Well, ya know, you’ve got to be reasonable. I think we can all agree that 7,100 lashes is just too much, while 7000 is juuuust right. Hits the spot, it does.
What’s even more grating is that the (women) rape victims get ousted if not killed by their own damn family.
Their justification being that she shouldn’t have been looking so sexy in the first place.
How the fuck do grown people actually believe this?
Is it just me, or does anyone else feel like the past 60 years of unique social development of the West has provided us with a towering pedestal to shout righteous accusations against the rest of the world?
Why not? I’m less than 60 years old, why should the past weigh me down?
I’m sorry, but if a country (like Saudi Arabia in this example) agrees to sign a Convention Against Torture, shouldn’t we call them on it when they renege on the agreement?
I so don’t give a fuck. East, west, north, or south, what’s happening in the OP is abominable, and it should be shouted out. Do you actually deny that the practice in the OP is something that should be exposed, reviled, and stopped?
What is your point? I must have missed it. It looks like you are saying, we have no right to condemn this action.
Jim
Nah.
Instead, castration without anesthesia, then 5x the lashes spread over 10 months (so that the recipient doesn’t die before the penalty is exacted.
It’s just you. But that isn’t to say that the West isn’t barbaric in its own various ways.
Well, we may be barbarians, but we’re not going to whip a rape victim to death, today. You see, that’s all it takes…
These are also the type of observances which, when some hand wringers wail that an evil person desecrated a copy of the Quran or published an unflattering cartoon of Allah, my response is, Allah you folks go fuck yourselves. Stern letter to follow.
The action itself is of course condemnable, but to use this specific example to typify a deficient culture and call for their downfall is well…wrong. Lets review:
That’s right, let us cast a massive brush of knee jerk generalization across an entire culture and religion that few of those posting here have had any solid experience with. I’ll be standing over here with Frylock.
Sitnam, maybe because right now, the fucking extemists aren’t being called out by the better Muslims, who seem only to be whining about stupid people writing nasty cartoons, or one moron using a racial slur?
THAT’S what pisses a lot of us off. Religion being used as an excuse to terrorize others=bad.
And though this is merely Onion satire, I think it nails the way a lot of people act and think.
And that’s horrid that it hits way to close to home, even if it is a joke.
Cry me a river. The issue is with Islamic Law, i.e. when religion is used as the basis for criminal prosecutions and punishments. It’s just as bad as laws based around fundamentalist Christianity or Judaism (or the tenets of communism, for that matter).
The reason we westerners can be justifiably smug is that for the most part we recognize the dangers in this and seek to minimize scripture’s influence on law. Nations whose justice systems still operate under Sharia or something similar suck for everyone who can’t buy an indulgence or is a member of the same tribe as the judge or whatever.
I don’t personally care about the culture or the religion, but I will actively oppose any effort to bring Sharia to Canada because though I won’t be personally affected by it, it offends me that fellow Canadians will.
What stuns me is that many people actually want to live under Sharia law.
The mind boggles.
Wow, and I thought all the Shariapologists were either BANNED or, well, BANNED.
This is what I’m talking about. When you’re being ‘justifiably smug’, you directly compare the Western civilization to the Middle Eastern one. With this line of thinking the only possible successful government can have no religious foundation, because that is the way it worked out for us. Saying effectively, if only the rest of the world could get their act together and be like us, they’d be much better off.
I’m not apologizing for unjust laws, I’m just saying don’t judge an entire religious foundation on the modern application of unjust laws.
Bryan Ekers, thank you for explaining it better than I could.
Sitnam, do some research on sharia and then come back and lecture us.
I stand by my comments. We’re not talking about controversial Saudi art, music, film, or public figures here. We’re talking about their legal system. We’re talking about the code these people have chosen to live by. As an indicator of cultural health that’s pretty tough to beat.
But in spite of my certitude, I’m going to cop out on this one. In fact, I’m going to let Dostoevsky do my arguing for me. He once said, and I think this is a very good quote, “The degree of civilisation in a society can be judged by entering it’s prisons”. Apparently, if we enter a Saudi prison we will see women waiting to be beaten half to death for the heinous crime of sitting in cars with men who are not their husbands. And those, believe it or not, are the lucky ones. The unlucky ones will be beaten completely to death as their bodies simply come apart under the barrage of 200 lashes. For sitting in cars with men who were not their husbands.
I won’t lose any sleep over labelling such a culture inferior to my own in many respects.
Minor correction: The second, heavier sentence is not, per my reading of a very sparse article, for sitting in a car with a man who was not her husband or other family member - but because she dared to pressure the court, successfully, using the media. (I say successfully, because in the wake of the controversy raised by the media attention to this case the rapists did have their sentences increased. I do believe it’s a pretty bleak “success” though.)
IOW, she’s not being killed for being raped, or being alone with men whom she was not related to - she’s going to be killed for contempt of court.
Which is even worse, IMNSHO.