The French do not understand secularism

The French senate voted 246 to 1, with about 100 abstentions from mostly protesting left-wing parties, to ban face-covering Islamic headdress.

As an atheist with humanist pretensions, I have to describe this sort of secularism impoverished of tolerance worse than useless. It will almost certainly retard the assimilation of Muslim immigrants most of its proponents want to encourage. Muslims will recognize the arbitrariness with which they have been singled out, and respond with the same fear and distrust that they have been met with. Jihadist goons will use the law to indict the West as a whole, swaying more of their undecided kinsmen closer to their own position, or at least away from appreciating democratic ideals. This plays into their narrative.

The Eiffel Tower has already received a bomb threat; I can’t believe that is a coincidence.

Eloping couple stoned to death by Taliban

Via the New York Times:

 The Taliban on Sunday ordered their first public executions by stoning since their fall from power nine years ago, killing a young couple who had unsuccessfully tried to elope, according to Afghan officials and an eyewitness.

The punishment was carried out by hundreds of the victims’ neighbors and even their family members in a village in northern Kunduz Province, according to Nadir Khan, 40, a local farmer and Taliban sympathizer, who was interviewed by telephone.

As a Taliban mullah prepared to read the judgment of a religious “court,” Mr. Khan said the lovers, a 25-year-old man named Khayyam and a 19-year-old woman named Siddiqa, defiantly confessed in public to their relationship. “They said, ‘We love each other no matter what happens,’ ” Mr. Khan said.

The executions were the latest in a series of cases where the Taliban have imposed their harsh version of Shariah law for social crimes, reminiscent of their behavior during their decade-long rule of the country. In recent years Taliban officials have sought to play down their bloody punishments of the past as they concentrated on building up popular support.

“We see it as a sign of a new confidence on the part of the Taliban in the application of their rules, like they did in the ’90s,” said Nader Nadery, a senior commissioner on Afghanistan’s Independent Human Rights Commission. “We do see it as a trend, they’re showing more strength in recent months, not just in attacks, but including their own way of implementing laws, arbitrary and extrajudicial killings.”

The stoning deaths, along with similarly brazen attacks in northern Afghanistan, were also a sign of growing Taliban strength in parts of the country where until recently they had been weak or absent. In their home regions in southern Afghanistan, Mr. Nadery said, the Taliban have already been cracking down. “We’ve seen a big increase in intimidation of women and more strict rules on women,” he said.

Afghanistan is hell now. But it would probably be worse if we left.

Obama backpedals on Cordoba

When is an endorsement not an endorsement? When your loudest opponents whose respect you will never have give you grief for it.

One of the genuine moments of courage in Obama’s presidency has given way to one of his most cowardly.

“This is America. Our commitment to religious freedom must be unshakable.”

Obama finally comments on the Cordoba House:

It strikes me as illiberal that not only does our culture need a discussion about the facility; but we also need our president to mediate it. It’s another illustration of the cult of the presidency, the elevation of what was conceived as a fairly humble office into an avatar of the Geist of the whole nation and unitary power onto himself (or, hypothetically, herself). But that’s where we are. And though some have criticized Obama for taking his time in commenting on the issue, one can at least say he chose an ideal venue–an iftar for DC Muslim leaders–and came down on the right side and did so gracefully, acknowledging the “hollowness” of Ground Zero, but also the hollowness of the first freedom.

An unequivocal denunciation

As if our side needed a Jonah Goldberg of its own:

America’s primary international enemy—Islamic radicalism—insists on government by theocracy, curtails civil liberties, embraces torture, represses women, wants to eradicate homosexuals from society, and insists on the use of force over diplomacy. Remind you of a certain American political party? In American Taliban, Markos Moulitsas pulls no punches as he compares how the Republican Party and Islamic radicals maintain similar worldviews and tactics.

This is (one of the multifarious reasons) why I dislike the array of web subcultures bound by a family resemblance called The Netroots. They have no rhetoric, and will never have any because they don’t much care to reconstruct how their opponents think. If they did, they would recognize the genuine qualitative differences between millenarian jihadism and the City on the Hill theoconservatism of the contemporary right–one doesn’t see Young Republicans shaving their chest hair to tape explosives under their shirt before walking onto a San Francisco marketplace; there are reasons for this. As Jonathan Chait wrote, the comparison is so broad and tenuous as to be considered intellectualy and morally “obscene” :

There are certainly tendencies on the American right that are less extreme versions of Talibanism — intolerance toward religious minorities, an insistence of shaping public policy according to religious dogma, hostility to science that contradicts religious texts — but the differences in degree are so vast that they are a difference in kind.The Taliban enforces totalitarian law through wanton torture and violence. Whatever you want to say about the GOP’s policies toward women and gays, it’s not this:

 Moreover, they would recognize skimming over these distinctions is tactical suicide, a means by which to alienate moderates and make enemies ignore you.

