Parallel Legal Systems in the UK

Appalling Disabilities

First cousin marriages in Pakistani communities leading to 'appalling' disabilities among children Baroness Flather, a cross-bench peer, says it is 'absolutely appalling' that first cousin marriages in Pakistani communities are leading to 'so much disability among children'

Steven Swinford, Deputy Political Editor
The Telegraph

Couples who are getting married should be forced to have a DNA test first to ensure they are not cousins amid growing concern about incest within Pakistani communities, Britain's first Asian peer has claimed.  Baroness Flather, a former Tory who now sits as a cross-bencher, said in the House of Lords that it is "absolutely appalling" that first cousin marriages in Pakistani communities are leading to "so much disability among children".

She said: "There are a lot of first-cousin marriages in certain communities, particularly among Pakistanis who come from the Pakistani Kashmir area. We know so much about DNA now, but there is so much disability among the children, which is absolutely appalling.  "You go to any such family and there will be four or five children, at least one or two of whom will have some disability. That is absolutely unacceptable, and if we cannot do anything about it, is it fair to the children?"

Baroness Flather, a former barrister who was born in the Pakistani city of Lahore when it was part of India, said: "Never mind the parents — it is not fair to the children that they should be allowed to become disabled because of a social practice. It is a social practice which does not belong in today’s age, when we know so much about DNA.

Letter From America (About the Saudi Death Cult)

Record Number of Saudi Executions Triggers Violent Backlash

John Hayward
Breitbart News

[Editor's Note: Saudi Arabia has defended its processes and the executions.  It has said that its judges are independent; they apply strictly and conscientiously the dictats and precepts of  Sharia Law.  We wonder whether this will lead to the West rethinking its imaginary version of Islam.  Either Sharia is intrinsic to Islam, or Saudi Arabia represents an extremist perversion of the religion.  Our money is on the first option.  To criticise Saudi Arabia's actions is to criticise one of the three supporting buttresses of Islam.]

One particular execution carried out by Saudi Arabia this weekend, that of Shiite cleric Sheikh Nimr, led to violent protests and the sacking of the Saudi embassy in Tehran.  Sheikh Nimr was by no means alone on the chopping block. The Saudis executed a remarkable 47 prisoners on Saturday. Many of the others were members of al-Qaeda, leading Reuters to characterize the Kingdom’s intent as “signalling that it would not tolerate attacks, whether by Sunni jihadists or minority Shi’ites, and stirring sectarian anger across the region.”

Reuters adds that the executions “seemed mostly aimed at discouraging Saudis from jihadism after bombings and shootings by Sunni militants in Saudi Arabia over the past year killed dozens and Islamic State called on followers there to stage attacks.”

Letter From America (About Culpable Blindness)

‘Voluntary’ Sharia Tribunal in Texas

This Is How It Starts

by Pamela Geller 
28 Jan 2015
BreitbartNews

Breitbart Texas confirmed Tuesday that “an Islamic Tribunal using Sharia law” is indeed operating in Texas. But not to worry: an attorney for the tribunal assures us that participation is “voluntary,” and one of the Sharia judges, Dr. Taher El-badawi, says it’s devoted only to “non-binding dispute resolution.”

This is how it starts. This is how it started in the United Kingdom. When Sharia courts were instituted there, Muslim and non-Muslim officials alike all assured the British public and the world that they would be voluntary, restricted to matters involving non-criminal matters, and subject to the British courts. Any areas in which British law and Sharia law conflicted would be referred not to the Sharia courts, but to the British courts.

That is not how it worked out. The Telegraph reported in August 2011 that “there are growing concerns” that the Sharia courts “are creating a parallel legal system — and one that is developing completely unchecked.” The Independent stated in April 2012 “some Sharia law bodies have been misrepresented by the media as being transparent, voluntary and operating in accordance with human rights and equality legislation. This is not the case. Many Sharia law bodies rule on a range of disputes from domestic violence to child residence all of which should be dealt with by UK courts of law.” Instead, “they operate within a misogynist and patriarchal framework which is incompatible with UK legislation.”

