. So we’re not on a level playing field anyway. We already live in a state of arbitrary law. What is at fault here is what the arbitrary decisions of government are supporting.
For instance, I broke the law a few weeks ago. I’m a qualified electrician, but since I no longer work in the trade I don’t have one of the shiny new electrician’s guild licenses imposed by Labour. I changed a socket in my elderly neighbour’s kitchen. And by posting this I’ve just admitted to being a criminal. So, we live in a society which defines at state level what an electrician is, and what he may do, demands he follow an official set of state regulations and will penalise one for acting without government approval (six months prison or an unlimited fine, DIY fans) but apparently it is beyond us to regulate the judging trade, which up until now has been a state monopoly. Inconsistent, much?
If we’re going to have arbitrary law and state guilds, let’s throw illegal judges in the slammer. Let’s make an offence of “operating an unofficial tribunal”. We’re never short of secret police to uncover the terrible crime of having a smoke in the boozer. A person who works for the chain of garden centres my sister works for just got a criminal record for selling a pruning knife to a 17 year old undercover trading standards officer. It is illegal to sell beer at the wrong time of day or without a licence, or to trade grey squirrels or impersonate a traffic warden.
And yet if somebody sets up a kangaroo court, it is beyond the ability of the state to intervene? Really?
Oh, and on the matter of criminal law, here’s an indication from some time ago (2006) of what is actually occurring.
“Mr Yusuf said a group of Somali youths were arrested on suspicion of stabbing another Somali teenager. The victim’s family told the police it would be settled out of court and the suspects were released on bail. A hearing was convened and elders ordered the assailants to compensate their victim. “All their uncles and their fathers were there,” said Mr Yusuf. “So they all put something towards that and apologised for the wrongdoing.””
We’re watching entire “communities” simply withdraw from the law. Are we going to stand by and let violent assaults, rapes, (even murders?) be the province of tribal gang decisions? These are people saying, “we are not part of your society, of your country, we are entirely separate”. And we should stand by and do nothing? Should we not worry so long as the state is firmly in control of the sale of gardening implements?
Perry de Havilland!
I still want to know what you are sniffing or smoking!
Didn’t imagine my impression of a person could change so dramatically for the worse over one post.
There has been a lot of misreporting and misunderstanding of these ‘courts’.
Any tribunal set up under the arbitration act must, MUST, act in accordance with English and UK law. Where they fail to do so their rulings are not enforceable. Where their rulings are legally enforceable it is because they are not contrary to English and UK law.
Where the police have cooperated in domestic violence cases, well, the police, in desperate attempts not to be labelled islamophobic, have acted contrary to the law. And that must be dealt with.
John Pate:
At least the Sharia is based on something concrete.
If you believe that the paranoid ramblings of a mass murdering, misogynistic, oath breaking thief who advocated slavery, condoned rape, lying and political assasination, and freely indulged his galloping satyriasis, are a reasonable basis on which to build a coherent and fair social, moral and legal system than you are as morally crippled as the kiddie fiddler you pretend you don’t worship.
Slarti:
Good to see you have dropped the taqqya this time. Although, that you were able to adopt it in the first place demonstrates the intellectual dishonesty of your personal belief system.
it would seem that Islam is not going to go away and that we had all better get used to it.
Seems to me you are admitting you are used to it. Wot you mean we musselman?
The Quran and Sharia’h law will become fundamental components of UK society, and they will become dominant, because they must. Why? According to the word of Allah in the Koran, Islam must become the dominant religion in any country or society in which it finds itself. Islam = Quran + Sharia’h law.
Sorry chum, the problem with this line of argument is that Allah does not exist, and the contents of the Koran are of no importance whatsoever, whatever fantasies you may hold to the contrary.
Certainly, none of the great minds on Samizdata have been able to come up with a solution to this except to punch someone in the face.
More lies slarti? You really are a good little slave of Allah, aren’t you?
You cannot argue with the absolute law and infallible word of Allah. Allah knows all.
Sigh, please see my prior comment. And just to let you know, I will argue with anyone I damn well please, over anything I damn well please. I am no ones slave, and never will be.
Now, tell me, given that Slartibartfast was a maker of worlds, a role reserved for Allah, surely your adopting that name was an act of shirk?
To Slarti, John Pate and Anonymous Wanker,
I remain messers,
Free, kufr and proud,
BTW,
Wot Ian B said.
While I would like to be able to agree with Perry and Guido my gut feel is no, there needs to be a single overarching law applicable to all members of society.
I guess that makes me a minarchist?
Another point to consider is the relationship between the Labour Party and organised Islam. To be blunt is Labour just currying favours from the Muslem voters? I read somewhere that up to 56 (?) Labour MPs need Muslem support to get elected. Whatever the figure Labour is playing politics with the Law, which is nothing new for politicians. However if you believe in freedom of thought and expression you will oppose the setting up of Sharia Courts, because they are contrary to such freedoms
Anonymous Wanker:
For what value of ‘succeed?’
Covering for the perp as he beats the victim to death in retaliation may be ‘success’ on your planet, but nowhere else.
