Malaysia woman result of controversy

Below are some comments of the punishments in the net. srizals

I don’t think anyone should be physically or mentally abused as part of their religion. However, I am much more concerned with Islam in the west, particularly the UK, than I am with it in general terms. These types of things are happening here and elsewhere in the west everyday, with increasing frequency as the Muslim population grows through immigration and high birth rates.

I don’t want Islam in my country, in any form, and I strongly believe that the vast majority of westerners feel the same. On the whole, Muslims have shown that they are incapable of reshaping their religion to fit with modern western principles in the way other religions have had to. They think that religion comes before the law, and that they should be free to carry out punishments as they see fit.

Islam should be outlawed in the UK. I say that from a defensive perspective of preserving western values and the rule of law above all else. If people want to follow Islam outsides of the western world, I really don’t care. I wish it didn’t exist at all, but so long as it’s not in my back yard, I’ll be happy.

@sshorts ‘As I said, who are ‘we’ to say anything.’ I think a young girl being subjected to genital mutilation in Rwanda because it’s their ‘culture’ would be very happy that ‘we’ said something against it. That’s the danger with cultural relativism, it’s used to cover the real issue: that human rights are being violated.

Another brilliant post from Will, as usual. However, I think the greater problem here is when multiculturalism seeps into a legal system. Take Indonesia, its legal system is based on Roman/Dutch law, but the integration of different cultural practices into custom law means that Aceh, in Sumatra, has adopted Shariah law. Once these cultural practices, stoning, whipping, etc, are cemented in law there’s no turning back and the victims are locked in a cruel legal system. There is a sliding scale to how severe multiculturalism can get; adopting Sharia banking or Sharia law in this country for example is absurd. So France has the balance right: keep cultural customs on a personal, not national level.

Let those women who wish to leave strict muslim rule do so. As it stands one who chooses to marry outside of Islam and against her families wishes is likely to killed and the act supported by the Muslim community as OK.
I suggest that the many of the muslim girls growing in England would not be ardent supporters of the faith they are forced to be.
1) safe refuges for any woman who is so threatened.
2) identification of perpetrators of honour crimes- if the evidence for conviction is not available use civil law (with its lower burden of proof) to deport as undesirable.
As to Johan- it is not the topic- and I severely doubt your generalisations and statistics.

One of these days the sisterhood is going to fight back. Pure oppression. Subjugation. The days of being mere chattel I thought were over. Not the way they do this religion it seems. An anathema to decency.

Islam is an anti-Semitic, homophobic, misogynistic religion. It hates Jews, homosexuals and women. Their Koran tells them to hate Jews, homosexuals and women. Islam shouldn’t be given more respect. It should be given less respect, because it’s standards are inferior.
And these are the standards being introduced into UK thanks to HMG’s misguided policy of multiculturalism and appeasement.

egil
You said “I don’t believe in cultural relativism. I believe that some cultures, religions and ideas are better than others… Otherwise we have nihilism, or else “multiculturalism” that is cynically used for the purposes of advancing a particular culture.”

Doesn’t the last sentence actually apply to the western world? Surely westerners support multiculturalism (through UNESCO, etc.), but, in fact, it is just a way to mask the westerner’s real intention: to subjugate non-reconcilable religion and to advance their own particular culture. When we say things about “international community” or “international law”, we are actually referring to westerners and their point of view, respectively, because they are the one who is/was in control, and they wrote the UN charter, etc. So, of course you don’t support cultural relativism; you will only rigidly abide the “international law” (a.k.a. western law).
If we look at history, we can see how this disarray originated. During European (and American) colonialism, some nations force non-European subjects to convert to Christianity (especially true in places colonized by Spain and Portugal and, to some extend, Britain, France, etc.). Although this forced conversion had mostly died down (in part because the average westerners themselves no longer adhere to their religion firmly, and some even become atheists), the idea that western ideas and way of life should apply to every individual is still a strong one among westerners. This is called “western universalism”, and it all started when Christianity became dominant in the Roman Empire, if not earlier than that.

It is funny how you want to stop Muslims from even desiring to adhere to Islam properly, but at the same time allow some people to actually DO the wrong thing (e.g. drinking alcohol). It is all about westerner’s point of view, isn’t it?
@ johnhenry: Whilst I am not jewish my wife is, and there is an orthodox rabbi in her family. My understanding of the position of the orthodox couple to whom you refer is, that whilst they may not switch on the cctv themselves on their sabbath, it is not against their religion that others to do so. Were they to follow this line of argument to its logical conclusion, then the central heating must be switched off prior to the sabbath, as would any lights in the communal areas, even down to electrically operated clocks. As with all religions, there are always the fanatics, with their own agendas.
…the Muslim practices which, according to British values, we consider unacceptable.

Well, here are a few of them. There’s halal slaughter (End ‘cruel’ religious slaughter, say scientists), wife-beating, restricting free speech (Dutch MP banned from entering UK), and inbreeding (Muslim ‘inbreeding’ in Britain is causing massive surge in birth defects).

As for wife-beating, this report from Amnesty International says, ‘According to the Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences, over 90% of married women report being kicked, slapped, beaten or sexually abused when husbands were dissatisfied by their cooking or cleaning, or when the women had failed to bear a child or had given birth to a girl instead of a boy.’

