VIDEO: Shut the f*ck up and start swearing!

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HATEWATCH: Blair and his buddies poke fun at domestic violence ...

Daily Telegraph blogger and opinion editor Tim Blair just loves to have a good laugh with his regular online buddies. And what could be more worthy of laughs than a woman being murdered, allegedly by her husband in an extreme case of domestic violence?

Sensible people would find domestic violence rather depressing. It happens everywhere and in all communities. Almost always it's men being violent to women.

Some of us spend time campaigning against domestic violence. But for the Daily Telegraph, domestic violence is a source of great laughs. Check out some of the comments moderated and featured on this Tele blogpost:

Abdul-Ghafur: Improve Islam’s image, Woman, or heads will roll!
Albury Shifton
Tue 24 Feb 09 (06:47am)

There’s an idea: Instead of beheading your wife when she’s misbehaving, show yourself as a truly moderate Muslim and throw her out the window instead.
Mikael, Grand Mufti of Denmark
Tue 24 Feb 09 (07:31am)

A woman is murdered in the most gruesome fashion. Her husband is arrested and charged with her murder. Her family and community are mourning. I can only begin to imagine what her kids are going through.

Yes, it really is very funny, Tim.

Then again, I should factor in the possibility that these comments were left by nasty anonymous leftoids determined to make Blair look even more racist than he already is. Pfft. Now that certainly is something worth laughing at.

UPDATE I: Someone has pointed out to me that beheadings have happened in a variety of places. In August 2008, a 31 year old Greek man was found carrying his girlfriend's head after beheading her at a popular tourist resort. No doubt Tim's resident cybernazis will also find a few laughs in this tragedy. Or perhaps they will start poking fun at the Greek Orthodox Church. Who knows?

Words © 2009 Irfan Yusuf


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HATEWATCH: Yet even more great moments from Tim Blair's News Ltd blog ...

The Abu Hamza pseudo-controversy has provided the nazified imbeciles congregating around the News Limited blob ... woops ... blog of Tim Blair with further inspiration for laughably inane comment. Here are some excerpts. Try not to laugh too hard.

Barak Obama eating a hamburger (not a Sea Kitten, note) prepared by the wife of a Muslim cleric - in an unforgivable affront to the Jewish and Christian faiths! No! Just the Jewish one. Wait! Which one doesn’t eat ham again? Oh yeah, the Muslims.
bill of sydney
Fri 23 Jan 09 (05:28am)

What the ...? And for all you interfaith buffs, shove this up your halal/kosher ham sandwich!

dowp replied to bill
Fri 23 Jan 09 (06:59pm)

Er BIll. Jews don’t eat ham, bacon, pork or other pig-based ingredients. Not if they’re religious anyway.

Just ONE of the religious obligations MoHAMmed stole from the Jews to try to convert them to Islam.

Don’t you know anything?

But this isn't just about religion. It's also about colour. People with white skin clearly have more conscience ...

Speaking of contex, in the video of the audience there are many ‘non-Anglo’ faces. They all look expressionless as they listen to the hateful Imam - apparently drinking in the message obediently.
But there is one ‘Anglo’ and he has a smirk [of embarrassment?] on his face. He seems to be half looking to see how he should react to the teaching to beat his wife.
Which of these reactions shows assimilation to the Australian culture?
Barrie (Reply)
Fri 23 Jan 09 (08:33am)

Moving onto page 2, some people are wondering why conservatives aren't stupid enough to buy into this tabloid tripe ...

Where are our cultural commentators, Greer of the Long Face and John Pilchard, on this; and, more importantly, where is Malcolm Turnbull, every conservative think tank spokesman and people elected by half of Australian voters to speak stridently against those things that are inimical to our way of life?
Mick Gold Coast QLD of Gold Coast QLD (Reply)
Fri 23 Jan 09 (09:07am)

Even after someone pointed out that even Muslims have actively condemned any hint of condoning domestic violence, the usual cultural nuance and sophistication returns ...

John E replied to ann j
Fri 23 Jan 09 (01:33pm)

The mere fact that the video is 4-5 years old, and yet they still broadcasted it - knowing full well the filth that was contained on it, and the likely reaction by the public - means that the Muslims who produced it deserve every bit of the condemnation that rightly flows their way.

I’d like to think - and certainly hope - that this line of thinking is, in fact, limited to a bunch of fringe crazies within the Muslim religion, but there appears to be very little objective evidence that that is the case.