Also:
1) Anger-management counseling as a part of supervised release actually does show some amount of success in reducing recidivism, among those defendants who actually have any desire to be more than just violent criminals. It’s fairly common here, although I don’t see a sharia court telling a defendant that his conduct was not okay, or ordering a defendant to un-fuck himself if you’ll pardon the expression.
2) We’re talking about VIOLENT crimes. Lock the sorry bastard up. At least here, violent crimes have mandatory sentencing. Thirty days in jail is thirty days that the convict isn’t victimizing innocent people. That’s thirty days that the victim has to get the hell out before he kills her.
It’s worth noting that even the egregious Yasmin Alibhai-Brown was appalled at the introduction of shariah, from the perspective. There is a good article by Archbishop Nazir Ali in the Sunday Telegraph today.
As for anger management, it’s a joke. When I worked in the NHS (psychiatry) loads and loads of referrals were made to anger management courses run by specialist psychologists at the local secure unit. Half of those referred didn’t bother to attend. Of the rest, the overwhelming majority came once only, and of all referrals, most agreed to referral because it looked good, they were “receiving treatment” etc. I can’t see a Muslim bloke condescending to take the advice of kuffar anyway.
I think an integrated approach that involves the whole community is much more likely to succeed and to prevent future cases.
Sunfish is right. We are seeing such a decrease in ‘honour’ killings and family violence as the years go by and Islamic community values become entrenched, aren’t we.
‘Honour killings’. What a repulsive term for a barbarous act. And you want to keep it in the community AW, after all, you wouldn’t want the kufr to know your dirty little secrets now, would you?
When the community, led by the Iman, starts marching these pieces of dog excerment to the police station and encouraging the victims to testify, then I will agree to community involvement. Not before.
Anger management training – pah.
The big differences between the Jewish and Islamic (or hypothetical theologist Christian) civil courts comes down to a simple difference between Judaism and Islam (and Christianity) on the other hand.
Islam and Christianity are at heart expansionist religions and Judaism is not.
For Muslims and Christians, it’s not enough to believe you have to believe that the overall percentage of believers in society and the world is increasing. Without that expansionist base they fall into irrelevancy (as has happened with Christianity in many western countries already where expansionism has fallen into disrepute).
Judaism, as a non-proselytizing faith doesn’t need the expansionist base, it requires core integrity (so that Jewish guilt is about not supporting the community enough). It would probably be hard to expand the basis of Jewish arbitration even if the state wanted that system to expand.
In the US Christianity thrives by keeping the expanionist base alive through a variety of means, including but not limited to:
a) splitting up into a smaller group that can siphon off believers from other branches,
b) converting and reconverting the same people over and over (see:
nationalreview.com/king/king200402131121.asp)
c) maintain vigorous missionary projects on an on-going basis.
d) some combination of two or more of the above
Islam keeps the expansionist base alive in majority Muslim countries mostly by outlawing non-Muslim activities and thought to some degree or other and/or expanding religious control into more and more areas of life (this is actually an innovation, Muslim majority countries were steadily becoming less religious in the first two thirds of the 20th century)..
In Britain Muslims don’t want to make the same mistake that the live-and-let-live irrelevant Christians made and keep their expansionist base alive by trumpeting conversions and by making the majority make concessions to them.
In theory I have no problem with voluntary binding arbitration outside the civil courts. I have a huge problem with allowing such systems to enforce judgements that are contrary to the prevailing law of the land.
And I’m positive that these Muslim courts will be trying to do that. They can’t afford not to.
But no-one would consider the ‘Far Right’ being able to make political capital out of this, or anything else, as a reason to do or not do anything, the preferred course of action where the far right is concerned is to attack them (while continuing with whatever they were creating a stink about).
A good rule for assessing the likely consequences of an event such as this, is to take your absolute worst nightmares and then square them. Like 15 times.
I would be pretty surprised if in 30 years we don’t have somewhere in the region of 50-100 stabbings of Jews by Muslims per year. Perry, Guy Herberr et al. will inform us that this is not, statistically speaking, a big deal and then point out that if we didn’t have the welfare state all these problems would go away anyway.
Cats and Tromfim:
I didn’t say that counseling is an alternative to a ‘real’ sentence for the DV offender. I said that it should be considered as a component of the whole package.
Most DV cases, by the time police get involved, the couple has been cycling for some time now. There’s an established pattern of violence. Maybe male-on-female, but female-on-male happens also and true mutual combat is hardly uncommon. Anyway. By the time the police are called, the pattern is set and simply trying to teach the offender to contain his temper (along with a few weeks in jail to give him an idea of what happens if he screws up) won’t do anything useful.
However. occasionally it really is about someone who isn’t like that just getting overwhelmed and lashing out. It’s rare, but it happens.
If you grant that a primary purpose of the criminal justice system is to prevent reoffense, then it makes sense to use it to teach the offenders[1] how to manage their problems in a way that won’t erupt into violence.