I consider myself to be of a different strand of left-of-center politics than Moulitsas and his Netroots allies. Their worldview is populist, idealistic if not radical, doctrinaire and fixated upon fixed principles. I am a technocrat, a realist tending towards pessimism, and a skeptic of creeds and given to pragmatic utilitarian calculation. But at the end of the day, Moulitsas and I vote for the same party, and advocate on behalf of the same. The manner in which Moulitsas does so, I think, paints our side in a bad light. In publishing this book under this title, he does its subjects more good than his allies.

Honor killing thugs firebomb bystanders

Via the Daily Mail:

An ‘honour killing’ gang murdered a married couple in their home when they set fire to the wrong house.

Abdullah Mohammed and wife Aysha suffocated after petrol was poured through their letterbox and set alight by the gang of young men. The Mohammeds’ nine-year-old son and daughter, 14, were also at home during the attack but survived.

Four men were yesterday found guilty of murdering the husband and wife, including 21-year-old gang leader Hisamuddin Ibrahim who had intended to attack a man who was having an affair with his married sister.

Ibrahim ordered three accomplices to set a fire at the home of Mo Ibrahim, who is not related, in the early hours of the morning. But Habib Iqbal, Sadek Miah and Mohammed Miah mistakenly targeted the Mohammeds’ house on the same terrace street in Blackburn as their intended victim. As the gang fled, neighbours tried in vain to break into the burning home before the fire brigade arrived on October 21 last year.

Mr Mohammed, 41, died after being found unconscious in his bedroom with his wife and two of their three children. His 39-yearold wife died in hospital days later.

London Underground worker Ibrahim was enraged when he discovered his 22-year-old sister Hafija Gorji was having an affair with the man she had met at a wedding. As rumours circulated a month before the fire, Mrs Gorji’s lover had lied as he swore on the Koran in front of her relatives that the pair were just good friends, Preston Crown Court heard.

Ibrahim, from East London, had then asked best friend 25-year-old Iqbal, Miah, 19, and Sadek Miah, 23, to drive up from the capital overnight and carry out the attack. He had been inspired by a story on the BBC’s Crimewatch website about an unsolved late-night arson in Eastbourne.

There were no witnesses to the start of the blaze in Blackburn but CCTV captured a vehicle circling the surrounding streets three times shortly before the fire. Three figures left the car, one carrying a container, before the trio ran back and drove off with the vehicle’s headlights turned off. The car, a black Volskwagen Golf registered to Sadek Miah’s mother, was then driven straight back to London.

The gang, from Manor Park and Tower Hamlets in East London, had all denied murder and face long jail terms. They will be sentenced later.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali on Australia’s Dateline

“Otherness is the challenge that Europe never mastered”

Leon Wieseltier on France’s burqa ban:

Where the face is covered, ethics cannot exist. I have been pondering all this again on the occasion of “the bill to forbid covering one’s face in public,” or the anti-burqa measure recently passed by the National Assembly in France. It has been defended on grounds of human rights. France, declared its minister of justice, “does not accept attacks on human dignity. It does not tolerate the abuse of vulnerable people.” Uh-huh. I confess that I am watching the French struggle with the distinction between Islam and Islamism—I mean the French who are struggling with it at all—with a certain malicious delight. Is the distinction really so slippery? When did France become the homeland of l’Autre, naturally tolerant and welcoming to cultures unlike its own? (The philosophy of Levinas was, among other things, a prophetic castigation of France.) And the same question may be asked of other European societies whose suspicion of, or hostility to, the Muslims in their midst has a foul familiar air. Otherness is the challenge that Europe never mastered. (I apologize for the gross historical generalization, but I have been immersed in Jordi Savall’s monumental reconstruction in music of the Cathars and their destruction.) And now, to fight Islamism in France, the power of the state, the frightened state, is being used to forbid the free practice of religion. It is of course shocking to encounter a person in a burqa, as it is to encounter a person tattooed from head to toe: it is a mutilation of personhood. But by what right does the state intervene? If some Muslim women are forced into their hideous sartorial prison, the state will not relieve them, and the Muslim men who are solicitous of their humanity, of the need to dissent and to rebel—of the rupture of modernization, which can only occur within, as it did in Christianity and Judaism; and if many Muslim women cover themselves consensually, the state should leave them be. Intolerance is a poor security policy. Moreover, the face is not all it’s cracked up to be. The face may be manifest but deceptive, and no disclosure at all; or it may disclose anger and hatred and violence. A visible face may be more dangerous than an invisible one. I am thinking of nineteen faces in particular.

Harry Potter actress’ father, brother threaten “honor-killing”

Via the Zap2it via Hemat Mehta:

The 22-year-old actress’s father and brother have been charged with threatening to kill her, says the Daily Mail. The altercation occurred at the family home in Manchester, England. In addition to threatening her, Afshan’s brother, 28-year-old Ashraf, is also accused of physically assaulting Afshan and “causing her bodily harm.”

