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| Olde Tyme Religion |
| My father, the honored Iman, beat me and raped me many times |
| 2009-03-16 |
| Her father emigrated to this country from rural Pakistan some time in the 1960s and is, apparently, a highly respected local figure. He is also an incestuous child abuser, repeatedly raping his daughter from the age of five until she was 15, ostensibly as part of her punishment for being “disobedient”. At the age of 16 she fled her family to avoid the forced marriage they had planned for her in Pakistan. A much, much greater affront to “honour” in her family’s eyes, however, was the fact that she then became a Christian – an apostate. The Koran is explicit that apostasy is punishable by death; thus it was that her father the imam led a 40-strong gang – in the middle of a British city – to find and kill her. Hannah Shah says her story is not unique – that there are many other girls in British Muslim families who are oppressed and married off against their will, or who have secretly become Christians but are too afraid to speak out. When, at school, she had finally summoned the courage to tell a teacher that her father had been beating her (she couldn’t bring herself to reveal the sexual abuse), the social services sent out a social worker from her own community. He chose not to believe Hannah and, in effect, shopped her to her father, who gave her the most brutal beating of her life. Hannah blames what is sometimes called political correctness for this debacle: “My teachers had thought they were doing the right thing, they thought it showed ‘cultural sensitivity’ by bringing in someone from my own community to ‘help’, but it was the worst thing they could have done to me. This happens a lot. “When I’ve been working with girls who were trying to get out of an arranged marriage, or want to convert to Christianity, and they have contacted social services as they need to get out of their homes, the reaction has been ‘we’ll send someone from your community to talk to your parents’. I know why they are doing this, they are trying to be understanding, but it’s the last thing that the authorities should do in such situations.” This is the sort of cultural sensitivity displayed by Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, last year when he suggested that problems within the British Muslim community such as financial or marital disputes could be dealt with under sharia, Islamic law, rather than British civil law. What did Hannah, now an Anglican, think on hearing these remarks? “I was horrified.” If you could speak to him now, what would you say to the archbishop? “I would say: have you actually spoken to any ordinary Muslim women about the situation that they live in, in their communities? By putting in place these Muslim arbitration tribunals, where a woman’s witness is half that of a man, you are silencing women even more.” |
| Posted by:mhw |
| #3 An important characteristic of "hate speech" is that it is not about "speech", but about a "hated individual" who is speaking about a subject that he is not permitted to speak about. The most obvious example is that black people are allowed to use racist language, even when it menaces or threatens, because they are authorized to use that speech. But white males are not authorized to use that speech at all, so the content of what they say, even if it is fully truthful and used in a non-aggressive context, is "hate speech". Geert Wilders is an "enemy of Islam", forbidden to speak about Islam at all. So the content or context of what he has to say, even if objectively accurate, is "hate speech". It does not matter what he says. He is not permitted to speak. "Freedom of expression doesn't mean the right to offend." -- Maxime Verhagen, Dutch Foreign Minister |
| Posted by: Anonymoose 2009-03-16 09:38 |
| #2 Will TimesOnline be prosecuted for publishing this 'hate' piece? It seems pretty consistent with the banned Wilders 'hate film'. |
| Posted by: Glenmore 2009-03-16 08:15 |
| #1 UK readers turn their minds off: "Islamophobia", they declare, and then move on to the next story. Nothing to see here. |
| Posted by: gromky 2009-03-16 00:42 |