As an aside: IMHO that’s actually not the primary purpose of the justice system. IMHO, the primary purpose is to protect the would-be victims from harm and the actual victims from additional harm. And I’ve seen plenty of cases where “community involvement” or involving the victim’s family or the couple’s religion is counterproductive: the victim will face substantial pressure from those sides to stay with an abuser for the sake of the family or to save the marriage or whatever. It doesn’t help when the couple’s community is of a culture that considers family violence to be right and acceptable.[2]
FWIW. We now return you to your regularly-scheduled program, and editors please nuke this if I’ve wandered too far afield.
[1] Those who can be taught in the context of court-ordered counseling. I’ll admit that they’re rare. Most DV offenders I’ve dealt with have a few years of offending in the current relationship, and in previous relationships, and growing up watching the same thing in their homes as children.
[2] Not only thinking of Muslim or Arab culture here. I love nearly every aspect of Latino culture, ever since I was a kid. That is, everything except the part where the wife is the husband’s property to be abused at will. Unfortunately, the idea that a marriage license is a license to abuse a partner seems to be almost a universal human notion, but I digress.
Gabriel:
This is the kind of statement that shows you really don’t understand the site where you are hanging out. This particular problem is not the welfare state, it is the prohibition on self defense. In the redstate part of the US of A, serial attackers of strangers have the life expectancy of a turtle on a busy highway. Demographic trend are, to put it mildly, against their continued existence. DV is a totally different problem and Sunfish has explained why addressing it cannot rely on victim cooperation.
One not particularly well-publicised aspect of the case is that the European Court of Human Rights, whose (often rather bad) rulings are binding on English courts, has basically said it doesn’t fancy sharia being introduced over here. In Refah Partisi, Erbakan &ors v Turkey, the story was that the Turkish government decided to ban the Refah (‘Welfare’) party, which spent considerable political time ranting against secularism (rather cherished in Turkey, as political ideologies go), and more or less advocated an Islamic state based on sharia. Refah claimed this was in breach of Art.11 (freedom of assembly). The ECtHR held that this was not so. I quote from the judgment:
“Refah’s long-term policy of setting up a regime based on sharia within the framework of a plurality of legal systems (…) were incompatible with the concept of a “democratic society” and that the real opportunities Refah had to put them into practice made the danger to democracy more tangible and more immediate”
As for comparing sharia courts to arbitration… as an arbitrator myself, I am tempted to say ‘give me a f*****g break’. Anyone who has ever sat in at an arbitral tribunal knows what I’m talking about. Maybe government advisers should, now and then, too.
Nothing wrong with a good punch in the face, now and then.
The statement was more or less a verbatim quote from Perry when a commentator challenged him over the rise of stabbings in the UK. I’m sorry that the expressed views of people who aren’t you do not square with yours.
I’ve searched this thread and found nothing even vaguely resembling that. Please post a link where he says anything even remotely suggesting your claim that Perry said “more or less verbatim” that “50-100 stabbings of Jews by Muslims per year [. . .] is not, statistically speaking, a big deal and then point[s] out that if we didn’t have the welfare state all these problems would go away anyway.”
Link it. Particularly the statement that “50-100 stabbings of Jews by Muslims per year” is no big deal. My guess is that far from accepting that statistic, Perry would be offering firearms lessons to members of synagogues.
You are using (yet again) the tactic of forcing somebody to defend against your false charges on a different topic (anti Jewish violence) in order to distract the conversation from the subject of the thread – which is whether it is okay to allow Muslims to use sharia courts between each other. Because Perry took the ‘wrong’ side of the issue from you, you are pulling out the strawmen again.
Can we get around this idea that firearms are some kind of a solution here? Yes, the right to self defence is an important thing and, yes, having a gun helps you with that, but that isn’t a solution to the problem, if it were to exist, of millions of people desiring to harm and kill Jews and looking to do so. Any more than one would say that a solution for firebombing synagogues would be firefighting lessons for the rabbis (or, lessons in how to firebomb mosques). It’s not really that helpful, is it?
OK. My point is that spousal abuse is a red herring and the issue is allowing something with a known tendency towards expansionism the institutional means to expand. For historical comparisons I would go to Constantine’s legal reforms and the widespread Christian rioting of the late 4th century. He at least he had a comprehensible motive.
**
The thread, I think, was about some Labour minister who had suggested something mildy silly about the link between youth crime and consumerism. I’m pretty sure it was a “Quote for the Day”.
Perry repeatedly said that British stabbings were not statistically significant and repeatedly said that the “solution” was – as opposed to various cultural/educational ideas – to get rid of the welfare state. I don’t think victim disarmament came up at all, which is not surprising for a Brit. Even pro-gun Britons tned to forget about the issue when assigning causes, it kind of goes over our radar. It’s relevant to this thread because Perry is agan taking a “no big deal, nothing to see here” line, when dealing with an issue where human life is at stake.
I would suggest, finally, that Perry can well look after himself without you speculatively suggesting interpretations of his comments.
And in case anyone brings it up, Late Antique pagan civilization was considerably more resilient and less degenerate than our’s and the Church had far less resources at its disposal thatn Islam has today. The official legal status and practical power of Christianity was not significantly greater than that of contemporary British Islam until Theodosius.
Even under Julian, pagans were still too complacent to think that 30 years hence they’d be cowering in their houses from mobs led by monks.
