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The Forum > Article Comments > The Australian's campaign's distorting emphasis on Sharia > Comments

The Australian's campaign's distorting emphasis on Sharia : Comments

By Zachariah Matthews, published 23/3/2012

Despite The Australian's reports Muslims may refer to Sharia law when framing their wills.

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It appears from the piece that journalists, a politician and this Mr Patel have all presumed to comment on a court case without reading the judgement.

How can one become a journalist or a politician without having learnt how stupid this is?
Posted by jeremy, Friday, 23 March 2012 8:52:06 AM
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...It is “high-time” Australia acknowledged its past mistakes in declaring war on Muslims, as the “suck” to a psychopathic George Bush and the USA wild swing pay-back, which wrongly accused all elements of the Islamic world as enemies of America, following the terror attacks on NY 9/11.

...To continue with the paranoid racism against our own Muslim communities is unforgiveable. I am pretty disgusted with the all to common comment in the Australian newspaper, which picks-off Muslims and Aboriginals on a regular basis; and as a consequence, I have ceased subscription to this South African style diatribe newspaper.

...As a PS, I noticed recently Graham Young published an article in the same infamous paper which was (thankfully) in no-way racist.
Posted by diver dan, Friday, 23 March 2012 11:17:09 AM
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Most people are happy to accept the Muslim immigrants to Australia, but we do not accept Sharia law, if you persist you must have the laws of the country you left, then return, we will be happy, and you then can continue with all the ramifications Of Sharia law, but please not here in Australia
Posted by Ojnab, Friday, 23 March 2012 12:16:43 PM
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And Ojnab: May I take the journalistic staff of the Australian newspaper back to Beirut for a fortnight too. They all may have a different view to the cowardly "attack-dog" mentality currently on free display, (if and when they return)!
Posted by diver dan, Friday, 23 March 2012 7:58:59 PM
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Some Journalists never let the truth get in the way of a good story.

No Australian judge is going to say that a daughter should get the same as her brothers in a Will from their Mother, purely because of her gender.

I agree with the author that the issue was more about whether the Mother in this story was of sound mind when she signed her Will.

Successive journalists then seemed to focus on the Sharia Law aspect of the case, rather than the major legal issue of being of sound mind when making your Will.

These 'writers' know that if they dangle the Sharia Law issue in front of any ignorant, bigoted people in the community, then they will cause some angst re a perceived 'takeover' of our Australian way of life.

It must have been a quiet news day...
Posted by Suseonline, Saturday, 24 March 2012 12:57:37 AM
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The author of this vapid article and generally the authors of the equally obtuse comments have confused the general right, albeit a right becoming heavily mitigated, for individuals to frame their will as they wish and the plaintiff's assertion that Sharia law should prevail in the tesimonials of Moslems.

It is a common conflation and an insidious one. The former right is an expression of the fundamental superiority of liberal, individual rights based democracies while the latter is another facet of the prescriptive and unindividual nature of Islam.

It is not a right of Moslems to demand any aspect of Sharia law in a secular democracy; this is an oxymoron obviously not fully appreciated by the author when he castigates the reporting of the case as missing the ratio decidendi of the Judge, which was the competence of the testator.

This is beside the point because it was the plaintiff's case that Sharia should apply. The proponents of Sharia law will not give up; they are implacable and have no respect for secular law.

In this respect, the main implication of the law case, the media, for once was correct.
Posted by cohenite, Sunday, 25 March 2012 10:22:50 PM
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The hills are alive, with the sound of...

...dogwhistles.

Forget the facts. Or, if really desperate, simply ignore the relevant facts. In this case, that the judge focussed on the mental capacity of the legator.

>>This is beside the point because it was the plaintiff's case that Sharia should apply.<<

It is not the relevant point at all. It may have been the justification the boys used to defend their position, that "the children were obligated to distribute the estate according to Islamic law." But it most certainly was not a relevant fact as far as the judge was concerned.

Nor should it have been.

What we have is a clear example where Sharia Law is NOT a consideration in an Australian court of law. But this does not prevent the dog-whistlers from pretending that it is the thin and of the wedge. Or the start of the slippery slope or whatever, choose your cliché du jour.

>>The proponents of Sharia law will not give up; they are implacable and have no respect for secular law.<<

Pee-e-e-e-e-ep.
Posted by Pericles, Monday, 26 March 2012 8:01:08 AM
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Pericles,

With the greatest respect, wait and see.

In my more paranoid moments, I sometimes suspect that advocates for Sharia and those advocating for the recognition of Aboriginal traditional practices against women and young people, meet in a secret location and agree to play a sort of leap-frog - 'You put forward this, we'll put forward that, let's see how it flies. If it fails, we'll lick our wounds, wait for a bit and then try something else.'

And to use your term, one tactic is dog-whistling about the unfairness of an Australian system which allows mainstream cultural practices but penalises Moslem or Aboriginal practices, merely because they are brutal, barbaric and uncivilized, and so is discriminatory - so the argument would go.

We can avoid all that, and any unpleasant referral to dog-whistling from both sides, by the non-recognition in law of ANY cultural practice - and by re-affirming, reinforcing, the legal equality of men and women, the rights of children to the protection of the state, and the implicit requirement that all cultural practices must conform to Australian law, no exceptions.

Culture should be subordinate to law, in other words. People's rights should trump culture.

Cheers,

Joe
Posted by Loudmouth, Thursday, 29 March 2012 11:49:10 AM
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