While the Middle East burns, it's worth noting that Sharia is on the march in Indonesia and many other areas of the world. I'm not a big relativist, so I have no problem saying that the U.S. should use its significant soft power to work against inhumane and cruel treatment of people in other countries. I know we're supposed to accept other cultures, and progressives are understandably skeptical of internationalist efforts in the wake of the Bush administration's debacle of a foreign policy, but these violations of human rights are sickening. It's practically a checklist of oppression:
Women's rights? Check.
In a ruling that has enraged women’s groups, an elementary school teacher, a married woman in her 30’s, was sentenced on July 21 to caning for working in the headquarters of a political party on a Sunday afternoon at the same time as the party leader, who was not her husband.The poor? Check.
What also rankled her, she said, was the fact that the laws on drinking, gambling and relations between men and women tended to affect poor people the most. “Why,” she asked, “have they not introduced the Shariah laws on corruption? Stealing in Islam is a bigger sin than these small sins.”Foreigners? Check.
In mid-July, an Italian aid worker was arrested by the Shariah police for being with an Acehnese woman late at night. It was the second arrest of a foreign aid worker and an Acehnese person of the opposite sex in the last several months.Islam is a great religion. There's nothing wrong with Islam. But punitive fundamentalist Islam is a pernicious influence, not unlike how Christianity was perverted by practitioners of the Inquisition. It's bad for the people who have to live under its yoke, and I wish our government would use diplomacy (remember? when a country talks to another country, and if, say, one of them is a superpower sometimes you can peacefully influence beneficial change?) to help these people.
I mean, caning. My goodness.