I always imagine a couple of pagan Romans sitting in a bar; one saying that if we don’t watch these christians they’ll do for us, and the other one saying calm down, that couldn’t happen here, this is Rome by Jove.
Ian B,
A government that refuses to trust its law abiding citizens is a government with no intent to obey the rule of law. Gun rights = catch term for a government’s acceptance that people are only to be governed with their general consent. Your (UK) government clearly believes that consent of the people is irrelevant. This is why it is more comfortable with sharia courts than individual self defense. Sharia courts are part of a system that denies the rights and even the existence of the individual.
I truly am far safer in my house because people around me all have and exercise (very very rarely necessary) the right to defend themselves in their homes. All US states extend this right to law abiding citizens in public places to varying degrees. Please show me any places where one sub-group of a population has systematically destroyed another subgroup without first claiming a monopoly on the means of attack and defense. It simply does not happen.
Your comment about firebombing indicates that you do not see the difference between self defense and attack. Do you really equate defending yourself with firebombing your enemies? Seriously? Or are you just piqued that I followed Gabriel off topic with his “50-100 stabbings of Jews by Muslims per year” ‘is okay with you guys’ claim?
The right to self defense is in fact the only solution to millions of people wanting to kill other millions. It seems silly to be saying this to you of all people, but relying on government for anything is a certainty of that thing being destroyed or turned against you. What you are perhaps inadvertently advocating for here is ‘my collective against that other collective’. But what you have in the UK is not ‘my’ collective against that Muslim one. It is social collectivism against Islamic collectivism. And they are aligning with each other against you. They have much more in common with each other than with you.
Your refusal to recognize the fundamental, basic, absolute necessity of a right to the act and means of self defense infers you believe that at some level your society should be trusted with whether protecting your life is worth its effort. The right to defend one’s self against attack is in fact an essential first step to a peaceful consensual society and its destruction is an essential first step to forcibly altering a society against its will. You rant against the physical and cultural dangers of allowing hostile cultures to run amok within our societies while de facto presuming it is the government’s onus to prevent them from doing it. Your fear is that these sharia courts will take over elements of self ownership that you have already ceded to your government. If you still retained these powers you had prior to WWI, sharia courts would be a non-issue.
But that is not what you said. In fact nothing about spousal abuse is anywhere in the comment I challenged (or any of your prior ones) so if that was your point it was subtle indeed. What you are really doing is just engaging in your usual practice of using new false claims to move the discussion away from your prior false claims. What you in fact said was that “Perry, Guy Herberr et al.” thinks (and by extension anybody who agrees with Perry’s stand on this thread’s topic) “50-100 stabbings of Jews by Muslims per year” is no big deal.
In a thread you haven’t provided but say now was about “youth crime” and “consumerism” Perry apparently makes a statement against the welfare state in the correlation between youth crime and consumerism and you interpret this to be an anti-Jewish opinion. You need to look at the article for this thread again. It is not about “youth crime”, it is not about “consumerism”, it is about sharia being incorporated into civil law. Unless you are saying that the victims of those “0-100 stabbings of Jews by Muslims per year” are being assigned to sharia courts, then your statement is OT and obviously intended to inflame the discussion.
The discussion of whether it is dangerous or not to allow sharia courts to enforce judgments that do not violate UK law is one that is not helped with your deliberate sabotage of thoughtful debate.
So speculatively interpreting other’s comments is your exclusive privilege? Here’s a clue. I wasn’t defending “Perry, Guy Herberr et al.” statements, I was attacking yours.
You are a troll. I am sure you can keep up your games to your great personal amusement for a long time. I will not.
Midwesterner, I am absolutely in favour of the right to self defense, the right to bear arms, and the right to use them. I am not criticising that. What I was pointing out was that it is not a panacea. Simply put, if we test it against an extreme and take away the law and the police and most importantly the peaceful intentions of the majority., and imagine a situation in which everybody is defending themselves with arms, we’d have a bloodbath in which the strongest groups would win. It’s called a war. The lack of the right to bear arms is a problem, but it’s not the problem under discussion.
The issue Gabriel was alluding to was that the rise of a community which is rabidly anti-semitic- which fundamentalist muslims are, let’s make no bones about it- would lead to a steady increase in violent attacks on jews. You can’t answer that problem with a simple “oh, that’d be fine if everyone carried guns”. Of course it bloody wouldn’t be.
Not much of an answer to millions wanting to kill thousands though, is it?
Ian. In either of those situations there is no safety or peace to be found by any means whatsoever. I am not sure what you can propose that could work in those situations.
There isn’t anything Midwesterner. Which is why it’s best not to let such situations develop in the first place. The key question, if you believe that such a situation is developing, is what one can reasonably do to avoid it.
Recognizing the essential individual right to self defense works toward avoiding that situation on so many levels. Bullies and thugs whether individually or group against group avoid hard targets. On the local news tonight, there was another gunman robbing some couple in Madison. Much talk by the talking heads of ‘not acceptable’, ‘will not be tolerated’ ad infinitum but one thing none of them mention. Madison (and the rest of Wisconsin) is one of the few places left in the US where you are absolutely positively guaranteed that any law abiding private citizen you assault will not be armed. It is absolutely true that a society with ‘shall issue’ laws is a safe place to live. Cars are much more dangerous devices than guns and the criminals already have guns. I presume that the UK, not having a 2nd amendment right, would require training and testing before issuing concealed carry permits. Sunfish might have a guess but I doubt that more than a very small fraction of people who can, actually carry.