With most British Muslims of Pakistani origin, it’s no surprise to learn that similar violence occurs here as well: ‘Fatima Husain, a consultant in obstetrics and gynaecology, has told how she sees Muslim women coming for treatment with strangle marks around their necks and bruises on their pregnant bumps.’ (The original Telegraph article is no longer available.)

I guess that most British people consider these and many other Muslim practices unacceptable, but, what chance of them being banned when the mainstream parties are falling over each other to win the Muslim vote?
•Johnny Rottenborough•

I bet there is more fuss about this than when the Saudi Arabians hacked off the head of one of their princesses for having an affair out of wedlock. Then, from Lord Carrington (Foreign Secretary) down, I remember the reaction was largely, ‘That is their culture let them get on with it’; and they did, and do get on with it still and we make hardly a squeak of protest because we need their oil and we need them to buy our military hardware.

Why don’t we require that all our trade partners and our political allies abide by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. We should surely do so if it is to have credibility and not be something we enforce only where it suits our agenda? And surely this is against the declaration?

I was beaten at school with a cane a few times and the lasting damage it did to me was a complete loathing of any automatic acceptance of any authority. I think that is a kind of British attitude but not the one the caners were seeking to instil. What will happen of course is that now this sort of behaviour will be used as a cane with which to beat Islam generally. It has started already with the usual suspects hot off the blocks I see. But British law does not allow schoolboys to be caned any longer and it does not allow women to be caned either whatever their religion and in nearby Indonesia with a much larger Muslim population such behaviour is illegal. So it is not a universal way of interpreting Islam and there is no reason why it should be interpreted in Britain in that way. Secret sharia courts in Britain, and any other kind of specialist court, must be made illegal; the ideas of the Archbish of Cant in the past and the legalising of 5 sharia arbitration boards recently in Britain is utterly against the experiences of countries like Indonesia with the use of sharia and should be revoked pronto.

Well personalcare, Multiculturalism actually arose from those who hate the West. It was abetted by liberalism, and it is now used heavily by promoters of ethnic-identity politics. The New Left, writers like Frantz Fanon and other haters of Western values are the promoters of Multiculturalism, not Western colonialists. The cynical use of Multiculturalism that I refer to is actually within the USA, the UK and western Europe. I wouldn’t equate it with the universalism or internationalist efforts that you suggest. Multiculturalism supposedly means the equality and embrace of all cultures, according to its advocates, but in practice in the USA and the UK it is always the elevation of certain specific cultures at the expense of Western culture.

The great, valuable principles that came from Western culture include individual liberties, the rule of law, science and respect for property. These are the things that need to be defended against Multiculturalism. The West advanced because of Judeo-Christian beliefs and Greco-Roman thought and achievement, and by embracing useful ideas from other cultures. As you suggested, destructive forces have been at work for a while, such as the decline of Christianity and reason, and this certainly has weakened the West.

But would most people in India, Brazil, Singapore, the USA or Australia want to get rid of the beneficial legacies of Western colonialism in their countries? I don’t think so, if they have any sense. And yes there has sometimes been a universalism coming from the West, but there have also been multitudes of people from the outside wanting Western values for themselves. They weren’t hypnotized by western universalists.

I and many other westerners do not support the “UNESCO multiculturalism” that you describe. I despise the UN, and I think that much foreign aid is wasteful and counterproductive. I also think “international community” is meaningless, except that it is used as a nice-sounding cover when advancing some political agenda. Some international law and cooperation is useful and necessary–I think we can be grateful to Interpol for instance. But how could the UN be a general mechanism for pushing westernization, when it has become mainly a tool for dictatorial regimes to get a world stage, as we see with Ahmadinejad, Chavez, etc.?

personalcare on Aug 23rd, 2009 at 2:53 am

I agree with a lot of that and a lot of your previous post. I however am looking at things from the point of view of how to alter the worrying increase in the way Islam is demonized in Britain. The more babaric practices committed in the name of the sharia and, usually, Wahhabist style Islam (at leats ultra conservative forms)are unacceptable in most Muslim majority countries and a lot of these have signed up to the universal declaration or at least accepted certain clauses into their own declarationa of rights (see clause 39 of the 1999 ammendments to Human Rights in the Consitution of Indonesia).

What I have been saying on posts here on the DT recently is that a repressive and mysoginistic element in the Koran can be interpreted in such a way as to suppress and subjugate in autocratic regimes with Muslim majorities. This style is assumed by many to be the norm and therefore Islam is thought of universally in this way. These practices are so much in conflict with western values that where Muslim communities exist in Europe they are under siege as the majority accuse them of things they probably abhor as much as their accusers.

It seems to me to go without saying that immigrants should obey the laws and customs of the country to which they have immigrated. I do here in Indonesia but it is no struggle to do so because the laws are based on Dutch Common Law and are pretty much the same as in Britain (Indonesia with around 190-200 million Muslims). That such societies as Indonesia exist in the Islamic world is proof to me that an enlightened form of Islam is possible; or if you do not like the word enlightened then a form that is compatible with a western view of societal norms.

I think also that it if we believe that the public butchery of people is repulsive we should not trade with the people doing the butchery; whatever their religion. We can’t stop them short of invading and inflicting our sense of justice, and I don’t agree with that, but by doing nothing we encourage people to think that we approve, and I don’t know about you but I don’t approve.

The rest of the comments can be read here:

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/willheaven/100007237/freedom-is-an-illusion-for-many-muslim-women-britain-is-letting-them-down