The General Melchett's of our Age

 Invincible Ignorance and Tin Ears

Western appeasement of Islam has got to the point of being an acute embarrassment. Let's hear from one of the great progressive politicians in our age--patrician Howard Dean as he displays his acutely intelligent grasp of the issues, declaiming grandly from his podium of ignorance:




OK, so the perps who murdered 12 people in Paris were not Islamic--they merely had "twisted cultish minds".  Sort of like Charles Manson types.  So speaks one of the great Western appeasers.

Contrast Dean's self-deceit on this subject with a timely article drawing upon authoritative Islamic sources in National Review Online:

Letter from the US (About Sharia Law in London)

Islamists Threaten British Shop Owners with 40 Lashes for Selling Alcohol

By Mary Chastain  

14 Dec 2013

Breitbart News

Whitechapel is on the outskirts of London, but it is an area where Muslims enforce Sharia law without any interference from British officials. On Saturday, they took it a step further and told shop owners in the area they will face 40 lashes if they continue to sell alcohol.

The protesters, including Anjem Choudary, the former leader of the Al-Muhajiroun group which was banned under terrorism laws, delivered warning letters to Muslim-owned businesses. “The shops are run by Muslims and they know they are selling alcohol and they know the sale and consumption of alcohol is completely prohibited,” he said. “We cannot live among the non-Muslims and see this evil take place.”

Mizanur Rahman, organiser of the protest, said it had urged business owners to stop selling alcohol in breach of Muslim laws. Mr Rahman said: “We want Sharia law to be enforced in Britain,” before adding that many of the Muslim owners had been “embarrassed and ashamed” when confronted about their alcohol sales, but had argued that it was an economic necessity.

In 2011, The Daily Mail did an exposé on these "Muslim patrols" and how the English government has not done anything to stop. Women are targeted if they do not wear a headscarf.

Extenutating Circumstances

" Honour" Murders and Islam

"Honour" murders are in the news again.  In Canada.  The nation is reportedly shocked. Here is a summary of the case:

Zainab Shafia's crime was to run off to marry a man her parents hated. Middle sister Sahar's crime was to wear revealing clothes and have secret boyfriends. Youngest sister Geeti's crime was to do badly in school and call social workers for help dealing with a family home in turmoil.  The punishment for all three teenage Canadian sisters was the same: death.

Their executioner: their brother, acting on instructions from the father to run their car off the road.  Another family member, their father's first wife in a polygamous marriage, was also killed.

Hamed Shafia, his father, Mohammed, and his mother, Tooba Mohammed Yahya, were sentenced to life in prison for murder, with Judge Robert Maranger excoriating their "twisted notion of honor, a notion of honor that is founded upon the domination and control of women, a sick notion of honor that has absolutely no place in any civilized society."

CNN and other media outlets are rushing to assure everyone that honour murders are not Islamic.

More Light Rising in Libya

Deafening Silence

Further to our recent piece on the confused ambivalence in the West towards Libya--hailing the overthrow of a tyrant and welcoming the introduction of popular suffrage, whilst turning Nelson's blind eye to the Islamic nature of the regime--here is a piece from the Telegraph.

Religious Freedom

That's Not What We Meant At All . . .

This event in Sydney reads like a scene out of Monty Python, except that it is not.  A thirty year old man converts to Wahhabism--the form of Islam that is regnant in Saudi Arabia.  He apparently doesn't take the tee-totalling fetish of Wahhabism seriously and has a bit of a tipple.  His new brothers-in-the-faith enter his flat at night and administer a thorough lashing to the backslider--over 40 corrective stripes.

Douglas Wilson's Letter From America

Very Little Stones


Political Dualism - Mere Christendom
Written by Douglas Wilson
Tuesday, August 24, 2010

So I have said more than once that secularism is on its last legs. Where do I get off saying that? Why that pronouncement?

