Daniel Pipes tackles the issue of Muslim special privilages in the NY Sun, via his site, with thanks to EPG and RB:
Throughout the West, Muslims are making new and assertive demands, and in some cases challenging the very premises of European and North American life. How to respond?Here is a general rule: Offer full rights - but turn down demands for special privileges.
I would only add a caveat: full rights, yes, but with full understanding of Islam's uniqueness as a political and social program as well as a guide for individual piety. For too long too many have gotten away with too much because of the unquestioned assumption that Islam is a religion like all others, and that Muslims therefore will have no trouble accepting Western pluralism.
By way of example, note two current Canadian controversies. The first concerns the establishment of voluntary Shariah (Islamic law) courts in Ontario. This idea is promoted by the usual Islamist groups, such as the Council on American-Islamic Relations-Canada and the Canadian Islamic Congress. It is most prominently opposed by Muslim women's groups, led by Homa Arjomand, who fear that the Islamic courts, despite their voluntary nature, will be used to repress women's rights.I oppose any role for Shariah, a medieval body of law, in public life today, but as long as women are truly not coerced (create an ombudsman to ensure this?) and Islamic rulings remain subordinate to Canada's Charter of Rights and Freedoms, I see no grounds on which to deny Muslims the right, like other Canadians, to revert to private arbitration....
Here again, it would have to be definitively established that all parties concerned, particularly Muslim women in Canada, were resorting to Sharia arbitration voluntarily. It's a thorny question.
But anyway, read all of Pipes' piece; it's a useful beginning to a discussion that needs to be held. You'll find many useful links in the original.
The idea that non-Muslims will not suffer from the application of sharia, even if it is only sharia personal law covering marriage, divorce, inheritance, etc, is a false one.
Look to India for the enormous social problems caused by sharia in that country.
For example, most Muslim married women who don't get adequate divorce settlements due to the application of sharia law will become a burden on the modern welfare state. Why should non-Muslims pay huge taxes to underpin a costly cultural practice over which we have no control?
Ditto the repetitive marriages of cousins. Why should non-Muslims have to finance medical care for the numerous handicapped children who will inevitably follow from this practice?
We shouldn't have to subsidize with our tax-dollars such backward cultural and religious practices. If Muslims want to practice these backward customs and behaviors, they are free to immigrate to the povety-stricken Islamic hell-hole of their choice.
The free ride in the West is over.
You Canadians out there - did you know Marc Lepine, the mass murderer, was a Muslim?
The Toronto Star
NEWS, Sunday, December 5, 1999
Remembering the massacre points the way to progress
TOMORROW, PAUSE and force yourself to think about 5-year-old Gamil Gharbi, clinging frantically to his father's pant leg as blow after blow rained down on him till he bled from his nose and ears. His mother, a former nun and then a nurse, was forbidden to console him. She, too, was constantly cursed, insulted, humiliated, smashed up against walls and beaten. Gamil, with his little sister, was locked in his room for hours at a time so his father, a high-flying Algerian mutual fund salesman who believed all women were chattels, could have a leisurely brunch.
Gamil grew up brimming with rage and primed to hate the only creatures lowlier than himself - women. In his teens, he changed his name to Marc Lepine. If his father metaphorically loaded the weapon, our violence-saturated society showed him where to point it: at the "feminists" so vilified in macho culture for encroaching on male entitlements.
Because of Lepine and the promising young lives he snatched away, we may be the only country in the world with an official Day of Remembrance for women. Instead of poppies, our lapels sprout the now-familiar button with the red rose to commemorate the 14 women engineering students who were gunned down, in blood, shock and horror, on that ordinary afternoon at l'Universite de Montreal 10 years ago.
We need the candlelit vigils and concerts for Dec. 6 just as we need the solemn bells and silences of Nov. 11. We need the cleared space, the stopping of time's relentless clock, the ceremony and the heightened words that will unlock our feelings and make us remember.
It takes an effort of will to bring to mind the blows and the ugliness that lie just beneath the surface of so many lives around us. We must make the effort, because even as you read this, other hands are raised against other children who will grow up to take vengeance on those who never harmed them. The National Day of Remembrance is for all women killed by male violence - not in battle, not because they were criminals, but simply because they were female.
As usual, when we gather tomorrow, only the willing of heart will be present. Willing or unwilling, however, no Canadian had an option 10 years ago when the blurred, urgent, news crackled into our consciousness. We had to hear; we had to feel the sting of hatred's poison.
I didn't hear about the massacre until the next morning. I was cocooned in the welcome warmth of bed, waking slowly after a happy public event the night before - the Toronto debut of a feminist documentary - that had played to a huge, exuberant crowd. The glow of pleasure still wrapped me as my eyes opened to my husband bursting out of the bathroom, his razor still in his hand, relaying in shocked tones what he had just heard on the radio: "Somebody killed a lot of women . . ." he exclaimed. "Montreal . . . it's a slaughter. . ."
Within moments, it was clear that the young women had been cold-bloodedly separated out and executed solely because of their gender. The pain of that news was physical, like an arrow of ice stabbing my heart. Only equality - full, rich, deeply entrenched equality of respect, dignity and human worth, for all people of all colours, reflected in laws, popular culture and social mores - can ever heal that wound.
