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Multiculturalism
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Topic Started: Apr 30 2007, 10:23 PM (127 Views)
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Forgottenlord
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Apr 30 2007, 10:23 PM
Post #1
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Credit to DBL for finding this and posting it on Uroca
http://comment.independent.co.uk/columnist...icle2496657.ece
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Johann Hari: How multiculturalism is betraying women It would be easy to congratulate ourselves on our tolerance of the fanatically intolerant Published: 30 April 2007
Do you believe in the rights of women, or do you believe in multiculturalism? A series of verdicts in the German courts in the past month, have shown with hot, hard logic that you can't back both. You have to choose.
The crux case centres on a woman called Nishal, a 26-year-old Moroccan immigrant to Germany with two kids and a psychotic husband. Since their wedding night, this husband beat the hell out of her. She crawled to the police covered in wounds, and they ordered the husband to stay away from her. He refused. He terrorised her with death threats.
So Nishal went to the courts to request an early divorce, hoping that once they were no longer married he would leave her alone. A judge who believed in the rights of women would find it very easy to make a judgement: you're free from this man, case dismissed.
But Judge Christa Datz-Winter followed the logic of multiculturalism instead. She said she would not grant an early divorce because - despite the police documentation of extreme violence and continued threats - there was no "unreasonable hardship" here.
Why? Because the woman, as a Muslim, should have "expected" it, the judge explained. She read out passages from the Koran to show that Muslim husbands have the "right to use corporal punishment". Look at Sura 4, verse 34, she said to Nishal, where the Koran says he can hammer you. That's your culture. Goodbye, and enjoy your beatings.
This is not a freakish exception. Germany's only state-level Minister for Integration, Armin Laschet, says this is only "the last link, for the time being, in a chain of horrific rulings handed down by the German courts".
The German magazine Der Spiegel has documented a long list of these multicultural verdicts. Here are just a few:
A Lebanese-German who strangled his daughter Ibthahale and then beat her unconscious with a bludgeon because she didn't want to marry the man he had picked out for her was sentenced to mere probation. His "cultural background" was cited by the judge as a mitigating factor.
A Turkish-German who stabbed his wife Zeynep to death in Frankfurt was given the lowest possible sentence, because, the judge said, the murdered woman had violated his "male honour, derived from his Anatolian moral concepts". The bitch. A Lebanese-German who raped his wife Fatima while whipping her with a belt was sentenced to probation, with the judge citing his ... you get the idea.
Their victims are forced to ask - like Soujourner Truth, the female slave who famously challenged early women's rights activists to consider black women as their sisters - "Ain't I a woman?"
In Germany today, Muslim women have been reduced to third-class citizens stripped of core legal protections - because of the doctrine of multiculturalism, which says a society should be divided into separate cultures with different norms according to ethnic origin.
Too often this issue is mixed up with other debates and gets waved through for the sake of politeness. The right loves mashing "mass immigration and multiculturalism" into one sound-bite. Well, I think Britain should take more immigrants and refugees, not fewer - but multiculturalism is a disastrous way to greet them.
These German cases highlight the flaw at the core of multiculturalism. It assumes that immigrants have one homogenous culture which they should all follow - and it allows the most reactionary and revolting men in their midst to define what that culture is. Across Europe, many imams are offering advice to Muslim men on how to beat Muslim women. For example, in Spain, the popular Imam Mohammed Kamal Mustafa warns that you shouldn't use "whips that are too thick" because they leave scars that can be detected by the "infidels". That might be Mustafa's culture - but it isn't Nishal's. It isn't the culture of the women who scream and weep as they are beaten.
And yes, we should admit that this is disproportionately a problem among Muslim, Sikh and Hindu immigrants who arrive from countries which have not had women's rights movements. Listen to Jasvinder Sanghera, who founded the best British charity helping Asian women after her sister was beaten and beaten and then burned herself to death. She says: "It's a betrayal of these women to be PC about this. Look at the figures. Asian women in Britain are three times more likely to commit suicide than their white friends. That's because of all this."
Yet the brave campaigners who have tried to help these women - like the Labour MP Ann Cryer - have been smeared as racist. In fact, the real racists are the people who vehemently condemn misogyny and homophobia when it comes from white people but mysteriously fall silent when it comes from black and Asian men.
Indeed, in the name of this warm, welcoming multiculturalism, the German courts have explicitly compared Muslim women to the brain-damaged. The highest administrative court in North Rhine-Westphalia has agreed that Muslim parents have the "right" to forbid their daughter from going on a school trip unless she was accompanied by a male family member at all times. The judges said the girl was like "a partially mentally impaired person who, because of her disability, can only travel with a companion".
As the Iranian author Azar Nafisi puts it: "I very much resent it when people - maybe with good intentions or from a progressive point of view - keep telling me, 'It's their culture' ... It's like saying the culture of Massachusetts is burning witches." She is horrified by the moves in Canada to introduce shariah courts to enforce family law for Muslims.