…

According to People [Magazine], Afshan’s Muslim family was angry about her relationship with a Hindu man…

Afshan is said to be staying with friends in London.

The NY Post  Afshan herself:

Ashraf told the Daily Telegraph that the family will suffer as a result of the scandal.

“We are going to get trouble from the community now,” he said. “It is bad news for our safety, her safety.”

“Her career could be ruined. When she goes to a premiere or something, they are going to ask her about this, not the film,” he added.

“My younger brother is going to get harassed at college,” Ashraf said. “All our family is going to be harassed by the community because of this.”

It might be somewhat callous to say this, but some great good could come out of this great evil, if Ashraf is willing to talk about her situation. She could be the catalyst for an open discussion about the violent traditionalism in unassimilated Middle Eastern, Southeast Asian and African communities–and be an inspiration to the tens of thousands of women and girls living under Sharia-inspired domestic tyranny.

“What isn’t wrong with Sharia law?”

British activist Maryam Namazie wants legislation in the UK prohibiting religious courts:

The recent global day against the imminent stoning of Sakine Mohammadi-Ashtiani in Iran for adultery is an example of the outrage sparked by the brutality associated with sharia law’s penal code. What of its civil code though – which the Muslim Council of Britain’s Shaykh Ibrahim Mogra describes as “small aspects” that concern “marriage, divorce, inheritance, custody of children”? According to human rights campaigner Gita Sahgal, “there is active support for sharia laws precisely because it is limited to denying women rights in the family. No hands are being cut off, so there can’t be a problem …”

Now a report, Sharia Law in Britain: A Threat to One Law for All and Equal Rights, reveals the adverse effect of sharia courts on family law. Under sharia’s civil code, a woman’s testimony is worth half of a man’s. A man can divorce his wife by repudiation, whereas a woman must give justifications, some of which are difficult to prove. Child custody reverts to the father at a preset age; women who remarry lose custody of their children even before then; and sons inherit twice the share of daughters. There has been much controversy about Muslim arbitration tribunals, which have attracted attention because they operate as tribunals under the Arbitration Act, making their rulings binding in UK law.

But sharia councils, which are charities, are equally harmful since their mediation differs little from arbitration. Sharia councils will frequently ask people to sign an agreement to abide by their decisions. Councils call themselves courts and the presiding imams are judges. There is neither control over the appointment of these judges nor an independent monitoring mechanism. People often do not have access to legal advice and representation. Proceedings are not recorded, nor are there any searchable legal judgements. Nor is there any real right to appeal. There is also danger to those at risk of domestic violence. In one study, four out of 10 women attending sharia courts were party to civil injunctions against their husbands.

“In this way, these privatised legal processes were ignoring not only state law intervention and due process but providing little protection and safety for the women. Furthermore … husbands used this opportunity to negotiate reconciliation, financial settlements for divorce, and access to children. Settlements which in effect were being discussed under the shadow of law.“

An example of the kind of decision that is contrary to UK law and public policy is the custody of children. Under British law, the child’s best interest is the court’s paramount consideration. In a sharia court the custody of children reverts to the father at a preset age regardless of the circumstances. In divorce proceedings, too, civil law takes into account the merits of the case and divides assets based on the needs and intentions of both parties. Under sharia law, only men have the right to unilateral divorce. If a woman manages to obtain a divorce without her husband’s consent, she will lose the sum of money (or dowry) that was agreed to at the time of marriage.

There is an assumption that those who attend sharia courts do so voluntarily and that unfair decisions can be challenged. Since much of sharia law is contrary to British law and public policy, in theory they would be unlikely to be upheld in a British court. In reality, women are often pressured by their families into going to these courts and adhering to unfair decisions and may lack knowledge of their rights under British law. Moreover, refusal to settle a dispute in a sharia court could lead to to threats, intimidation or isolation. With the rise in the sharia courts’ acceptability, discrimination is further institutionalised with some law firms offering clients “conventional” representation alongside sharia law advice. As long as sharia courts are allowed to make rulings on family law, women will be pressured into accepting decisions which are prejudicial.

The report recommends abolishing the courts by initiating a human rights challenge and amending the Arbitration Act as Canada’s Arbitration Act was amended in 2005 to exclude religious arbitration. The demand for the abolition of sharia courts in Britain, as elsewhere, is not an attack on people’s right to religion; it is a defence of human rights, especially since the imposition of sharia courts is a demand of Islamism to restrict citizens’ rights.

Rights, justice, inclusion, equality and respect are for people, not for beliefs and parallel legal systems. To safeguard the rights and freedoms of all those living in Britain, there must be one secular law for all and no religious courts.