The Alternate Universe of Islamic Law
March 11, 2009 by Big Fella
Imagine a universe where young people are denied an education, or punished when they seek knowledge. Imagine a universe where men who have committed violent crimes are literally slapped on the wrist, and allowed to go free, and where women who have been innocent victims of violent crimes perpetrated by men, are condemned and killed simply because they are victims.
Imagine a universe where women are delegated to the role of “slave breeders”, where men take as many wives as they wish, demand carnal relations at their whim, where the women bear children who they are then forbidden to have any relationship with, where despite bearing the children of the family patriarch, have no rights to family property, or simple human liberties, such as traveling alone in public or driving an automobile.
Image a universe where a thirteen year old female child is forcibly raped, then condemned for “adultery”, placed in a hole in the ground, buried with dirt to the top of her shoulders, immobilized and terrorized, and then stoned to death in front of a crowd of 1,000 rabid Islamic fundamentalists. Then open your eyes, and see that it is not an alternate universe, it is part of our universe, occurring today in Somalia, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Afghanistan, etc.
Then, except for Afghanistan, consider that the insatiable appetite for oil by free, western nations, is what fuels the economy that enables and empowers the slave owning class of fundamentalist Islamic males. Our need for conspicuous consumption, fueled directly through oil refining in to gasoline, and fueled indirectly through oil burning electrical generation, is the grease that makes the repression and subjugation of humans continue in the Islamic world. As for Afghanistan, its export economy and the repression by the Taliban is driven by the needs of wealthy (in relative terms) westerners, who indulge in and become hooked on the narcotic derivatives of opium.
What can we do to help ourselves economically, and environmentally, and at the same time, help those men, women and children that are repressed, abused, and killed in the feeding of our insatiable appetites?
For more on the cruel facts of life under Islamic fundamentalism, and criminal regimes see:
Johnathan Turley’s posts here, here and here.
The CNN report here.
The BBC report here.
The Amnesty International report here.
The latest Los Angeles Times report here.
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I agree that vast amounts of money in the hands of religious whackos only makes things worse for those oppressed by the religious whackos. However, if their wealth disappeared tomorrow, it’s hard to imagine things getting better for the next woman that gets buried in the sand to appease imaginary friends of those that ordered the hole to be dug. Shovels are cheap and sand is pretty much free.
Look how these knuckleheads react to a cartoon depicting their pie-in-the-sky top dog. In a couple of centuries, they may look back on their barbarism they way we look back on the Salem witch trials. Until then, as my late father-in-law would say, “It’s a hopeless situation.”
From a purely pragmatic view, as you say, Robb, a removal of their wealth, on its own, will not change the attitudes of the patriarchal dominated Islamic fundamentalist word. But one can hope that it would eventually dawn on the fundamental Islamic mind set that their archaic, misogynistic beliefs is what keeps their heads buried in the sand, and one can only exist so long, ingesting just sand, while the rest of the world evolves economically, technologically and socially.