The bad guy demographic has to so greatly outnumber the target population, and has to be so dedicated in the face of substantial risk, that genocidal populations always disarm their targets first. While self defense may not be a panacea (although it may be) its absence certainly guarantees violence. Enabling self defense is an essential first step to take in the face of large scale threats of violence from a subset of a population.
The way I see this sharia thing, it is not Muslim revolutionaries hiding behind the governments courts, it is the government using sharia on point. The sharia thing is the flames, not the fuel. You need to focus on Whitehall (or is it Brussels, now?). There is synergy here and sharia courts are the lesser threat to your liberty and safety.
Mid,
I don’t have numbers in front of me, but if one out of twenty eligible people got licensed, I’d be surprised. My department stopped issuing licenses in 2003 or so, when the law that made us a shall-issue state also made county sheriffs the sole issuing officials.
What distorts things is, in my state there are a number of defenses to a concealed weapons charge and licensing is only one of them. Peace officers don’t need licenses[1], no license is required inside your own home or business, no license is required inside a private vehicle[2], and no license is required for open carry[3].
Meaning: no good ‘offiicial’ numbers. I’ll go with maybe 90% of the homes around here and 50% of the cars I stop have guns in them, but that’s just a guess.
[1] I know. And OTOH, the purpose of licensing in a shall-issue state are to get people through a background check and training prior to carry, both of which are met in the hiring and training process. Not sure why I’d bother licensing here: our state’s training requirement is a dang joke.
[2] That’s loaded and accessable. We don’t require people to lock them in the trunk, unlike some states.
[3] However, municpalities and counties still have some power to limit open carry, even after their ability to restrict concealed carry was pre-empted in 2003 or so.
One of the things that the USA has got right is it’s assimilationist approach to immigrants. You never hear of USA-born Muslims blowing people up! They accept the local laws, and work within the laws to change any they don’t like.
That attitude is what is needed in Britain, and Europe!
Or do imams in America actually call for separate Sharia laws, but it is not widely reported?
Nick G,
One of the things that the USA has got right is it’s assimilationist approach to immigrants. You never hear of USA-born Muslims blowing people up! They accept the local laws, and work within the laws to change any they don’t like.
Read Little Green Footballs. The doings of the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) catches a lot of stick there. Interesting reading, even if the comments are worth avoiding.
Yes.
Sadly the doctine of multiculturalism is growing in the United States and has been since at least the 1960’s. The Muslim groups are an extreme example, but they are not alone “The Race” (the main organization of hispanics in the United States) is hardly pro American either.
As for Islamic law in Britain – just when I think the powers that be can not possibly get any worse, they do.
For example, B.B.C. Radio Four had a programme this afternoon about now the Common Law was developed out of Islamic ideas (no I am not making this up). The not so hidden message being – “well it is O.K. for us to allow Islamic legal ideas in now then”.
For the record – the various schools of Islamic law are about interpreting the sacred texts of Islam. The English Common did not develop by interpreting the holy texts of Islam (if it was interested in holy texts at all they were Christian ones – via Canon Law), it grow via the effort to do justice in various disputes – a legal evolution.
Much like Roman law in its Republican form – i.e. not the 12 tablets, but the rulings of Prators (what was at first law for dealing between Roman citizens and non citizens) in individual disputes (influenced by legal arguement of various schools). Or the legal evolution in Nordic lands (both German and Norse).
And, no, the jury was not an Islamic invention either.
All sorts of peoples had juries – Republican Rome, some Greek city states, the Normans (independent of Islam), Saxon villages ruled by 12 man councils (and so on and so on).
@Nick G:
Well, it seems they do, and they even documented their plans to do so in 1991. Maybe it was not widely reported, or perhaps you missed reading about the report.
The document is:
References:
This document is in the U.S. Department of Defense library. It is dated 22 May, 1991, and the signatories to it are the Muslim Brotherhood – a group of 29 Islamic American-based organisations. This document is essentially about the strategy for Islamic domination in the US, and it was absolutely in line with the Quran and aligned to use the guile approach so as to take advantage of and use American systems and services in legitimate ways in order to meet the objective of Islamic dominance in the US. This strategy, as well as being absolutely in line with the Quran (the word of Allah) – or maybe because it is – is flawless. An analysis carried out by the DoD led to a report by LTC Joseph C. Myers (Senior Army Advisor, Air Command and Staff College, Maxwell AFB Montgomery, AL) that described the document and the organisations that contributed to it as a “threat”.
LTC Myers’ notes include the statement that:
This would seem to indicate that the Islamic brothers are well underway with bringing the word of Allah to the Kaffir in the US, just as they are bringing it to the Kaffir in Britain (as per this discussion thread) and indeed the rest of Europe.
nick g.