Multiculturalists believe that they are defending immigrants. But in reality, they are betraying at least 55 per cent of them - the women and the gays. It is multiculturalists, for example, who are the biggest champions of the Government's massive expansion of "faith" schools, where children will be segregated according to parental superstition and often taught the most literalist and cruel strain of a "faith".
What will girls and gay pupils be taught there? Will they have Sura 4, verse 34 drilled into them, along with the passages from the hadith where Mohammed calls for gay people to be executed? We know Catholic schools often push the most vile aspects of their faith at children; why should Muslim schools be different?
We desperately need to empower Muslim women to reinterpret the Koran in less literalist and vicious ways, or to leave their religion all together, as they wish. But multiculturalism hobbles them before they even begin, by saying they should stick to the "authentic" culture represented by the imams.
Yes, it would be easy to keep our heads down, go with this multicultural drift, and congratulate ourselves on our tolerance of the fanatically intolerant. But I can give you a few good reasons not to. Their names are Nishal and Ibthahale and Zeynep and Fatima, and, yes, they were women.
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No, seriously
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TBlack
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Apr 30 2007, 10:57 PM
Post #2
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The baby killer
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How are problems in legislation and the judiciary problems of multiculturalism. It's not even political correctness gone mad.
Am I missing something here? Am I that naïve? It it me or is this not multiculturalism that's being described. More, you know the opposite.
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"You would think it obvious to anyone, with a grain of intelligence, that there are far too many people born in England." .:I'm melting!: http://alwaysautumn.etsy.com :.
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Forgottenlord
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Apr 30 2007, 11:01 PM
Post #3
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I called it racism....
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No, seriously
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Allech-Atreus
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Apr 30 2007, 11:13 PM
Post #4
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Trying Too Hard
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I don't know what to call it.
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Also known as Snefaldia and Palaam
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East Hackney
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May 1 2007, 12:03 AM
Post #5
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I may respond to this more fully when sober, but in the meantime: 1) This is using a definition of "multiculturalism" so broad as to be meaningless; 2) Johann Hari is a ghastly little troglodyte whose every utterance is so suspect that if he told me the sun rises in the east I'd get out a compass and a star chart to check. Frankly, it would not surprise me if every claim in this article were a flat-out lie.
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East Hackney ACA "I ain't a communist necessarily, but I been in the red all my life"
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Forgottenlord
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May 1 2007, 12:45 AM
Post #6
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The Nishal Case is true....
Took me a while to find it:
http://www.spiegel.de/international/german...,473017,00.html
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A German Judge Cites Koran in Divorce Case
By Veit Medick and Anna Reimann
He beat her and threatened her with murder. But because husband and wife were both from Morocco, a German divorce court judge saw no cause for alarm. It's a religion thing, she argued.
The Koran seems to have become the basis for a court decision in Frankfurt. Zoom AFP
The Koran seems to have become the basis for a court decision in Frankfurt. The case seems simply too strange to be true. A 26-year-old mother of two wanted to free herself from what had become a miserable and abusive marriage. The police had even been called to their apartment to separate the two -- both of Moroccan origin -- after her husband got violent in May 2006. The husband was forced to move out, but the terror continued: Even after they separated, the spurned husband threatened to kill his wife.
A quick divorce seemed to be the only solution -- the 26-year-old was unwilling to wait the year between separation and divorce mandated by German law. She hoped that as soon as they were no longer married, her husband would leave her alone. Her lawyer, Barbara Becker-Rojczyk agreed and she filed for immediate divorce with a Frankfurt court last October. They both felt that the domestic violence and death threats easily fulfilled the "hardship" criteria necessary for such an accelerated split.
In January, though, a letter arrived from the judge adjudicating the case. The judge rejected the application for a speedy divorce by referring to a passage in the Koran that some have controversially interpreted to mean that a husband can beat his wife. It's a supposed right which is the subject of intense debate among Muslim scholars and clerics alike."The exercise of the right to castigate does not fulfill the hardship criteria as defined by Paragraph 1565 (of German federal law)," the daily Frankfurter Rundschau quoted the judge's letter as saying. It must be taken into account, the judge argued, that both man and wife have Moroccan backgrounds.
"The husband can beat his wife"
"The right to castigate means for me: the husband can beat his wife," Becker-Rojczyk said, interpreting the judge's verdict.
In an interview with SPIEGEL ONLINE, Becker-Rojczyk said the judge indicated to her that it makes no sense to insist on an accelerated divorce. The judge's advice? Wait for the year-long waiting period to elapse.
The fax from the Frankfurt court granting the conflict of interest claim. Zoom
The fax from the Frankfurt court granting the conflict of interest claim. The lawyer and her client were shocked. Immediately, they filed a claim alleging that the judge should have recused herself due to a conflict of interest. They felt that, because of the point of view presented by the judge, she was unable to reach an objective verdict. In the reply sent to Becker-Rojczyk, the judge expressly referred to a Koran verse -- or sura -- which indicates that a man's honor is injured when his wife behaves in an unchaste manner. "Apparently the judge deems it unchaste when my client adapts a Western lifestyle," Becker-Rojczyk said.
