More Islamic Brutality in Sudan

Here's another example of fundamentalist Islam's unthinking brutality: Silva Kashif, 16 year-old Sudanese girl, was recently stopped by police, dragged into court and tried in a matter of hours, then punished on the spot by the administration of 50 lashes. Her crime? Wearing a knee-length skirt in violation of the country's Shariah legal system. Making this travesty even more egregious, her parents were not notified by authorities under after the ordeal was already over. Furthermore, not only is Kashif too young to be legally sentenced to lashes even under Sudan's brutal legal system, she's also from the semi-autonomous region of Southern Sudan which (at least nominally) does not acknowledge Shariah law.

Shariah is a system of Islamic religious law and, as is typical of religious legal systems, it is intensely preoccupied with concepts of sexual purity and decency. This is especially true in Sudan, where the enforcement of so-called decency standards is about as hard-line as you can get. ¹ Dressing in a manner that causes "public discomfort" is crime in Sudan, and it shouldn't take much thought to come to the realization that "causing public discomfort" is a troublesomely nebulous definition. Apparently Ms. Kashif has retained legal council and is planning to sue for compensation, but it should never have even gotten to this point. The power of officials to randomly snatch up and flog any woman arbitrarily deigned to be dressed inappropriately has no place in any real legal system.²

If the Sudanese are so concerned about "decency", maybe they should worry about common human decency before they start hammering out of the details how short a skirt has to be to warrant a public beating.

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1.) Back in July, Lubna al-Hussein, a female media worker employed by the U.N., was arrested and fined by Sudanese officials for the terribly indecent act of wearing pants in public. Her arrest was part of a round-up of other pant-wearing women, ten of whom ultimately received lashings for their "crime".

2.) Boy, that sounds kind of familiar, huh?

Crazy Sharia Brutality in Saudi Arabia...

Blog posts about fundamentalist Islam practically write themselves. Mazen Abdul Jawad is a Saudi Arabian man who appeared on a TV show to discuss his sexual experiences. Since "publicizing vice" is a crime in Saudi Arabia, Jawad's description of various pre-marital sexual encounters (which are likewise illegal in Saudi Arabia) has landed him a sentence of 5 years in prison and 1,000 lashes.

Do I even need to say how crazy that is? Embedded below is a CNN news report about the matter. It should give you an idea of the kinds of things that can get you an extended prison term and a brutal beating at the hands of crazy fundamentalist regime.

PZ Finishes What He Started...

PZ Myers' Great Desecration is complete. It's neither elaborate nor particularly malicious, but it certainly puts both the Holy Cracker and the Quran in their place. Well done.

This whole incident brings to mind a story I was told when I was just a whelp. Because I went to a public school, my folks stuck me in Catholic religious education classes throughout all of elementary and a bit of middle school. I encountered some peculiar folks in those classes, mostly the teachers. When you combine the weird D&D mysticism of the Catholic Church with the Southern propensity for Charismatic nonsense, you end up getting some pretty laughable stuff. (One of my fellow students once claimed that all of her family's crucifixes spontaneously turned gold, and I was quickly smote down by the teacher for calling shenanigans.) In any event, one Wednesday our little study books decreed that we would learn the definition of the word "blasphemy". Rather than, say, have us look it up in the dictionary, the kooky lady in charge of the class instead told us a horror story about some kid who stole a Eucharist from church (with no apparent motivation) and took it home to flush it down the john. Naturally the instant the Holy Cracker hit the water, it turned the entire contents of the toilet in a soupy pool of blood. It was, the teacher said in nicer words than I'm going to use, Yahweh's way of telling the kid to settle down and tow the line unless he wanted his ass handed to him on a cosmic scale. I, along with every other kid in the class except maybe the golden crucifix girl, was freaked right the hell out. I mean, this lady was a teacher (nominally); She wouldn't tell scary lies to a bunch of little kids, would she?

