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Spengler writes on one of the great differences between Islam and the West. It is Islam’s acceptance of violence towards women.
More than the Koran’s sanction of wife-beating, the legal grounds on which the Koran sanctions it reveals an impassable gulf between Islamic and Western law. The sovereign grants inalienable rights to every individual in Western society, of which protection from violence is foremost. Every individual stands in direct relation to the state, which wields a monopoly of violence. Islam’s legal system is radically different: the father is a “governor” or “administrator” of the family, that is, a little sovereign within his domestic realm, with the right to employ violence to control his wife and children. That is the self-understanding of modern Islam spelled out by Muslim-American scholars – and it is incompatible with the Western concept of human rights.
The practice of wife-beating, which is found in Muslim communities in Western countries, is embedded too profoundly in sharia law to be extracted. Nowhere to my knowledge has a Muslim religious authority of standing repudiated wife-beating as specified in Surah 4:32 of the Koran, for to do so would undermine the foundations of Muslim society.
By extension, the power of the little sovereign of the family can include the killing of wayward wives and female relations. Execution for domestic crimes, often called “honor killing”, is not mentioned in the Koran, but the practice is so widespread in Muslim countries – the United Nations Population Fund estimates an annual toll of 5,000 – that it is recognized in what we might term Islamic common law.
Muslim courts either do not prosecute so-called honor killings, or prosecute them more leniently than other crimes. Article 340 of Jordan’s penal code states, “He who discovers his wife or one of his female relatives committing adultery and kills, wounds, or injures one of them, is exempted from any penalty.” Syria imposes only a two-year prison sentence for such killings. Pakistan forbids them but rarely punishes them. …
…In Islam, the family father has the ability to be a petty tyrant in his own home. That may explain the great mystery of modern Islam, namely why nearly a billion and a half human beings have failed over eight centuries to produce scientific or cultural figures whose names the world recognize. Even in Joseph Stalin’s Russia, individuals could find refuge in their families, and in creative pursuits not discouraged by the state, for example pure science and classical music. Islam can make the family itself an oppressive institution.
Now, we have four items from fly-over country; Denver, Las Vegas, Kansas City, and Indianapolis.
David Harsanyi, when looking at the Rand Paul flap, asks, “Didn’t we have enough to debate?”
… The fact is, nearly everyone — including, it seems, most libertarians and Paul himself — agree that the Civil Rights Act was necessary in untangling repressive, government-codified Southern racism. The problem is that some of this kind of well-intentioned and important legislation has been used to validate the infinite creep of Washington intrusion into commerce and life.
While it is inarguable that many in the South used the Constitution as a pretext to solidify their racism then, today it is often the mainstream left that uses racism to smear those with an earnest belief in the document.
After all, today’s political battles are about “extremist positions,” issues like socializing medicine, nationalizing the energy sector and other various hyper-regulatory projects that are baking in Washington’s oven.
We’ve got plenty on our plates without debating the past.
In the Las Vegas Review-Journal, Sherman Frederick wants to know the truth.
I’d like to hook up the president to a lie detector and ask him this one simple question:
“On any given day, Mr. President, do you wake up feeling more proud of, or more embarrassed by, the United States of America?”
…The position of the United States, as now articulated by the Obama administration, is China’s widespread crackdown on Internet use, free speech and religion, its use of prisoners for organ harvesting, its persecution of Tibet and the execution of more people than all other countries in the world combined, is on par with Arizona’s immigration law? …
In the Kansas City Star, E. Thomas McClanahan looks at reasons why the Obami are embarrassed by American exceptionalism.
…Since the ’60s at least, those on the leftish end of the spectrum have had an annoying tendency to place themselves above the nation and what it stands for. They have a profound discomfort with the notion that the country must be defended, an effort that sometimes requires military force.
Some of the more exotic of the species, the Jane Fondas and Susan Sontags, blatantly identified with our adversaries. In the late 1960s, both of these characters popped up in Hanoi and blathered about the nobility of the North Vietnamese struggle against the vile imperialist Amerikans.