Meanwhile, it's time to bring in extraneous leftwing ideas like human rights ...

So according to this Muslim cleric it’s OK for Muslim men to beat their wives so long as they don’t draw blood or create bruises.

Then how come other Muslims complain that terrorist suspects were tortured at Guantanamo Bay ? Surely it’s not torture ? Surely it’s just a bit of harmless wife-beating ?

Men can hit there innocent wives but the US can’t interrogate terrorist suspects ?
Bruce Smith (Reply)
Fri 23 Jan 09 (01:37pm)

I look forward to comments from "Augustus", "tim blair" and the anonymous chap from Normanhurst to this post. Enjoy!

Words © 2009 Irfan Yusuf


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COMMENT: Marital rape and misunderstanding the nature of sexual assault ...

It's been a while since I last read the literature on criminal laws governing sexual assault. In Australia, each state and territory has its own statutory provisions dealing with sexual assault. The last time I studied the NSW provisions was back in 2004 when I briefly acted for a person charged with sexual assault of a minor. Prior to that, I studied the historical development of the NSW legislation in great length during while completing an undergraduate course entitled Personal Injury in 1990.

There is a huge amount of misunderstanding in the broader community (including among law enforcement officials and the judiciary) about the nature and effects of sexual assault (also known as rape). Clearly the Melbourne speaker Abu Hamza also has little understanding of the nature of sexual assault, especially within marriage. What especially frightened me as I watched the video excerpts on the News Limited websites was the large number of young boys and men listening carefully to what Abu Hamza had to say.

One of the best papers I havefound addressing this subject is authored by Dr Patricia Easteal entitled Without Consent: Confronting Adult Sexual Violence. The paper can be downloaded here.

Here are salient excerpts:

One of the only means available to reduce sexual assault and to enhance the probability that its victims will report it to authorities is through knocking down the false images of rape that act to perpetuate it in society ... rape prevention lies in changing societal attitudes about rape and about men and women. Rape is not limited to male perpetrators and female victims; however, it is overwhelmingly a crime against women ...

Rape is not a sexual act. Rape is an act of violence which uses sex as a weapon. Rape is motivated by aggression and by the desire to exert power and humiliate. Just as wife-battering had to be taken out of the privacy of the home and criminalised in order to effectuate any change, rape must be taken out of the sexual realm and placed where it rightfully belongs in the domain of violence against women.

... Sexual assaults are not usually done spontaneously or impulsively; studies have shown that in most instances, rape is premeditated and often involves a pre-rape time period of interaction with the victim ...

The nature of rape makes it an extremely problematic crime to measure. Due both to the ambiguity about what it is and to the societal and criminal justice response, which at best could be labelled ambivalent, sexual assault is grossly under-reported by its victims. There is reason to suspect, from international crime surveys, that Australia has a particularly high incidence of sexual assault, certainly higher than the United Kingdom although probably second to the USA.

... rape by a stranger is more likely to be reported than assault by a partner, date or acquaintance ...

An abundance of research both overseas and in Australia has established that the majority of sexual assaults are perpetrated by acquaintances, dates or marital partners ...

Marital rape has been found to be a component in a high number of marriages that
involve physical battering ... [an estimated] 10 to 14 per cent of all married women have been or will be raped by their spouse. Although marital rape involves more violence and physical injuries than acquaintance rape, the lower rate of reporting can be attributed to both the isolation of the battered woman and to the ongoing societal assumption that husbands are immune from sexual assault charges.

Almost 15% of all married women will experience sexual assault by their husbands. These are extraordinary figures. Marital is under-reported and hence its victims suffer in silence. Indeed, as the South African Muslim theologian Farid Esack says, female victims of rape are double victims. They are victims of the act itself and are then victims of a kind of enforced or pressured silence based on false notions of shame.

Abu Hamza and other Islamic religious teachers should read the following paragraph from Dr Eastel's paper:

A woman is no longer supposed to abdicate her sexual rights in marriage; a wife's consent is no longer to be implied. However, the reality is that few rapes by cohabiting spouse/rapists are either reported or tried. Even estrangement has proven problematic. In practice, extreme violence appears to be a necessary component in the marital rape for it to be deemed as a criminal act. Certainly the change in legislation has not resulted in a flow of marital rape cases through the courts ... [I]n September 1991, a man in Tasmania was sentenced for the rape of his wife. This was the first marital rape trial in that state, although immunity was abolished in 1987. The couple were estranged. Similar paucity of such cases was found in South Australia six years after that state's reform ...