Not as widely, and they’re a little more likely to be told where to get off. Case in point: the Harvard University gyms. Some Muslim students demanded that that a coed gym be closed to male students (and possibly non-Muslim female students, accounts vary on this point) for several high-traffic periods each week. Harvard, showing great moral courage, caved right in.
There are also a few places that are supposedly starting to become Muslim enclaves. One is Dearborn, MI (Where’s llamas? He knows the area). The other is Minneapolis, where one neighborhood was supposedly taken over by Somali immigrants, although I don’t know how much of that is true and how much is hyperbole.
As for CAIR: what Cats said. A congressthing from NY (Nadler?) brought up a bill granting civil immunity to people who report suspected terrorist acts to police. CAIR pressured him to water the bill down to uselessness by replacing immunity with an affirmative defense of reporting in good faith[1]. Bastards.
On the other hand, much of the US still has the sorts of rednecks for judges who will tell defendants that, if they wish to beat their wives, they can unass this place and go back to wherever they came from, but that they’ll be guests of the Sheriff if they do it here.
It doesn’t hurt that governments here have rather less power to involve themselves in religious matters or to make someone’s religious notions a matter of law, than they do in other places. “Separation of Church and State” has become quite a going concern in the sixty years that it’s actually been on the books.[2]
[1] The significance: it can be insanely expensive to defend a civil suit in the US. It’s actually possible to be bankrupted by winning one, as US law does not automatically award attorney’s fees to a prevailing defendant.
[2] The term first appears in law, in a 1949 SCOTUS case over public funding for support services in religious schools. The court essentially ruled 9-0 in favor of the notion of separation. The first place I’ve ever seen the term at all was an 1880’s essay by Theodore Roosevelt. I’ve heard that it appears somewhere in the Federalist Papers, but have been too lazy to confirm.
No, the spread of Islam in this country poses a real medium term threat to the safety of myself, my family and my friends. The comments of people who fundamentally do not get this blithering about polycentric legal systems and what not do not deserve reasonable debate. I assure you I derive no amusement from this at all.
Maybe yours. I tend regard walking down the street without having the living shit kicked out of me to be the cornerstone of my liberty.
Jefferson uses the term in his personal writings, but in reference to Virginia.
My family didn’t come to Britain because of Freedom of Speech or the Right to Bear arms or Habeas Corpus, they came because they were fucking sick and tired of having alcoholic Polish peasants raping their wives and burning down their houses every time there was a bad harvest, or one of their kids went missing, or they just felt like it.
As Conrad noted, the problem with middle class British people is that they learn from their history that, whatever happens, everything will eventually turn out OK and you end up smelling of roses. In the real world the message you learn is keep your eye on the ball or you’re fucked. Things get very badly, very quickly and you can’t fix them. My people are used to packing up and getting gone when things go bad. You might want to start taking notes on that if you don’t grow up soon.
Midwesterner’s attitude is no less glib and stupid than Perry and Guy’s, which is quite a feat. If the right to bear arms is the solution to sectarian violence, how exactly do you explain Lebanon?
Maronite Christians were stuck in their situation, they did the best they could with a bad hand. When people ask you why you (not you Midwesterner) decided it would be fun to turn Birmingham into Beirut what’s your excuse gonna be? (Perhaps that you only thought working class people in places you don’t live would bear the brunt, or maybe that it was all the fault of the welfare state/gun control/whateverthefudge?)
I think one difference between Alarmists and Apologists is a profound disagreement regarding threat level. I make no bones about my belief that the threat level from fundamentalist Islam is acute. To Jews, and also to non-Muslim gentiles. Although I believe Gabriel’s argument regarding this is correct, I think there is every reason to think that everyone is in the frame as a potential victim of violence *cough* cartoonists *cough*. Particularly those whom the fundies believe are acting immorally by their definition- since my own view is that the underlying driving force of their movement is the despising of the west as a moral cesspit.
But I have an anecdote to offer regarding Islam and the Jews. Many years ago- I can’t remember precisely when but it must have been around the time of the Rushdie affair- I had a cab ride with a muslim cab driver and a discussion about such matters developed. He was a pleasant enough, amiable chap it seemed. I can’t remember how the discussion got onto the status of the Jews, but at some point I asked him (and bearing in mind I knew very little about Islam back then so was genuinely trying to learn in my at teh time multi-culti mindset) why his people hate the Jews so much.
He proceeded to explain the following: the Jews were chosen by Allah as his chosen people. By rejecting Jesus, and then Muhammad, they had broken that covenenat and turned their backs on Allah. This is a sin that cannot be expunged, and thus the Jews must one day be exterminated. And, he wasn’t ranting, this was in the style of a conversation about the weather or who will win the Cup. I felt somewhat chilled.
I asked him, what about me? I’m a christian (I lied). Must I be exterminated too? He replied that I need not be; when the time comes I will be allowed to convert instead.
So that’s all right then.
Now this is anecdotal. I can’t prove it, and it’s only one bloke who said it. But I bring it up quite often in such discussions, because one common believe on the Apologist side seems to be that such rabid anti-semitism is merely a minority thing, just a few raving imams, that it isn’t common currency among ordinary muslims. But if that’s the case, I must have been very unlucky in my choice of cab driver.