Our posters and banners for Dec. 6 all read: "First mourn. Then work for change." In these 10 years, thousands upon thousands of Canadians, women and men, have done both. The mourning was and is painfully real. For women who were activists, working at low pay or as volunteers in the front lines (a telling phrase) of the war against women, staffing the clinics, the rape crisis centres, the women's counselling centres, the incest recovery groups, the battered women's shelters, that bleak day was the final unbearable crisis. All the stifled rage and despair at the useless violence welled up and spilled over in tears, angry speeches, boiling words.
For myself, I regret now that The Star asked me, only hours after I heard the news, to write a front page reaction piece. Along with many others, I felt that at this raw moment, of all moments, I could say, without being misunderstood, how enraged and defiant we felt about the constant stream of blows and wounds inflicted on women simply because of their femaleness.
I was wrong.
Based on the angry reaction to our words, it apparently was still taboo to speak about male violence against women. As a learned man once explained to me, such blunt speech violates "men's right not to know" what their buddies are doing and what their male culture permits and even fosters.
Instantly, our hot tears and painful grief were dismissed as "political." The story, in countless broadcasts and news columns, became not the dead women but the outrage of "innocent" men, in a fury at being linked by their maleness to Marc Lepine. It was all about them - were their feelings hurt, were they being discriminated against because a few all-female vigils were planned. I regret that many of us spoke up so honestly only because it gave the backlash an opening for attack that served as a distraction from the real issue. (Sometimes it seems that anything will distract the public from the dead bodies of murdered women - 40 women a year in Ontario killed by male rage.)
Now, 10 years later, I'd rather draw people's attention to lessons we might learn from the life of Gamil Gharbi. His brutal, control-freak father - one of the real root causes of the Montreal Massacre - sued for custody, although he never bothered to visit or pay for his children after the divorce. Today, there are angry and violent men, some of them slick and plausible, who insist that they are entitled to custody of their children, and there are parliamentarians dedicated to promoting their cause.
Most men, thank heaven, took a different path. Patrick Quinn, chair of the Professional Engineers of Ontario, swore on the spot to make a difference, and he tells me that today not only have the number of women engineering students doubled, but attitudes have changed: "The young men are used to equality in their relationships now, and many, including older men, were awakened to different values by Montreal."
Gun control, new schools of women's studies, Statistics Canada data on the levels of violence against women, anti-violence education in schools, ever-diminishing tolerance for the stupidity of sexism, progress in legislation to afford women equal protection of the law - the advances are heartening. CBC Newsworld will devote the entire day tomorrow to remembrance and reflection, an unprecedented media breakthrough.
It may be many years, however, before we can shrink the pitiful roll-call of the murdered women and children on those annual lists of the dead. Tomorrow, on the national Day of Remembrance, let each of us think of those who died, and what we can do to stop the killing.
Just to start, if you see a woman selling red rose buttons, buy one. If your workplace doesn't have a remembrance service planned, stage an impromptu one. In the moment of silence, try on the word "feminist" and see how a passion for equality feels.
Michele Landsberg's column usually appears in The Star Saturday and Sunday.
While my sympathies are for those Muslim-origin women who don't want to be subjected to Sharia, I can't help but notice that in the greater New York area, a lot of Chasidic Jews resort to a Bes Din (rabbinical court) in certain kinds of arbitration. Certain kinds of out-of-court "peacemaking" are starting to crop up in conservative Christian circles, too.
If certain Muslims are willing to sumbit to the decisions of Maulvis and the like, fine by me. Just don't force it on me.
Kepha -
Does the ruling of the Bet Din supercede any govt. law?
Does the govt. or society in any way end up
'holding the bag' as a result of any of these decisions? (inadequate divorce settlements, wills, child support etc.) Inequitable decisions made in a Sharia court end up subsidizing Islam, don't you think?
Do Jewish/conservative Christian religious laws give males greater powers?
Do Jewish or Conservative Christian women feel in any way coerced by their family or religious community that they must submit to religious 'arbitration'?
IMHO, Sharia can NEVER be allowed on sovreign American soil in any way shape or form. I don't give a rats behind 'who' is willing to submit to it.
By all means, anyone wishing to cloister themselves under the laws of Sharia should find an existing suitable Islamic paradise that practices it and MOVE!
If sharia is approved for Canadian Muslims, will poligamy finally come out of the shadows of the Islamic community and be practiced in the open? It is a costly lifestyle. I wonder if the Canadians have thought about what costs a cab driver would pass on to the state for the care of his two wives and 12 children? It would have in effect of much more immigration too, as men brought over more wives from their home country, along with in-laws, etc. etc. The ordinary Canadian citizen deserves a long and very truthful debate on this issue, without politically correct brakes on the discussions.
Rising proportions of Islamic immigrants in western populations will make the distinction between "rights" and "privileges" harder to sustain. If the "right" to subsidies for larger (and poorer) families is used disproportionately by muslim populations, will nobody notice?
You bet they will - put noses down, and follow the money trail. Islam in the west (above all in Europe) is thriving on a combination of state subsidy, and trickle-down from oil revenue. Not a viable business! Close it down.