Sunday, October 30, 2005

When Did You Stop Beating Your Wife?

Little Green Footballs brings us the latest act of insane truckling subservience to Islamic sensitivies, this time from Australia, where police are being advised to go gently on Muslim men who beat their wives:

POLICE are being advised to treat Muslim domestic violence cases differently out of respect for Islamic traditions and habits.

Officers are also being urged to work with Muslim leaders, who will try to keep the families together.

Women’s groups are concerned the politically correct policing could give comfort to wife bashers and keep their victims in a cycle of violence.

The instructions come in a religious diversity handbook given to Victorian police officers that also recommends special treatment for suspects of Aboriginal, Hindu and Buddhist background.

Some police officers have claimed the directives hinder enforcing the law equally.

Police are told: “In incidents such as domestic violence, police need to have an understanding of the traditions, ways of life and habits of Muslims.”

They are told it would be appreciated in cases of domestic violence if police consult the local Muslim religious leader who will work against “fragmenting the family unit”.


If a cop answering a domestic assault call himself told the battered wife to shut up and take it for the sake of family harmony, he'd find himself before a disciplinary panel before sundown.

Yet if he calls in the local imam and the imam gives the same advice, he'll be off the hook, as will the imam, and the husband will have carte blanche to keep punching her up.

Indirectly, the police will be acting as enforcers of sharia law, as stated in the Qu'ran (Surah 4:34, The Women):

Men are the maintainers of women because Allah has made some of them to excel others and because they spend out of their property; the good women are therefore obedient, guarding the unseen as Allah has guarded; and (as to) those on whose part you fear desertion, admonish them, and leave them alone in the sleeping-places and beat them; then if they obey you, do not seek a way against them; surely Allah is High, Great.


And Muslim women will now have no hope of assistance from the civil authorities against violent husbands.

Had the proposal to allow sharia tribunals settle family law disputes been approved in Ontario, this same practice by the police would certainly have followed.

But feminist groups will remain silent in Australia and elsewhere, for the needs of poor Muslim immigrant women are unimportant in their minds when compared to the wants of well-off educated white women.

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