Demolish Daft Laws

Image via Wikipedia

A lot of fuss was made when France banned the wearing of the burqa in public places. So how many people have been fined for breaking this law? None it seems. Women have continued to wear the burqa and apparently they get more hostility from the public since the law was passed, but they do not get fined.

There have been a number of demonstrations by burqa wearing women hoping to be penalised so that they could go to the European Court of Human Rights or to challenge whether the law was in conflict with the French constitution. The usual kinds of antics that will consume large amounts of public money, but make no difference at all to how people lead their lives.

A man wearing a burqa in the colours of the French flag has been charged. Not with burqa wearing, but with the more serious charge of outraging the flag. It can only be concluded from this that the burqa ban cannot apply to men. That must be a relief for John Simpson who famously liberated Afghanistan while wearing one. It may also be an encouragement to admirers of the failed 21/7 bomber who fled the country in a burqa. Despite being a tall man it seems that nobody thought to peep inside before allowing him to escape our shores in the middle of a major terror alert.

Before the French burqa ban, the Swiss voted to ban minarets. The immediate reaction was for a shopkeeper to knock up a plywood minaret, shin up a ladder and stick it on top of his chimney. What is a minaret? Unfortunately none of the foolish people who wanted to prevent mosques from being built, but didn’t have the balls to say so, had thought that one through. I have got news for them. Even if their stupid law worked, mosques don’t have to have minarets.

Why am I rambling on about this rubbish? In the aftermath of the mass murder in Norway and revelations that the killer had British connections we are likely to be faced with calls for new laws to make sure that it doesn’t happen here. Among the demands to make it illegal to be mad, or whatever other ridiculous proposition they think up perhaps we should pause to consider what we are doing.

The burqa and minaret bans, however they may be dressed up, are expressions of unease at the growing presence of Islam in countries where it is seen as an alien presence. Some will be afraid of jihadi fundamentalism, others will be unhappy about the loss of their cultural identity and some will probably have religious concerns about the threat to primacy of their beliefs.

All of these are reasonable worries. The problem with the laws is that to the deranged mind of a person like Anders Breivik, legal resistance to an Islamic takeover has failed and he needs to start a war to do what the burqa and minaret bans failed to do. Let’s be clear, I am not suggesting that silly laws are the cause of the Norwegian tragedy, spree killers have all kinds of reasons for doing terrible things.

The point I am making is that laws cannot solve social problems. Proscribing organisations results only in them changing their names or going underground. It does not get rid of the reasons why those organisations managed to find followers in the first place. The same applies to bans on the symbols of Islam or any other thing that is bothering people.

Resolving social tensions cannot be done by governments. We have to work out decent and secure arrangements for society among ourselves. If a woman has her face covered in the street it is not a problem for me and it is none of my business whether she made that decision for herself or if she might have been pressured by her family of community to do it. Those things are for her to decide and it is only right for others to be involved if she asks them.

If the same woman wants to teach, be a student in a class, enter a bank, pass through border control, collect a child from school, or engage in any other activity where her identity or eye contact are necessary for that process to be properly and safely undertaken, then she must show her face. That should be dealt with by the woman concerned and whoever she is interacting with. No law could ever cover all situations and the state should not intervene in disputes about whether or not it is necessary for the face to be revealed for a specific purpose.

Similarly with minarets or any other building styles. It is offensive for the state to try to impose centralised building control that stifles cultural, religious or taste preferences at a local level. Land owners should be able to erect safe structures on their property without constraint other than to the extent that it might damage the enjoyment of the property of neighbours. If a place of worship, entertainment or whatever is going to disturb the neighbourhood in which it is proposed, then it is for the residents of that neighbourhood to resolve the matter. If they cannot reach agreement, a town or community council should be able to require conditions on the building, but there is no place for a remote government to dictate how things should be.

Alienation is at the root of social conflict and genuine localism is the only solution.

BBC Thought for the Day used to create religious tension

There was a shocking ‘Thought for the Day’ on the Today programme a few minutes ago. The muslim speaker effectively condemned the Americans for not having buried Bin Laden correctly and talked about radicals re-naming the Arabian Sea as the martyrs sea. He was effectively inciting extremists to claim that their religion had been offended and to create a shrine for a mass murderer. Thought for the day must be ended now. Our taxes cannot be used to whip up religious divisions and discontent.

Rowan Williams and sharia – Stupid, Wrong and Dangerous

 

Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, has today gone from just being a rather silly man to being a dangerous one.

 

In an interview with the BBC he says that it now seems inevitable that Britain should allow parts of Islamic Sharia law to be incorporated into British law if social cohesion is to be maintained.

 

He says that he is thinking in terms of certain aspects of financial and marriage law being given the support of legal enforcement rather than the hideous punishments of sharia being introduced to the UK.

 

Williams points out that orthodox Jews have their own courts that have some forms of recognition and he goes on to waffle about Catholic attitudes to abortion needing, and getting, some form of recognition by doctors being able to exempt themselves from involvement in abortion.

 

What he is doing is deliberately confusing the right of some professionals to decline to take part in certain practices on the basis of conscience with the introduction of a different system of law for part of the population. That is dangerous, divisive and, to me at least, abhorrent.

 

Muslims can already conduct their financial affairs according to their preferences. Basically that means avoiding deposits and loans involving interest. Provided they have entered a contract, they will have the protection of civil law to enforce those contracts. They do not need, and should not have, any special or different treatment in law.