I think it is a given that an islamising Europe will cease to be a safe place for Jews, and many other people too. Self defense is a poor answer to that. Even if Gabriel can walk the streets safely due to being tooled up, and even if that is something we would consider acceptable (Jews only being safe by being heavily armed) there is much other violence that can occur. Synagogues can be attacked, Jewish businesses can be attacked and so on. If we rely on self defence, we end up with such institutions needing barbed wire and guard towers, effectively.
As it goes, I don’t think the Jews will stick around for it. There is a profound lesson from history which will ensure, I think, that if the situation does go that way, they will all get out this time. But I pray to a God I don’t believe in that that isn’t what our future holds. The rest of us? We have no other homeland to go to. It’s our homeland we’ll be handing over.
I thought Muslims emigrated from Muslim lands to civilization to escape crap like sharia law.
Their cultural nervousness in the modern West should not be an excuse to lapse into Bronze Age thuggery.
If you did you were wrong. The majority of them emigrated for economic reasons, not realizing that successful economy has its roots in a culture of basic freedoms. And it’s not just Muslims: most people emigrate mostly for economic reasons. Political and religious dissidents are usually a minority.
If my memory serves correctly, Gabriel has abandoned one of his very correct other assertions in other threads for purposes of this thread.
There is a huge moral vacuum in UK, Europe and to a lesser extent in the USA. Sharia courts are not conquering, the are moving into a self rejecting, abject, amoral (not immoral), vacuum of principles and a campaign of culturecide.
Gabriel, the Nazis were not Muslim. The Communists were not Muslim. Both of these genocidal cultures formed on the ashes of a failed state. The UK is far more vulnerable than many care to admit. The problem is the relativist amorality of your government and to a strong extent the cultural (is ‘acultural’ a word?) leaders. You are trying to keep Islamists from filling the vacuum. Something is going to fill that vacuum. Somebody is going to provide heroes, causes and role models. The role models could be good or evil but they will be something. There could arise Brownshirts, Mujahideen, Bolsheviks or something new. I would not rule out the possibility that these cultural and political leaders are not stupid but are themselves evil in intent. Sooner or later some of them will begin (if they haven’t already) to nurture their pet murderers. I am telling you and Ian that you are making a mistake. You are focusing on a benign practice (alternative dispute resolution agreements) and cursing that option by association with a group that uses one.
I’ll say it again and stand by it. And I include the safety of Jews, ‘rude’ artists and any who can be labeled ‘enemy’. The danger is not the sharia courts. It could very well be something else. The Nazis had sympathizers in both the UK and the US prior to the conclusion of WWII. Had we lost that war they would have taken off their masks and taken over in force. Particularly in the UK. The communists of Stalin’s pogroms still have vocal sympathizers and apologists. Singling out sharia as the origin rather than a symptom of the evil is dangerously deluded.
Islamists are merely doing what they do. Evil. What is your government’s, your leader’s and your media’s (and to a lesser extent our’s) motivation for encouraging them and assisting them? If you find somebody dumping scorpions into your bedding, do you attack the scorpions or the person putting them in your bed? First things first. You two are focusing on the package violence arrives in, not its protectors and facilitators.
At some point, it becomes unavoidable to recognize that these people, given an opportunity, will rule who they can rule and kill who they can not. Most of us here have only grainy black and white understanding of a world of total violence. I do not think the 20th century is a unique anomaly. I believe it will come again unless we can prevent it. Even to our bucolic Edens. The problem is not the existence of an alternative dispute resolution system. As others have pointed out there are many of those that are completely benign. The problem is the government that finds common cause with this particular system and is assisting all attempts to murder your culture, your constitution and ultimately personal identity.
Mid, all true, but: if you cannot get to the person dumping the scorpions this very moment, are you not going to take care of the scorpions in the meantime? The Islamists carry with them the threat of an immediate violence. In fact, this violence is already happening, especially against Jews. And besides, as has been pointed out, this particular arbitration system is fundamentally different from all the others. I certainly agree with you that the amoral government is the much greater long term threat, but it doesn’t mean that the immediate threat, even though it is ultimately just a symptom, should or can be ignored.
“You are trying to keep Islamists from filling the vacuum. Something is going to fill that vacuum. Somebody is going to provide heroes, causes and role models. The role models could be good or evil but they will be something.”
I largely agree with this and it makes me wonder (somehow for the first time) if ‘libertarianism’ isn’t just one more expansionist belief system whose real purpose isn’t so much to effect anything like widespread change as provide a sense of coherence and meaning in the lives of adherents.*
Even Ayn Rand (not exactly a libertarian but close enough for government work) chose a quasi-religious conversion-narrative format for her magnum opus dedicated to …. individualistic rationalism (persecuted minority banding together behind a charismatic leader/chosen-one who leads them to a brighter under-specified future).
*not that there’s anything wrong with that, it’s certainly better than many of the alternatives.
Alisa,
A couple of decades or so ago, our part of Wisconsin was invaded by a new type of wasp. They build in holes in the ground or frequently in buildings. They multiply rapidly and are extremely protective of their nests. I’ve only been swarmed once and you never saw somebody shuck their pants off so quickly as when the wasps started crawling up my legs. I got away easy with maybe 8-10 stings.
