Really... what if?

[dreamville-bg.livejournal.com]

What could possibly go wrong?

LONDONABAD, Britannistan. Prime Minister Theresa May has come up with an amazingly ingenuous proposal for solving the rising terror problem that Mother Britannia is having these days. She is preparing a draft of a bill that would enforce Sharia law across the UK.

Her rationale: if people were following strict Islamic law, they wouldn't have anything to be afraid of, since Allah keeps pious Muslims safe from harm, right? And that would also remove a major point of justification for the terrorists' actions (we're currently infidels so we need to be exterminated).

"Just think about this!", Mrs May told the bewildered press. "If we establish Sharia here at home, we would no longer be a target to Muslim extremists, because we would finally have a neat religion-based conservative order. Isn't this what our conservative constituents would have wanted for our great and prosperous society anyway?"

Indeed, according to surveys carried out throughout the Muslim community in the country, the majority of that population would have loved to have Sharia. This way bombers would have no more reason to attack our everyday life - especially Ramadan.

"It's either that, or (gasp!) the Internet", Mrs May concluded. "If we establish Sharia across the land, you'll be able to watch all the goat-related porn on the Internet like good Allah-fearing people do in other Sharia-based countries".

When asked to specify if she meant hard Sharia or soft Sharia, she simply noted, "Sharia is just Sharia".


...Now tell me, was this an Onion-style obnoxious nonsensical non-news - or, incidentally, does it contain a grain of truth? I dunno, you tell me.

Comments

[luzribeiro.livejournal.com]

Multiculturalism in action, baby.

[johnny9fingers.livejournal.com]

My dad worked for the Express under Beaverbrook and then Max Aitken.
Jocelyn Stevens was his editor. It went from being one of the great populist newspapers in the world to its present state. The ownership of what was once "the world's greatest popular newspaper" is part of the problem.

The number of factual errors in that article, alongside the editorial bias, is impossible for me to quantify. Sharia law, in its limited form allowable in the U.K. is subordinate to criminal law. I.e. If a sharia court makes a decision that contravenes UK law it can and will be overturned by the appeal to the legal process. You are familiar that we have Jewish courts of a similar kind, and also still have the remnants of ecclesiastical courts too.

The UK is the sort of place that gives lawyers of every stripe a chance to make a buck.

You really reckon that bloody-minded Brits who can just about stop ourselves comitting appalling retributions on innocent folk would to take being ordered about by a bunch of religious types? It took us a few years to neuter the Catholic Church, we have throttled the life out of the Anglican Church. We don't much care for religions but we are happy to let them do their own thing...right up until it spills over and affects us. If folk want to enforce rules to their club fine. If those rules go against British Law the rules have to change. The smoking ban affected the London clubs. Whites, Brooks, and Boodles changed overnight, despite protesting. The smoking room at the Athenaeum was repurposed. You can't even have a cigar with your brandy unless you step outdoors.

If our establishment has to bow to the law of the land, so do subordinate courts. The Express article is a manufactured storm in a fucking teacup. Manufactured to increase a specific anti-Muslim constituency in an already prejudicial atmosphere.

The OP is an Onion-like exercise in satire, and made me laugh. The Express makes me cry; the Daily Heil makes my blood boil, and I feel such sorrow that Murdoch bought the Times. But I do think Sharia decisions should be scrutinised closely, which they no doubt are.

[dreamville-bg.livejournal.com]

Why should there be Sharia decisions on British soil at all?

[johnny9fingers.livejournal.com]

We extend to religions the same rights that clubs and unions have. Though neither unions nor clubs tend to describe their internal arbitration processes as courts. Which is why I used the analogy of gentlemen's clubs.

The Jewish court, Beth Din, also operates in the U.K. in a similar fashion. Subordinate to English law, it deals with divorce, property and family matters according to cultural mores. Which is what the Sharia courts do too. The important point here is subordinate to English law, which is in itself subordinate to the international treaty agreements of which we are signatories like the ICHR etc.

Positing Sharia courts in the U.K. as a bogeyman is only vaguely plausible when one considers familial pressure and social coercion within the Islamic community, but that's about it. And actually those things, social coercion and family pressure, are true of all communities.

[dreamville-bg.livejournal.com]

So when you recognize different legal and judicial systems for various groups in the same society, don't you risk encapsulating those groups and then having them marginalized? Isn't this the reason that so many British-born citizens are now getting radicalized?

[johnny9fingers.livejournal.com]

Maybe. It's a tough line to walk between allowing folk cultural self-expression and marginalising them. We have been enriched, across the centuries, by cultural importation, appropriation, and assimilation; so our policies tend to reflect that. You have to let folk have a say in their particular minority-culture within the context of the overall culture of the nation. If they start bombing and stabbing folk...well, they alienate the very people giving them space to do their own thing within our borders. (Doing your own thing as long as it doesn't impinge on others is a tradition that stems from the English Revolution, and the return of the Jews under Cromwell.)