Talking to other former Catholics on the internet has made me realize that almost all of us have, at some point, heard some derivation of the so-called "Bleeding Host Story", and that really cheeses me off. It's pretty freakin' cowardly to isolate little kids (I think I was 6 or 7 at the time) and tell them crazy horror movie stories about your fearsome god in order to scare them out of questioning the obvious bullshit you're feeding them. If I used that kind of emotionally abusive coercive crap at work to get my mentally disabled clients to do what I wanted them to I'd be (quite deservedly) fired on the spot. Between this and my Baptist schoolmates being tormented by their parents with threats of Hell from the time they were old enough to repeat the word, all I can say is that I've seen my fair share of religion being used to abuse children. I suppose the only way to get people to devote their lives to a hodgepodge of vapid, self-contradictory fables is to terrify them into submission as early as possible.

Saluting the Danes for a job well done...

Ah, beautiful Denmark. The land of poets and warriors, of sages and artists. The land of Beowulf and Brahe. The land of Magnus the Great and about half of Jessica Alba. The land of Hans Christian Anderson and Reptilicus. Denmark is a beautiful country with a rich and colorful history and an even more rich and colorful mythology. It also has the balls to stand up to the fundamentalist Muslims.

Two years ago a collection of Danish newspaper cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed provoked a ludicrous amount of outrage from certain sets of the Muslim population. Apparently depicting Mohammed is a big no-no, big enough to spark protests, death threats, and a whole lot of signs that say "behead those who insult Islam". Guess I should have thought twice before adding Mohammed to my Wii baseball team. (He bats between Jesus and Richard Dawkins, but really shines as an outfielder.)

In any event, cartoonist Kurt Westergaard, who drew one of about a dozen of the cartoons that got people so up in arms, was the victim of serious death threats from some of the "offended" folks. On Tuesday, three men were arrested by Danish authorities and charged with conspiracy to kill Westergaard. In a delicious turn of events, newspapers across Denmark reprinted the offending cartoons yesterday, as did newspapers in Spain, the Netherlands, and Sweden. Officially they were "documenting the history of the case", but I like to think of it as a big middle finger to all the crazy religionists who claim the right never to be offended even as they breathe fire and hatred at everyone else. (I'm not just talking to the Muslims here, either.) One of the newspapers involved in the matter, Berlingske Tidende, issued the following statement:

"...[We] unambiguously back and support the freedom of speech that we as a newspaper always will defend."

Bravo. Thing is, no one, and I mean no one, has the right not to be offended. Muslims, Christians, atheists, fat kids, skinny kids, kids who climb on rocks - all of us are open to criticism and we're all free to criticize each other. Shrill objections and threats of violence against people who question your beliefs are the stuff of preschool playgrounds, not of the adult, rational world. Or perhaps the stumbling block here is the word "rational", as we have seen time and again that the people who would exploit religious bigotry to foment hatred and murder are anything but reasonable.

This actually calls to mind the fellows over at Preaching Your Funeral. You'll recall that I've been bothering these guys for a couple of weeks now to no avail about getting myself burned in effigy on their website. (I guess ol' Skippy doesn't have the star power of Rosie O'Donnell.) Now that kind of crazy crap is about as "offensive" as you can get, but I've yet to see any atheists trying to shut these fellas down. If anything, they're getting linked from more atheist blogs than I can count as the rest of us look on in bemusement. As I've said before, I'm not even sure that it isn't just one big joke.

In any event, kudos to the Danes for standing up to the nutjobs, and kudos to Westergaard for putting his neck on the line in the name of freedom of expression.

Oh, and here's his blasphemous cartoon.

More Fundie Islamic Brutality

I first heard something to this effect on NPR the other day, and I'm not surprised to see it on CNN's site today. Iraqi police are finding the tortured, beheaded bodies of Iraqi women, especially in the largely Shiite city of Basra. Their crime? Going into public dressed immodestly. That is to say, while wearing makeup and forgoing the head scarves that some Islamic men have decided that "their" women should wear. I don't really think I need to say much more than this. The full article is available here.