On Tuesday evening, Becker-Rojczyk expressed amazement that the judge was still on the bench, given that the controversial verdict was handed down weeks ago. Becker-Rojczyk had elected to go public with the case to attract attention to the judge's conduct. It seems to have worked. On Wednesday, after the Tuesday evening publication of the story on SPIEGEL ONLINE, the attorney received a fax from the Frankfurt court granting the conflict of interest claim and excusing the judge from the case.
Still, it is unlikely that the case will be heard again before the mandated year of separation expires in May. But the judge who heard the case may have to face further consequences for her decision. On Wednesday, numerous politicians in Berlin voiced their horror at the verdict -- and demanded disciplinary action against the judge.
Further investigation
NEWSLETTER Sign up for Spiegel Online's daily newsletter and get the best of Der Spiegel's and Spiegel Online's international coverage in your In- Box everyday.
"In my opinion, this is a case of extreme violation of the rule of law that can't be solved with a mere conflict of interest ruling," Social Democrat parliamentarian Dieter Wiefelspütz told SPIEGEL ONLINE. "There have to be further consequences. This is a case for judicial supervision -- this case needs to be further investigated."
The deputy floor leader for the Christian Democrats, Wolfgang Bosbach, agreed. "This is a sad example of how the conception of the law from another legal and cultural environment is taken as the basis for our own notion of law," he said on Wednesday.
This isn't the first time that German courts have used cultural background to inform their verdicts. Christa Stolle of the women's rights organization Terre des Femmes said that in cases of marital violence, there have been a number of cases where the perpetrator's culture of origin has been considered as a mitigating circumstance -- although such verdicts have become seldom in recent years.
But there remains quite a bit of work to do. "In my work educating sexist and short-sighted Muslim men," asked Michaela Sulaika Kaiser of the Network for Muslim Women, "do I now have to convince German courts that women are also people on the same level with men and that they, like any other human, have the right to be protected from physical and psychological violence?"
With reporting by Franziska Badenschier and Severin Weiland
EDIT: I'd say the latter suggests this is a few individuals being used to discredit multiculturalism. It's like...oh....how did it go Hari?
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... It's like saying the culture of Massachusetts is burning witches."
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No, seriously
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TBlack
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May 1 2007, 10:52 AM
Post #7
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The baby killer
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The recipe for this article
Take examples of people who are using different cultures as an excuse to punish people for belonging to those cultures and/or being women.
Stir in old copies of the Daily Mail, those that say 'political correctness gone mad' and 'oh my god a back man lives next door are best'. So all of them.
Use this mixture to marinade your battered concept of multiculturalism.
Fry until ready to be a pretentious column written by someone self important.
And there we have a nice way of pointing out how other cultures, aided through the evil liberals in the judiciary, are Wrong and Hate Women. And That's Why We Can't Be Multicultural So Build A Big Fence Around Britain. Without saying 'political correctness gone mad' because this is a broad sheet darling.
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"You would think it obvious to anyone, with a grain of intelligence, that there are far too many people born in England." .:I'm melting!: http://alwaysautumn.etsy.com :.
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Ecopoeia
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May 1 2007, 11:29 AM
Post #8
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E-u-o-c-o-u-p-i-e-i-a-u-o-e-a
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Yeah, Hari's really lost me with this one. Fuck, how do you put this down to multiculturalism and keep a straight face?
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Enough is as good as a feast
To Ill-Advisedly Go!
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VL
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May 3 2007, 01:09 AM
Post #9
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The Sorcerors Apprentice
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Ireland is receiving an influx of foreigners. Most of which come from eastern bloc countries. Now I have no problem with this to a point. What I do have a problem with is new cultures coming to the country and not integrating with that countries laws and traditions. When in Rome it is said you do as the romans do.
You can be certain that If you traveled to Iran or some country that has a culture so different to our westernised societies you would be expected to follow the local laws as that culture/society. I would be very concerned if such rulings were being handed down in Irish courts.
Over the last decade Ireland has been struggling to raise awareness of equality regardless of gender, race, religion or ability and we have over come a great deal of dificulty in relation to it. It is obvious to me that the cases quoted above are against equality law and if i were the plaintiff in those cases I would be taking my case to the European courts of law, the source of which was responsible for equality being raised as a matter of urgency by Irish legislature.
Multiculturalism, should be accepted in all societies, but where a culture wishes to denigrate human rights and equality then that is a step too far.
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Author Of NSUN Resolutions #96 UNWODC & #119 UNCoESB
 <marquee>(\ /) ( xx) C('')('') "VL laughed so Hard! Dead funny or just dead Bunny"..... Kill a Cbox today! your brain will thank you! </marquee>
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Forgottenlord
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May 3 2007, 03:57 AM
Post #10
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I note that the main case used in this article was given an appeal within the German court system quickly upon review. I don't think these are cases where you need to go to the European court system or even blame the system - I think these are cases where you need to hang the judge and be thankful that there IS an appeals process.
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No, seriously
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