RUTHFULLY YOURS

Writing in Islamist Watch for April 17, 2013, David Rusin draws our attention to a recent case in an Australian court which would beggar belief if we had not grown inured to such outrages through repetition and cultural submission. As Rusin writes, “Esmatullah Sharifi, an Afghan refugee who came to Australia in 2001 and launched a career as a sexual predator, has been granted leave to appeal his sentence for raping an intoxicated young woman in 2008. Robert Redlich, an appellate judge, explained that the sentencing judge had focused primarily on ‘the protection of the community’ and improperly ‘rejected any suggestion [Sharifi] didn’t have a clear concept of consent in sexual relations’ due to cultural differences.” Rusin suggests that a double standard is in effect, “whereby a Muslim upbringing can excuse horrible behavior that would never be tolerated from non-Muslims.”

There have been a growing number of cases throughout the West, in which Muslim felons, charged with various crimes that would normally entail vigorous sentencing, have seen their cases dismissed or subject to appeal on the grounds of differing cultural norms, customs and assumptions. While convictions can sometimes be made to stick, even then the authorities are prone to react with reluctance and only after charges cannot be reasonably deferred. As Soeren Kern reports at The Gatestone Institute, in a case involving a gang of Muslim “groomers” in Manchester, the Crown Prosecution Service was provided with DNA evidence of rape but “twice decided not to prosecute” while government lawyers also refused to proceed.

Even a brief internet search will yield innumerable such episodes. The distinction seems to apply only to Islamic offenders; immigrants from non-Islamic countries can generally expect the full weight of the law to be levied against them. But Muslim cases are far more often regarded as special cases and Muslim perps granted unique prerogatives in the eyes of the law.

Thus a Muslim who attacks an American citizen for insulting the Prophet has the assault case thrown out of court by a sympathetic judge. The judge, Mark Martin, claimed that the accused, a certain Talaag Elbayoni, was justified and even obligated by his religion to respond to perceived provocation with violence. Apparently, in the opinion of this Pennsylvania judge, Sharia law trumps the First Amendment. Similarly, a Muslim who rapes a 13-year-old girl receives a suspended sentence because, in the words of the presiding judge, “it is quite clear from the reports that you are very naive and immature when it comes to sexual matters.” Indeed, Muslim rape of young girls has become a veritable epidemic in Scandinavia, the U.K. and elsewhere, and Muslim assaults of one sort or another—workplace harassment, physical beatings, intimidation, unpatriotic and even treasonable acts and utterances—are legion. Yet in far too many of these instances our judicial system may be plausibly described as double-jointed, two-tiered, and appallingly lenient—in a word, Islamophiliac.

Such conduct on the part of our judiciary leads to an inevitable question and a logical conundrum, namely, where does it end? If rape, physical assault, and other crimes are dismissed as instances of different cultural values that need to be acknowledged and that generate privileges and exemptions pertaining to no other group or cohort, why stop there? Islam requires its adherents to behave in certain specific ways, the Koran and the ancillary literature prescribe right and permissible forms of conduct and proscribe others, the religion excuses and vindicates particular acts that many of us find intolerable and reprehensible. Nevertheless, the paradigms and ideals inherent in the faith are considered by an increasing number of judges and lawmakers to be sacrosanct.

If that is the case, why should an Islamic terrorist be held to account by Western jurisprudence for flying a plane into a skyscraper or detonating bombs among a civilian population? Does not the Koran, in innumerable pssages, enjoin the believer to slay the infidel? (See, for example, suras 2:191, 193; 8:39; 9:5; 9:29; 9:73; 47:4; 66:9; etc. etc.) Is not violence and slaughter an intrinsic part of a canonical imperative when it comes to Islam and its holy scriptures? Unlike in the Hebrew and Christian scriptures, the commands to maim and kill in the Koran are truly extraordinary. The major passages dealing with violence in the two Testaments are chiefly narrative and descriptive, whereas in the Koran they are largely hortatory and prescriptive. The disparity is critical. “Islam,” writes former Muslim Nonie Darwish, “is the only religion that requires its followers to kill those who do not believe in Allah.”

The question remains. If a man is acting according to his faith, that is, his Muslim faith—raping women and assaulting passersby and demonstrators—for which he is frequently reprieved by the courts for reasons of cultural and religious practice and doctrine, why should he be punished for wreaking havoc among unbelievers and skeptics and targeting those by whom he feels offended or whom he has been taught to regard as fair game? After all, he is not individually responsible for his ostensible depravity or malfeasance; educated under different auspices, he is innocent of malice aforethought. He is the product of a society, religion or civilization which we must perforce respect within the multicultural context we have embraced.

Where, in short, does one draw the line between the perpetrating of a presumably “minor” offense—raping, beating, burning cars—and the infliction of a major cataclysm—blowing people up—if the exonerating factor is cultural usage or religious dogma, or both? What principle is in place that would allow us to escape the aneurysm of cognitive dissonance and evade the charge of palpable hypocrisy? For if “principle” is interpreted as the embodiment and expression of a policy of consistent extenuation, then there is no moral or legitimate principle at work whatsoever. Principle has been waived in the interests of expediency and collusion. With respect to Islam, such is the scandal of Western jurisprudence, which tends to act as the domestic arm of Western diplomacy, foreign adventurism and political appeasement of a clever and remorseless adversary.

If God is dead, said Dostoevsky’s Ivan Karamazov, all is permitted. Whether or not one agrees with this dictum, there can be no doubt that when pride in one’s civilization and gratitude to the precursors who built and defended it weaken and erode, the spirit of the culture is broken and all is permitted to the enemy who would destroy us. He can violate the common law and receive only a mild reprimand or be acquitted wholesale. He can preach subversion and jihad in the mosque and be allowed to pass under the radar. He can kill the innocent in their thousands and be defended by a decadent but influential elite as a holy warrior extracting justice from a colonial oppressor. He is the beneficiary of a selectively applied multicultural ethos that allows him, quite literally, to get away with murder.

Such is the cultural pathology that heralds the decline and fall of a civilization. Given our indifference, our passion for conciliation, our frivolous disregard of both reality and conscience, and the attendant corruption of our judiciary, the Muslim ghazzua on our way of life seems likely to succeed.

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