It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that a lot of the people who came to Washington with Obama carry intellectual residue from this era. How else to explain the comical difficulty they have in coming up with a straightforward term for an enemy that turned airlines into missiles and revels in the slaughter of innocent civilians?
For decades, various people on both the right and left have mined this rich lode. One of the latest is Paul Berman, a member of the editorial board of Dissent, the leftist magazine, and author of the new book, “The Flight of the Intellectuals.” Berman is also an increasingly rare species: He is a liberal hawk. …
In the Indianapolis Star, Deroy Murdock comments on how out of control and out of touch the government is.
…As if from a ruptured pipeline, Washington continues to gush taxpayer dollars.
The Education Department requested $26 billion in emergency funds on May 13, supposedly to prevent 300,000 teacher layoffs. This is atop last year’s $100 billion in stimulus spending for school districts, including $48 billion to prevent teacher layoffs.
Meanwhile, Obamacare — essentially DisneyWorld for federal busybodies — will require $115 billion more than advertised in March. According to the Congressional Budget Office, if lawmakers appropriate all of this legislation’s promised spending, its price will leap from $938 billion to $1.053 trillion, an anticipated 12.5 percent cost overrun just six weeks after enactment.
About the only budget cut Obama has managed is a $53.2 million, 25 percent slash in New York City’s counter-terrorism funding, unveiled 11 days after the Pakistani Taliban successfully sent terror suspect Faisal Shahzad to Times Square to park a car bomb just outside “The Lion King.” …
Fred Barnes interviews Jeb Bush who is optimistic about the road ahead for Republicans and for America.
…“My guess is, post-November, should things go well, you’re going to see the emerging Cantor-Ryan wing of the Republican party—the policy activists—in their ascendency,” Bush says. “They’ll be in the ascendency in the Senate as well. And you’ll have activist conservative governors. In 2011, I think you’re going to see all sorts of efforts to act on the belief in entrepreneurial capitalism and limited government.”
He’s read Paul Ryan’s “Roadmap” for reform, “all 95 pages of it. It’s fantastic. Paul Ryan is the only elected official that’s actually laid out a plan. He has a very thoughtful, realistic approach to dealing with this fiscal crisis, and he’s the only guy out of 300 million people that I’ve seen that has done so.” …
…Bush has done a back-of-the-envelope calculation about what an economic growth strategy could produce. Obama’s policy won’t generate more than 1.5 percent growth annually, he says. But with “lower taxes, more rational regulation, limiting the power of government in general, particularly in Washington, investing in research, innovation, education—and get out of the way, trust capitalism to work and you can achieve easily 2 percent more per year,” Bush insists. “You end up with $3.5 trillion of extra economic activity, more than the entire economy of Germany.”
Not bad, and there’s an additional benefit: unifying conservatives. “We have all these factions inside the conservative cause, people focused on social issues, or libertarian leave-me-alone issues or paleocons or neocons or traditional conservatives,” Bush says. “It seems to me if you ask what is the one thing that we all agree on, [it’s] that we passionately agree that entrepreneurial capitalism works.” …
Michael Barone says there’s a gathering revolt against government spending.
…The rebellion against the fiscal policies of the Obama Democrats, in contrast, is concentrated on spending. The Tea Party movement began with Rick Santelli’s rant in February 2009, long before the scheduled expiration of the Bush tax cuts in January 2011.
…The Tea Party folk are focusing on something real. Federal spending is rising from about 21 percent to about 25 percent of gross domestic product — a huge increase in historic terms — and the national debt is on a trajectory to double as a percentage of GDP within a decade. That is a bigger increase than anything since World War II.
…Will Republicans come forward with a bold plan to roll back government spending? …
…Unlike the Conservatives, Republicans have no elected party leader. But House Republicans like Eric Cantor, Kevin McCarthy and Peter Roskam are setting up web sites to solicit voters’ proposals for spending cuts, while Paul Ryan has set out a long-term road map toward fiscal probity. Worthy first steps. I think voters are demanding a specific plan to roll back Democrats’ spending. Republicans need to supply it.