There are a number of ways this argument can be made, but allow me to point to just a couple. These indicators are not my own private claim to be able to see the future, as though I had a crystal ball, but rather indicate which way I see certain important currents running. The things I am pointing to do not seem to me to be disputable, and it also seems obvious to me that they are highly significant.

First, the anemic response of the secularists to the idea of sharia law has been quite striking. For example, consider the various accommodations to forms of sharia law that have been made around Europe. And through recent years, when that has been pointed out here, the laughter and the poopooing has been quite patronizing. "That couldn't happen here, you boob." And then this imam, at Ground Zero no less, pops up and wants to put a mosque there, and does so as an advocate of sharia law.

Now I know there is sharia law and there is sharia law. There is the chopping off of hands and death by stoning, on the one hand, and spiritiual jihad against eating too much cheesecake on the other. Given how human beings generally spread themselves out across a range of opinions, it is not surprising that some advocates of sharia law are not as whackadoodle as others. But this distinction is one that secularism, back in its robust and virulent phases, would have been incapable of making. This is the kind of distinction that secularism can make because it is in the process of unraveling.

Think back to the days of the Christian Reconstructionists. Think of Ezekiel One-Tooth, living on his theonomic compound somewhere in the Ozarks, unbending a little, in order to argue that the biblical requirement of death by stoning could actually be met by a firing squad, for what are bullets, he asks, but "very little stones?" Meets the requirement, he says. And then put alongside him a moderate theonomist, a scholar and careful thinker like Bahnsen, say. Do you think that as many secularists would be rushing to praise the "moderation" of Bahnsen the way they are defending this particular imam? To ask the question is to answer it. No, what is happening is that self-confidence is draining clear out of secularism, as can be seen in their inability to take a clear, public stand against the encroachments of militant Islam. The pathetic European attempts to dab around the edges of this problem, by trying to ban burkas, for example, are a day late and a Euro short.

The second reason I would like to offer for considering secularism a spent force is that the devil is moving from opposing Christendom across the board to a more nuanced stance of supporting and advancing some forms of it. This will require greater development, but here is the outline of it.

When the Church crosses the boarder between "outside and persecuted" to "inside and influential," that border crossing does not mean that the devil has gone into retirement. He does whatever he can to prevent the formation of Christendom in the first place, but then, when it looks as though we are going to get ourselves a Christendom regardless, he is concerned to manage what kind of Christendom we get. It was altogether a good thing that Constantine converted, and there was nothing bad about how the persecutions of the Church ceased. Three cheers for all of it. But the spiritual war continued on, unabated.

Anybody who thinks that the apostle Paul would have had us put up a big "mission accomplished" sign at that point is seriously mistaken. Once we have Christendom, which the devil opposed, are there forms of it that provide him with a great deal of scope to continue his work? You bet.

And I have seen, in recent years, arguments from Christian scholars that, if adopted in the context of a renewed Christendom, would present a really big problem. In fact, they would be a problem in just the same area where people have accused Constantine. The idea is that Constantine wanted something to prop up the existing order, and not something that would transform the existing order. Leave aside for the moment whether the accusation against Constantine is true. It is a plausible accusation nonetheless. "Let's get Jesus to help us to succeed in what we were already trying to do." In a similar way, those Christian thinkers who want the lordship of Jesus Christ acknowledged in public affairs coupled with a continuation of soft socialism (e.g. Wright, Cavanaugh) are wanting something that cannot be. And when they get the former, what they want with regard to the latter will be completely undone. For someone like Eusebius, someone like James Madison turns out to be something of a let down. Oh, well, I would say.