[dreamville-bg.livejournal.com]

Cultural self-expression is one thing. Allowing various legal systems to mingle with yours is quite another. Especially if those are often incompatible with the mores of the land.

If a religious group demands that their members be subject to gender segregation, how's that OK? What about capital punishment? It doesn't impinge on others, does it?

[johnny9fingers.livejournal.com]

Would you please read what I've written.
I have emphasised "subordinate" at least once. The sharia court in England cannot issue a judgement that infringes national criminal or civil law, never mind pass a sentence that does.

If you are ever lucky enough to be elected to Boodles or Whites you would agree to be bound by the rules of the club, and the club's committee could pass a judgement upon you for an infraction of club rules. They couldn't fucking well behead you. They could however take you to court, and could you take them to court; wherein the state steps in, with all its awful majesty. Do you get the differences of jurisdiction and judicial power? Have I made it plain?

[johnny9fingers.livejournal.com]

You do know the General Medical Council acts as a court?
As does the Bar Society
And the FA
Etc and etc.

As do many supra-national organisations, like the Olympics.

[luzribeiro.livejournal.com]

I haven't heard of any Jewish extremists committing massacres in the center of London lately, have you?

[johnny9fingers.livejournal.com]

Not recently. But some still have memories of Palestine, the Stern gang, and Irgun. Israel is not entirely saintly, and at its inception needed to be less so. Mind you ISIS rather puts them all to shame as the most horrible barbarians this side of Attila. Well at least until we European types get going. Then we can happily devise ways of slaughtering folk en masse.

Personally, I'll try to head that problem off before it gets properly started.

[johnny9fingers.livejournal.com]

And also that's rather athwart the problem. The problem isn't with law abiding Muslims working within the context of English and British society. The problem is with mainly young extremists who want to impose themselves and their values on the folk who are just about tolerating them living here.

[luzribeiro.livejournal.com]

How did those young people become extremists, have you asked yourself that?

[johnny9fingers.livejournal.com]

We're all asking ourselves that. And have been for a while. It's not the first incidence of this kind of thing. But it does seem, as with other fundamentalist terrorists, that the ones who carry out the bombings are the slightly deranged or petty criminal elements of their respective groups. The leaders encourage their foot soldiers to kill themselves in horrible ways in the name of God. There is either a fault-line in the moral stance of the religion that allows them to do this, or they are wilfully misinterpreting their scripture. If the former, then a certain co-operation is required to find a way of mending that fault line. If the latter we can ask them to put their house in order.

That's a slightly more nuanced position couched as an either/or. Because we all know that reform has to come from within, or we are just being cultural imperialists, forcing Shakespeare and Beethoven, and our moral values on folk. Now, some of us might think that if you want to live in a country, you have to go some way towards adopting that country's values. And most Muslims do.

How do we weed out the jihadists from the other slightly bonkers or petty criminal groups? And even then there will be outliers; middle class extremists like Baader-Meinhof, but Islamic instead of Anarcho-Syndicalist of the violent kind.

So we preach tolerance in the hope that the best of our values are so damn good that folk will naturally adopt them, and want to hold to them because it is noble to do so. Having got here, to London, they know they will be welcome: it is part of our legend that Londoners will pick anyone's pocket, regardless of class, colour, or creed. (And we will shag them too if they ask nicely.)

[luvdovz.livejournal.com]

Calling something a bogeyman is the easiest way to dismiss a problem.

[johnny9fingers.livejournal.com]

Maybe, but to my mind here the Express is the problem.

[luvdovz.livejournal.com]

It's kind of cute that you think a specific media outlet is *THE* problem.

[johnny9fingers.livejournal.com]

Well I don't think voluntarily accepting a Beth Din or Sharia court's judgement on family matters is a problem. I do see frothing at the mouth at Islamic courts and promulgating heavily biased and fantastical notions of the extent of their powers a bit of a problem. And it's pretty much the Express going down this road alone. Though I do expect the Daily Heil to join in.

In its heyday the Express was home to Carl Giles and Rupert the Bear; two national institutions. How low it has fallen.

[mahnmut.livejournal.com]

LONDONABAD, Britannistan.

Good one. :-)

[mikeyxw.livejournal.com]

Very nice, but it wouldn't work. The UK had basically Christian based law for centuries, this didn't stop one Christian from saying something like "there's no miraculous transformation during the Eucharist" and another Christian saying "them are fighting words" and blowing up some civilians to make his point. Until God comes down and clarifies things, which I believe would be an event called "The Apocalypse", or provides a 24/7 support line, some folks are just going to use religion as an excuse to be violent assholes.

[mahnmut.livejournal.com]

All major religions are a tool for social oppression anyway.

[mikeyxw.livejournal.com]

Yep, but on the side they do a lot of community building, charity work, and generally try to make people see beyond themselves.

[mahnmut.livejournal.com]

Hitlerjügend did too.

[mikeyxw.livejournal.com]

Dude, you went Goodwin in your second sentence?

[mahnmut.livejournal.com]

I'm good, aren't I?