Given the extreme difficulty in securing convictions for marital rape, and given the high proportion of rapes carried out by spouses, the last thing religious leaders should do is make some imbecilic ambit claim that their followers are somehow exempt from the clear provisions of the criminal law. Further, if religious leaders are really interested in women's welfare, they should understand the severe physical and psychological consequences of rape upon its victims.

Words © 2008 Irfan Yusuf


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CRIKEY: Domestic violence crosses cultural barriers

There's an Arabic word commonly spelled in English as fiqh and pronounced as "fick". It refers to the corpus of regulations derived from scriptural sources. For 14 centuries, Islamic religious scholars developed all kinds of rules from scripture. And for the past decade or so, my "Aussie Mossie" mates have developed a polite way of responding to the more imbecilic rulings.

So when I read this morning of the crazy rants of someone described by Herald Sun as "Coburg's self-styled cleric", I used that same polite response, asking myself: "What the fiqh?" And when I watched the actual video (consisting of clumsily edited excerpts from two separate lectures), I found myself wondering what bits had been left out.

Samir Abu Hamza was shown saying hitting and bashing one's wife was forbidden. As a last resort, a man may hit their wives with a toothbrush. The traditional brush used by the Prophet Muhammad (known as a miswak and which looks like this) is much lighter than your average Oral-B. Did Abu Hamza remind his audience that not a single incident is recorded in Islamic scriptures of the Prophet even so much as raising his voice at any woman? I'm not sure. What I do know is this -- my mum would happily squirt toothpaste in Abu Hamza's eyes and up his nostrils if he tried lecturing her husband and/or son on the merits of even the "mildest" form of toothbrush tantrum.

The second excerpt showed Abu Hamza talking about the spiritual and moral causes of alcoholism, crime, gambling and other social ills. He accuses Muslims of being selfish in not sharing their religious values with others. Apparently, we are meant to be offended by this. Apparently, the Jensens and Pells of this world don't deliver similar sermons.

So where is the real story in all this? Abu Hamza defended using an instrument of "discipline" that can still poke someone's eye out whilst effectively denying the existence of marital rape in religious law. It's a claim without foundation. To suggest marital rape is tolerated in any religious tradition (let alone Middle Eastern faiths like Christianity, Judaism and Islam) is complete nonsense. What kind of sick man gets his kicks out of forcing any woman, let alone his own wife, to have s-x with him?

Domestic violence (including marital rape) is far too common across all Australian communities. The Herald Sun poll asked whether readers thought Abu Hamza's comments are out of touch with Australian values. If Aussie values are defined using crime statistics, well the White Ribbon Day website provides disturbing statistics; for example, nearly two-thirds of women experience physical or sexual violence at least once during their life time.

Yet sadly, as is so often the case, religious teachers are out of step with the rest of us. Some months back, The Age covered a Melbourne University conference where the Islamic Women's Welfare Council delivered a paper on the attitudes of imams toward gender issues. Muslim women deserve not just the protection of the law but also the support of their menfolk. How can this happen when male religious leaders continue to be caught out making despicable remarks? And how can the problem be resolved when moronic tabloids across the land turn issues like domestic violence into yet another exercise in shoring up "Australian values" despite the fact that men of all backgrounds are perpetrators and women of all background are victims?

First published in Crikey on Thursday 22 January 2009.


UPDATE I: The following comment was left on the Crikey website ...

Stephen
Thursday, 22 January 2009 2:53:06 PM
The answer is simple: they are the same morons who kept quiet when Israeli soldiers were committing the greatest of violence against women- wives, mothers, daughters- in Gaza.

UPDATE II: Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has called upon Abu Hamza to apologise to women in Australia. He's right. Abu Hamza must retract and apologise. And he must issue a statement saying that rape within marriage is just as serious and just as criminal as rape outside marriage. Even if he feels he has been hard done by, he must still apologise and retract. Too many Muslim women are suffering due to violence and abuse within families. If men don't speak out, when will this situation stop?

UPDATE III: A further comment was left on the Crikey website:

Geoff
Thursday, 22 January 2009 3:43:26 PM
Irfan conveniently misses the point...again. Abu Hamza's condoning a muslim man's right to force his wives to have sex if they show no signs of physical illness or injury is nothing less than disgusting and despicable. This maniacal mysogynist and his sickening view of women's place in the world should be loudly disowned by all thinking muslims - including, if not especially, Irfan.