Another area of danger is found in those who urge an accommodation between postmodernism and the Christian ideal of community (e.g. James K.A. Smith). Leave aside for the moment that no one is really postmodern if they are not postDarwinian . . . more like Henry Morris than Brian McLaren. What is passing for postmodern these days is simply a rearguard action, trying to preserve certain customs in "our faith community." Which is not what Jesus told us to do. Jesus, if you recall, told us to go out into all the world in order to impose our metanarrative on all those other little, unbelieving narratives, and to do so in quite a triumphalistic fashion.

Douglas Wilson's Letter From America

The Dregs of the Last Christendom

Political Dualism - Mere Christendom
Written by Douglas Wilson
Monday, August 02, 2010

Former House speaker Newt Gingrich has given an important speech on the threat posed to us by Sharia law and the encroachments of Islamic fundamentalism. He was right to do so, but like so many, the ground where he wants to stand in this fight is ground that gives way under his feet. Sharia law is "abhorrent to Western values." So? Who cares about that?

The Islamists are driven by what Allah has revealed. The answer to this is not what the people of the West think at the present moment. If you want a good example of the voice of that god, then take a gander at the House of Representatives. A transcendental appeal, even if it might be false, appears to outrank a horizontal appeal that is known by everyone to be false.

Here is the basic problem. Why should we resist the encroachments of Sharia law based on our Western values? What is the opposite of Western values? That would be Eastern values, and can anybody give me a reason why we should prefer one position over another on the basis of geography?

Western values only have value if they are a coded way of referring to something else. And that something else cannot be another horizontal fact, like representative government, or womens' rights, or anything like that. That just pushes the question back a step. Why should we prefer those? And if we say that Western values simply means "our values," then why should those outrank "their values"? In the ebb and flow of Darwinian struggle, ours sometimes loses to theirs.

"Western values" as an appeal works only if it is a coded references to Christendom, and that only works if Christ is still there. Anything else is arbitrary, jingoistic, and stupid. Anything else is a couple of dogs fighting over a piece of meat.

The problem is illustrated by secular or atheistic Zionism, which is racism, straight up. If you make a theological argument for Jews in the land of Palestine, that argument is based in the will of God and not in the inherent right of a certain DNA imprint to hold the rights to a certain bit of territory. Even if that theological argument is wrong, the appeal it makes is not to race (Dt. 7:7-8). But if there is no God, and hence no theological argument, all you have left of your Zionism is race. "I can have this, and you cannot have it, because I am a Jew and you are not." Zionism of that sort, Zionism with no God, is racist pure and simple. Of course, if there is no God, there is nothing wrong with such racism, and nothing wrong with answering it in kind, but that is another point for another day.

In the same way, Western values are a bundle of wind, a bunch of nothing. The postmodernists have pointed out to us that there are different communities out there, and they all have their values, and so now these communities careen around in our global village like so many bumper cars. Who's to say?

Western values are only to be preferred in a conflict like this if they are grounded in some way in the will of God. If they are not, then they will go down before the will of Allah like dry grass before the scythe. Islamism will go through deracinated Western values like a hot knife through butter. It goes back to Chesterton's adage -- if you don't stand for something you will fall for anything.

Now there have been times, times of unreflecting youth, when a people with their false little democratic gods on a shelf might successfully stand against another people with their false allah-god up in the air. Sometimes Jupiter prevails over Mithra and sometimes it goes the other way. That kind of thing has been done, and it has actually been done by the people of the West to the Muslims. Think of the Western democracies of the early twentieth century carving up the Middle East like it was a pie. Yes, it has been done.

But that was before the rot of postmodernism set in, the reductio that made all our crackerjack thinkers realize (some of them reluctantly) that our great Kantian sky hook wasn't actually bolted to anything, and one man's guess was as good as another's.

So this means, in short, there is now no way to defend the West without rejecting, root and branch, the last one hundred years of Western intellectual history. That's fine with me, and all my modest proposal entails is that we undertake to defend the West by rejecting the last two hundred and fifty years of Western intellectual history. I am willing to defend the next Christendom, and am in fact eager to do so. I am not willing to take my stand on the basis of the dregs of the last Christendom.