 

When it comes to marriage, divorce, custody and other relationship matters, it is utterly unacceptable that sharia should have any recognition at all. All sharia courts are male dominated and the culture in Islamic societies generally is discriminatory. If there were a choice of using British law or sharia courts in Britain, muslim women would come under irresistible pressure to use the sharia system. As a result they would lose custody of their children when they should not, they would suffer disadvantage in divorce and in financial settlements.

 

Above all, the objection to incorporation of sharia into British law is that we live in a democracy. That requires that our chosen government is the only law making body in the country and the same law must apply to everybody without exception.

 

One of the failings of our system is that it includes bishops like Williams to have a place in the House of Lords where they are able to speak and vote on legislation despite being accountable to nobody. In this recent statement Williams has shown himself unfit to be a part of the legislature.

 

All religious involvement in our legislature should be abolished. We now need an end to the established church and we must have the abolition of blasphemy laws, tax exemption for religious schools and all other preferential treatment for religion by the state. People are entitled to hold religious beliefs, but the church has no entitlement to influence law, undermine democracy or to be subsidised by taxpayers.

A Woman Must Breast Feed a Male Colleague to Work With Him!

 The system of fatwa’s, or religious instructions, within Islam, reached a new height of absurdity when an Egyptian lecturer issued a fatwa suggesting that women employees could only work alone with an unrelated male colleague if they brest fed them at least five times. 

In May 2007 Dr. Izzat Atiyya, lecturer at Cairo’s Al-Azhar University, issued a fatwa that suggested that male and female colleagues could use breastfeeding to get around a religious ban on being alone together. The fatwa said that if a woman fed a male colleague “directly from her breast” at least five times they would establish a family bond and thus be allowed to be alone together at work. “Breast feeding an adult puts an end to the problem of the private meeting, and does not ban marriage,” he ruled. “A woman at work can take off the veil or reveal her hair in front of someone whom she breastfed.”

Despite impeccable precedence for the ruling within Islamic law (as discussed above), the fatwa sparked outrage and embarrassment, with critics deriding the author on Egyptian television. The University later suspended the lecturer, who headed the university’s hadith department. The fatwa was widely publicized by Arabic-language satellite television channels and was discussed in the Egyptian parliament. After being threatened with disciplinary action by the University, Atiyya issued a retraction, saying the fatwa was “a bad interpretation of a particular case” during the time of Muhammad and that it was based on the opinions of only a minority of scholars. Egypt’s minister of religious affairs, Mahmoud Zaqzouq, has called for future fatwas to “be compatible with logic and human nature”.

Soldiers of Heaven Death Cult

 

An Iraqi based Shia Muslim group calling itself the Soldiers of Heaven has killed hundreds of people as well as suffering hundreds of losses of its own members attacking the Ashura gathering in Kerbala.

 

Many Muslims (mostly Shia) believe that the ‘hidden imam’ (Mahdi) will reappear and bring in a period of global justice before the end of the world and resurrection. The 12^th imam in the line of succession from Mohammed disappeared in the ninth century, but Mahdists believe he is still alive.

 

The Soldiers of Heaven are an armed extremist group who believe that they can hasten the reappearance of the hidden imam by destroying the mainstream Shia leadership and they seem to think that the fervour of Ashura is the right environment for them to operate.

 

President Ahmedinejad of Iran is a believer in the hidden imam although he has nothing to do with the Soldiers of Heaven. Like many messianic Christian cults, Mahdists believe that they are in the ‘end times’. Mahdists generally believe that the hidden imam and Jesus will together operate to create the conditions for the resurrection. Like Christian end timers, they welcome destruction and disorder because they see it as an indicator of the coming final conflict.

 

Since Mohammed, several people have claimed to be the Mahdi, just as many have claimed to be the second coming of Jesus. At least one claimed to be both the Mahdi and Jesus!

 

Almost all of the Soldiers of Heaven members are believed to be very poor, rural people, but when the cult’s compound in Najaf was raided a year ago, a swimming pool, beauty parlour and many luxuries being used by the leadership were found. Cult leading is pretty much the same in the Christian and Muslim worlds. The outcome can be death in both as well. The dreams of paradise will be unfulfilled.

 

 

Sarkozy to Visit Saudi Arabia Without Bruni

The following is a quote from the Tehran Times Wednesday 9 Jan 2008:

“Saudi diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue, said Sarkozy should leave Bruni behind for “”religious reasons”" when he visits the kingdom on Sunday. “

What an incredible cheek from the vile dictatorship of the House of Saud. This is the monarch who on a recent state visit to the UK brought a retinue of about 400 people including an unspecified number of wives. We were obviously never told exactly what members of his family accompanied Abdullah because this sickening dictator shrouds everything about him with secrecy.

President Sarkozy is the properly elected Head of State of a civilised democracy. He is a divorced man who has a relationship with an adult lady. He makes no secret of this relationship and where he chooses to have her accompany him and what he does in his bed or his hotel room is nobody’s business. It is for him and his partner to manage their personal relationships.

Abdullah, and the sickening Wahhabi Death cult in whose name the House of Saud rule the country by bloody dictatorship, are happy to oppress women and take multiple wives (including temporary wives which is the euphemism that they use for prostitutes), but they don’t want a visiting Head of State to offend their ‘religion’ by being accompanied by a female friend. It makes me want to throw up.

These devout Islamist thugs will carry on preventing women from travelling, except in the presence of a husband or male relative, prevent women from driving, and flogging, maiming and killing people through their corrupt, male sharia courts until the world wakes up and stops them.

Saudi Arabia and the House of Saud is an insult to Muslims, an affront to democratic countries, and a disgrace to human rights. I am sad that Abdullah was given a state visit to the UK and it is a shame that President Sarkozy should be so insulted by this repulsive regime.