Also note the mention of "honor killings". That's the idea that a man, often a relative or spouse, has the right to murder a woman for the violation of any of a number of laws that might bring shame to the men in their lives. There was a cellphone video circulating a few months ago of an Iraqi girl being stoned to death by a mob for dating a man from a (slightly) different religious background. I've seen it but I have no intention of posting it here. It makes my blood run hot and cold at the same time just thinking about it.

Posted below is a video clip from Richard Dawkins' excellent "Root of All Evil" in which he talks to a former Jew turned hardline Muslim. Some of the guy's comments are very telling, such as how he constantly refers to how we westerners let "our" women dress like sluts and whatnot. Just goes to show you the kind of backwards medieval thinking going on over there. I'd say "enjoy", but there's nothing at all enjoyable about psychopaths like this.

Gillian Gibbons Convicted

The well-lubed mechanism of Sudanese justice has cranked out a guilty verdict for Gillian Gibbons. Presumably due to international outcry, they've elected not have her publicly flogged. Instead she'll serve 15 days in jail and then be deported. All things considered though, deportation from Sudan probably isn't that bad of a thing.

A religion of peace...?

Gillian Gibbons is a 54 year-old British national who has been working as a teacher in Sudan since August. She teaches a class of 7 year-old children. Part of a recent class project involved choosing a name for the class teddy bear. Gibbons allowed the children to decide, and they ultimately decided to name the cute lil' teddy "Mohammed". Sounds nice, huh? A bunch of little kids naming an adorable bear after a prominent mythological figure. Awesome.

Sadly, Sudan lives under Sharia law. Gibbons has been arrested for insulting and/or cultivating hatred for the state religion. The crime is punishable by up to 40 lashes and up to a year in jail. The Brits aren't getting as fired up about this as they probably ought to be, and frankly the Sudanese officials involved just keep spouting off platitudes about how sentencing is far off in the future and how anything could happen.

So just what's going on here? Why aren't the children who named the bear being brought to task rather than the teacher? Hell, why is anyone being being punished for something so silly? I think we see not only the evils of a fundamentalist religious constitution at work here, but also probably a heaping helping for misogyny and disdain for westerners as well. We must especially remember that the Koran itself doesn't even ban depicting images of the prophet Mohammed, nevermind naming cute, cuddly teddies after him.

Once again, we see that the strongest force in the world for cultivating disrespect and hatred for a religion is religion itself, its actions unrestrained and unquestioned, as it glories in its own intolerance and cruelty.

Parallel Worlds...

One of the weird things about some species of Christianity is their propensity to take things that became popular in the mainstream years ago and mutate them into Christianized dopplegangers. A few months ago, even Youtube got a Christian mimic, Godtube, on which the faithful get the chance to post in the name of their fearsome deity without the risk of accidentally stumbling across some evil secularist's videos.

At the end of the day there is, of course, absolutely nothing wrong with all that, even if a lot of the Christian output seems pretty freakin' goofy. After all, secularists make parodies of Christian symbols, and are in turn parodied right back and so on. As long as everyone is laughing and no one is getting all that hot under the collar, then everything is wavy gravy. The real problems start when discussion and good-natured ribbing (and, yeah, that's a legitimate part of most discussions) break down and folks start having conniption fits.

Of course, people on all sides of religious issues have conniption fits more often than would be optimal. (Honestly, just Google "William Donohue".) Sure, the internet gives a lot of people enormous amounts of keyboard courage, and video exchange sites are rife with puerile videos about how religious folks are dumb or how atheists are lame, but them's the breaks. Problems only really come up when people start claiming that they have the right not to be questioned or insulted. Threats of violence are rare from most mainstream religious groups, but we still have enough Pat Robertsons and Islamic Jihadists who are more than happy to advocate doom and despair for their detractors. And, of course, we'll always have Bill Donohue, who has enough free time to write a 23-page pamphlet (available for a mere pittance of $5) about how a film involving talking polar bears is "most dangerous movie of all time."

All that being said, when the last time you saw anyone carrying a sign that said "Behead those who insult Darwin"...?