My response to this comment:

Irfan
Thursday, 22 January 2009 4:03:47 PM
Geoff, it goes without saying that these kinds of absurd attitudes toward women are nuts. The idea that a man can just demand intercourse from his wife is something out of another century. Or at least it should be. The problem is that it isn't out of another century. It's happening here and now and across cultural and religious divides. But when you turn domestic violence into the object of cultural warfare, it means you aren't serious about the issue. You're only serious about it when it allows you to point the finger at others, forgetting that three fingers point straight back at you.

A positive aspect of the Herald-Sun article (which wasn't replicsated in the hard copy edition of the Daily Telegraph) was the response from Joumanah El-Matrah. I think her response is spot-on.

Words © 2009 Irfan Yusuf


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COMMENT/MEDIA: The Times of London recycles Kerbaj?

Richard Kerbaj, formerly of The Australian and author of numerous articles displaying his Lebanese-and-Arabic-speaking skills, has now moved to London to take up a post at The Times. Both The Australian and The Times are owned by Rupert "Muslims-marry-their-cousins" Murdoch.

You can check out Kerbaj's skills at reporting on radical thick-Sheiks by clicking here. Also interesting is correspondence sent by ABC's Media Watch here. You can also read Imam Sheik Ayatollah Hujjat al-Islam Khoury Sayyid Michael Stutchbury's response clarifying Kerbaj's Arabic-language skills here.

[UK readers will be amused by Kerbaj's colleagues at the Melbourne Herald-Sun confusing Abu Hamza with Abu Hamza.]

Kerbaj's latest piece in The Times actually isn't so bad. He discusses plans to purge "Muslim spiritual leaders" who turn a blind eye to violence against women. In theory, it might well be a good idea. Lay persons shouldn't get away with turning a blind eye to violence against women. Why should religious leaders?

[Though given Kerbaj's past performance with labelling, one wonders whether in this particular article, by the term "spiritual leader", he means an imam. Or does he mean a pir? Or a murshid? Or how about a hoca? Or a maulana? Or even a molvi? Or how about a sidi? And why has he stopped using the term "Muslim cleric" as he often did in Australia?]

I'm not sure if Kerbaj will focuss much of his time at The Times focussing on UK Muslim issues. But just how qualified is he for this task? Does Kerbaj have any clue who leads the liturgy and educational needs of Britain's various Muslim sects and cultural groups? Can Kerbaj identify one maslaq from another? Does he understand the differences between various shades of Deobandi, Barelwi and Ahl-i-Hadith? Does Kerbaj speak Urdu or Bangla?

These questions are pertinent. After all, in Australia so much of Kerbaj's information came from various Lebanese groups whose political nuances he had little understanding of, despite his own Lebanese heritage.

Much of Kerbaj's information on Aussie Muslim management issues came from followers of Abdullah Hareri and the al-Ahbash sect. One wonders whether in London, Kerbaj's sources come from the equal and opposite of al-Ahbash i.e. the followers of Nazim al-Qubrussi (attacked on an al-Ahbash website here) and and his student Hisham Kabbani?

One of Kerbaj's main sources in his recent story is Irfan al-Alawi from the UK branch of the Centre for Islamic Pluralism. Al-Alawi claims to be a follower of a Yemeni Sufi master who has close associations with Imam Hamza Yusuf Hanson of the Zaytuna Institute.

[The Executive Director of that Centre's head office in the United States, Mr Stephen Suleyman Schwartz, whose profile you can read on that wonderful blog Jewcy where you'll also find a fascinating post on why he sees Islam as "Judaism for the Whole World". Amir Butler claims here that Schwartz is a follower of Hisham Kabbani, though Schwartz doesn't mention Kabbani at all in this interview with National Review Online. Schwartz claims to be a proponent of traditional Islam and Sufism, though his repeated personal attacks on Imam Hamza Yusuf Hanson (a prominent proponent of traditional Islam) borders on obsessive.]

Australian readers will be familiar with Kerbaj's usual mantra that Wahhabi Islam is virtually a unitary phenomenon espoused by Usama bin Ladin. He repeats this mantra for the consumption of UK readers in his latest piece ...