My point by the reference is that we learned quickly that it is impossible to regain access to areas they have taken by attacking the wasps. They only thing that works is to attack the nest itself. In this metaphor, sharia is a wasp, the nest is multiculturalism, which is another word for segregationism, moral relativism/equivalency, and anti-rationalism. The other evils can only get a pass if first, rational analysis is removed from the toolbox.
These evils do need to be evaluated rationally. Enough people need to admit the emperor of moral relativism is naked and then only can they begin to compare and choose.
There is a line from MacBeth I’ve read often and don’t know that I am interpreting correctly.
Messenger
MACBETH
Messenger
And the image created in my mind is that of somebody staring looking for the soldiers against a field of trees and then suddenly realizing that the field of trees was the soldiers. Like I said, I’m not sure my interpretation was correct, but the image it created in my mind is indelible. We need to widen our field of view.
All this talk about consent seems strange. The essence of a Court is force- to compel a solution between parties who disagree, and to be able to enforce that solution. You’re focussing on the decision, but Enforcement is the key.
If the parties agree to accept the decisions of an arbitrator, then there doesn’t have to be any government involvement at all. Mumtaz and Ali let Siddiq divide father’s estate, and they take what he decides they take. The decisions of the infidel British court are irrelevant- if it gives Mumtaz half, she can give half of that to Ali on her own, nothing is stopping her.
There can only be one court system with the power of enforcement, just as there can only be one umpire function and rule book in a game. Otherwise you end up with a polo referee and a baseball umpire arguing over who won the rugby game between the football and basketball teams on the ice hockey rink.
Part of a free society is clear, predictable rules and an equally clear, predictable process of enforcement.
“If you think Father will say no, ask Mother” is no way to run a civilisation.
An Islamic student of the Quran would see that:
@Ian B has it pretty much spot-on with his anecdote about the conversation he had with a London Muslim cab driver:
The cab driver would have been expressing what any good Muslim would say, in obeying the word of Allah (the Quran).
@Ian B also would probably be correct when he says:
This handover would take the form of a significant cultural change event, over time.
@Midwesterner is unable to see the Islamic paradigm when he says:
The paradigm is like this: If you ask any Muslim if they do evil, they would be horrified and would explain that they must not commit evil, because it is against the will of Allah – they have submitted to and follow the absolute and infallible word of Allah, as written in the Quran.
Thus, when a Muslim (say) cuts off a kaffir’s head, he is committing a holy act (not an evil one) by being like Mohammed – who apparently personally cut off about 600 kaffir’s heads. A place in paradise is ensured for Muslims who emulate the prophet Mohammed.
If you can understand and think through and look at the world through that paradigm, then you will be able to understand:
(a) why Muslims celebrated 9/11 then and now;
(b) why Muslims now celebrate the “Magnificent 19” Muslim brothers responsible for the 9/11 event;
(c) why Muslim nations were pretty mute about the 9/11 event at the time when the Western world was looking on aghast and exclaiming about the horror of it all.
They were mute because, in that paradigm:
If you are a kaffir you do not have to like this, but, if you make the intellectual effort to understand the Islamic paradigm, then it will help you to see that Muslims are very religious believers who are commanded by Allah to do only good and to unswervingly obey his absolute and infallible word.
Slartibartfarst:
You’re wrong in generalising the response of Muslims to 9/11. I well remember spontaneous demonstrations of sympathy in Iran, at least.
See here.
Slarti, I don’t want to look at the world through the Islamic paradigm, thank you. It is an inherently violent, barbaric and anti-life view of the world, and would seem to have been coined by the Devil – hence the Satanic verses of the Koran.
I’ll stick with the God of love and peace – despite mankind having committed sins in His name – and I shall accept Christ’s teachings over the hellish ideology of the false prophet Mohammed.
Mid:
Well, yes, of course. It is multiculturalism that Ian B. and Gabriel are attacking. You, on the other hand, were discussing the right to bear arms in self defense. I am all for that, but that is only tangential to this discussion.
@Trofim:
Good, though tangential point that you make to Slarti – but on second thoughts, maybe not so good. I consider that not only could you have picked a more reliable organ than the so-called “Independent Media Center” for your exception example, but also you picked a bad example in Iran. After all, it was the Iranian president who was pretty straight about the need to wipe Israel (and the Jews) off the face of the planet. He couldn’t wait to hang all homosexuals either, as I recall. That great leader, Adolf (Hitler), would have loved him.
To cap it all, this was the president some of the Iranian ruling hardliners had apparently criticised for being too tolerant and a “moderate”. Maybe this was just their political posturing though.
I feel that what Slarti writes is distasteful, so I hate to think that he may well have it right when he said that Islam is not going to go away and that we had all better get used to it. I’d be a gonner though – as a confirmed Christian I could never accept or submit to a legal system that was driven by Sharia law, and all that that implies. My head would be one of the first to get the chop.
I wonder if the bookies have odds yet on when Sharia law will become the driver of the legal system in Britain?