I just had to delurk for this - I cant believe no one else brought Greyblades to task for such utter ignorance.
1) There are no "Sharia courts" in the UK. There are Sharia councils who offer arbitration but their rulings are not law and have no legal standing in actual courts.
2) They are not the only religious councils offering arbitration - the Jewish community has had its own (the Beth Din) for centuries and other Christian councils are also in existence.
Just because they have no legal bearing doesn't mean they don't exist, and are a huge problem especially for women, the ultimate judge is their society. You know that's true. There isn't anything that can be done against it but if you value women's rights it doesn't resonate very well with reality if you just sqy they aren't officially binding, a verdict can have terrible consequences regardless, that shouldn't be dismissed. At least we should strongly distantiate ourselves from sharia-courts and give not an inch, that's all we can and should do. Alas we don't, respect and all that, screw respect I'd say, I've had things under my shoe I respect more
Last edited by Fragony; 03-28-2017 at 16:39.
I am not really sure you understand what I am saying - they are not courts and as such cannot give verdicts or make rulings.
They are totally limited to arbitrating disputes between two willing parties.
Ill agree they are problematic when it comes to sexism (the Beth Din has been accused of favouring Men many times to my knowledge) but singling out the Muslim councils is far worse when arguable they are all equally as bad.
Do you honestly think that there are two willing parties, sorry but I find that realy naive. We can't do anything against it legally but we can ridicule the fuck out their ways of handling things. Everybody knows that women have less rights in these courts and that being branded is basicly a (social) death-sentence, bye friends, bye family, total solitude
And the cultural impact is greater. Family -- in the sense of the extended, not nuclear family -- is of more value that the individual in most of the cultures wherein Islam is the primary religion. The "family" cultures of the West tend toward more of a nuclear family definition. The idea of "clan" faded in the West. Exclusion and outcast status is much more compelling a punishment to such a culture than it ever could be to anyone from one of the more ratio-legally driven Western cultures.
"The only way that has ever been discovered to have a lot of people cooperate together voluntarily is through the free market. And that's why it's so essential to preserving individual freedom.” -- Milton Friedman
"The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule." -- H. L. Mencken
-snip-
Last edited by Fragony; 03-28-2017 at 19:55.
I actually agree with Fragony in this case. These courts may only make suggestions but there is most likely an incredible peer pressure to follow these "suggestions". And for people who want no part in this, it's very hard to get out of that "system". If these communities also send out a "shariah police" that tells everyone, including non-muslims how to behave in the area according to shariah law, it's an obvious attempt to create a parallel society where members cannot rely on the protection of the British or other local government anymore. This is absolutely unacceptable as it tends to go strongly against our democratic values and oppresses people in our midst. It's an attempt to undermine the freedoms that we claim to guaranteee in our democracies.
If other religions have similarly oppressive structures that people cannot easily escape from, it is equally wrong. Out of the top of my head I can think only of Scientology. I know fundamental Christians and they would try to convince you and so on, but not oppress you or use violence or threats thereof to bring people in line. To deny that fundamentalist muslims are sometimes even willing to even kill their own family members in order to enforce religious ideas would indeed be naive.
While the solution can't be mass punishment, these structures need to be broken nonetheless. It basically seems very similar to domestic abuse of the kind we've been fighting for a long time already, solutions could possibly be found there, while any attempts at patrolling around as shariah police and so on should be punishable as attempts at undermining the rule of law and impersonation of officers. IIRC that's how the police treat them here.
"Topic is tired and needs a nap." - Tosa Inu
While it's true that Americans are a relatively-mobile people, and small-town residents where there is a strong religious bent have a tradition of 'getting the heck out ASAP', you shouldn't take emigration for granted as a matter of course, even forgetting those who can't or don't leave, or those who must be raised there.
It's not the sort of community to explicitly couple enforcement with violence - that's what corrupt sherrifs are for - but it is quite forgiving and encouraging of patriarchal violence between private individuals, and public complaint tends to receive public censure against the complainer.