During its investigation the organisation - the British arm of a longestablished US think-tank - received a number of complaints about imams who had turned a blind eye to cases of domestic violence, many of whom are followers of Wahabbism, a puritanical interpretation of the Koran espoused by Osama bin Laden.

Some readers may wonder why a White Ribbon Day Ambassador like me should object to a report the publication of which is clearly in the public interest. Surely religious leaders of any congregation turning a blind eye to domestic violence must be exposed and shamed. Why should Muslims be any exception?

Muslim spiritual leaders could be denounced publicly by their own community as part of a campaign to expose imams whose silence on domestic abuse is leading to women being burnt, lashed and raped in the name of Islam.

Muslim scholars are to present the Government with the names of imams who are alleged by members of their own communities to have refused to help abused women. Imams are also accused of refusing to speak out against domestic abuse in their sermons because they fear losing their clerical salaries and being sacked for broaching a “taboo” subject.

Some of Britain's most prominent moderate imams and female Muslim leaders have backed the campaign, urging the Home Office to vet more carefully Islamic spiritual leaders coming to Britain to weed out hardliners. A four-month inquiry by the Centre for Islamic Pluralism into domestic abuse has uncovered harrowing tales of women being raped, burnt by cigarettes and lashed with belts by their husbands, who believe it is their religious right to mistreat them.

At least 40 female Muslim victims and many social workers from northern England - including Bradford, Manchester, Leeds and Birmingham - were interviewed as part of the inquiry, which is expected to be published next month.

And why should someone like yours truly, who has a history of criticising a young Sydney imam and a former Australian Mufti for their ignorant and dangerous comments on sexual assault victims, have a problem with Kerbaj doing the same?

The problem is that Kerbaj might be accused of using domestic violence as an excuse to play a game of journalistic sectarian wedge-politics. The last thing we should be doing is believing that the only imams who justify or turn a blind eye to domestic violence are Wahhabis and the Tabligh Jamaat, whom Kerbaj claims is ... wait for it ...

... accused of radicalising young British Muslims with its orthodox teachings.

[One wonders how some of Kerbaj's sources, who claim to be more true to Islamic orthodoxy than the TJ, would respond to Kerbaj's claim that orthodox Islam radicalises young British Muslims.]

But my real objection to Kerbaj's article (at least based on my own reading of it) is the same as my objection to any attempt to focus on one group of domestic violence perpetrators whilst ignoring another group. Or my objections to scribes, pundits and politicians behaving like defenders of sexual violence victims when it suits their prejudices.

Here's an excerpt of what I wrote about this topic in the Australian Jesuit publication Eureka Street ...

This isn't just another case of inconsistency inspired by sectarian prejudice, of what's good for the Muslim goose being not good for the non-Muslim gander. The clear message is that misogynistic or insensitive remarks about sexual assault victims are only worthy of universal condemnation if those making the remarks belong to the 'wrong' religious, ethnic and/or cultural background ...

When sexual assault becomes a cultural or sectarian wedge, it demeans and insults the suffering of all victims and their families. It also opens to question our society's commitment to unconditionally ending violence against women.

On the other hand, Kerbaj might argue that he wasn't expressing any opinion. He was merely reporting the facts. However, consider these points ...

a. Is the CIP the first and/or only UK Muslim group to tackle community attitudes toward domestic violence?

b. What standing does CIP have in mainstream British Muslim circles? I'm not just talking about religious circles but also cultural (e.g. South Asian) and language (e.g. Hindi/Urdu, Punjabi and Bangla) circles.

There are other factors to consider. Perhaps Kerbaj would have factored all these points in if he'd been provided with a more generous word length. And as I've already said above, Kerbaj's article isn't as bad as his past work, some of which does little more than perpetuate a Team America take on Muslims. When it comes to identifying Islamic sectarian nuances, at times Kerbaj has tripped over even the most basic kindergarten stuff.

UK readers of this blog should keep a close eye on Kerbaj's work. At the same time, we should all remember that it often isn't easy for journalists to report on such issues.

(Thanks to PK and BC for the tip-off.)

UPDATE I: Another article (in fact a case study of one victim ignored by her local imams) by Richard Kerbaj is well worth reading. This is really disturbing stuff. We can bag reporters like Kerbaj all we like. But who is going to protect women like 'Aliya'?

UPDATE II: I've written about Kerbaj at some length in various Crikey pieces, some of which can be found here, here, here, here, here, here and here.

Words © 2008 Irfan Yusuf


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