Vitiate Man.
History repeats the old conceits
The glib replies, the same defeats
Spoiler Alert, click show to read:
"The republicans will draft your kids, poison the air and water, take away your social security and burn down black churches if elected." Gawain of Orkney
I find it rather indignified to call for things like burying bomblims in pig-skin but I can kinda understand why people want to hurt them that way. I could never be in favor of it but terrorist-attacks are also symbolic. Wouldn't call someone who says we should do that stupid people alwatys are angry after an attack, only ask him to think things over after a good night of sleep
Conservative Muslims have plenty in common with the now extinct extremely conservative Christians. Which makes it odd for certain strains of the Left to be so vocal in their support. I'm minded of Orwell's piece on why strains of the British Left were so supportive of the USSR. They take the default position that the Anglo-Americans are in the wrong, and therefore anything that opposes them is the side to take. Resulting in the far Left supporting the USSR, and nowadays Islamism, despite these foreign movements being so opposed to liberal ideals that the Left are supposed to hold dear.
No, but what can you say? After the IRA bombs in the 70s and 80s, we didn't stop the Catholics from building churches. We didn't try and break up and disperse the population of Kilburn.
His ideas are a combination of the unjust, the unworkable (investigate everyone who's been to the middle east?) and the plain daft.
"The republicans will draft your kids, poison the air and water, take away your social security and burn down black churches if elected." Gawain of Orkney
Vitiate Man.
History repeats the old conceits
The glib replies, the same defeats
Spoiler Alert, click show to read:
I'd agree that there are a lot of leftists who automatically support different cultures/religions because "it's what you do as a leftist".
But where liberals and conservatives disagree is in the nature of Islam itself. A liberal tends to see perverted interpretation of Islam as the problem, while conservatives see Islam itself as the problem.
Muslims can't agree on the nature of islam, I am much more interested in why leftists defend the islam by default. I think I know why, leftism is a religion as well and leftists are in fact deeply religious. Christianity is a competer with the leftist church, islam an ally just because it's different
Last edited by Fragony; 03-29-2017 at 16:48.
I see Islam as an extra-national state as the problem. If British Muslims think of themselves as British first and Muslim second, as just about every other culture in Britain does, then the worst aspects of conservative Islam are ameliorated. If they think of themselves as Muslim first and overwhelmingly, then they're well on the way to becoming a problem.
"The republicans will draft your kids, poison the air and water, take away your social security and burn down black churches if elected." Gawain of Orkney
"The republicans will draft your kids, poison the air and water, take away your social security and burn down black churches if elected." Gawain of Orkney
Which is why it's puzzling that the radical Left ally themselves with conservative Islam, which is as anti freedom of thought as Christianity at its worst. Well, it's not puzzling if you understand that their starting point is that the Anglo-Americans are wrong, and go from there, as Orwell saw back in the 1930s when it was the USSR that was their vehicle of choice.
Vitiate Man.
History repeats the old conceits
The glib replies, the same defeats
Spoiler Alert, click show to read:
The Moderate left together with moderate right have pretty much built our world as we know it. Far left and far right are just fringe groups that will hopefully remain so also in the future. Same goes with the religious extremists, no matter of religion. So all three groups have in common is that they have to be somewhat tolerated until they act criminally.
Last edited by Kagemusha; 03-29-2017 at 19:08.
Ja Mata Tosainu Sama.
"The republicans will draft your kids, poison the air and water, take away your social security and burn down black churches if elected." Gawain of Orkney
"The republicans will draft your kids, poison the air and water, take away your social security and burn down black churches if elected." Gawain of Orkney
Way before my time then. My only experience of non-Islamist terror is the IRA, and by the time I'd grown up to notice the news, they'd progressed to specifically targeted attacks, and nuisance bombings preceded by phoned warnings. Other than Omagh, nothing as indiscrimnatory as the Islamists, and unlike the republican response to Omagh, the Islamist response to 7/7 was an attempted repeat a few weeks later.
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