Sheik Al-Halil still in the news II

The mufti’s attitudes towards women are a Muslim problem, right? Think again says Michel Costello No, I won’t, says Kev. Michael allocates some of his column space to the fact that there are plenty of examples of white guys raping, beating and generally treating woman poorly and he’s right but that’s not the issue here. He points out that 30 years ago the situation of rape victims in Australia was bad. Society, he says, treated them as sluts. Well, I was very much around 30 years ago and I always thought of rape victims as just that, victims, and I have always been main-stream. The most common examples of these woman being treated poorly was from the legal profession as they tried to get the predatory males off the hook by suggesting that “she was a slut’ as they grilled her about her sex life. However, I don’t recall any political or religious leader saying woman deserved rape if they dressed inapproriately. Nor do I recall any such person sympathising with rapists as they were convicted and sentenced to years out of circulation. Until now. If our society isn’t blameless in this matter then that was thirty years ago and as Kim Beasley says, we have moved on. When I, as a Protestant fell in love with a Catholic 30 years ago I had to undergo ‘training’ to marry her but that was all – I can’t recall the local priest suggesting I should be killed because I wasn’t a believer. The Mufti supports those who would do this and they are doing it today. Can we please remember that. (Coincidentally all of my training was conducted by Army Padres with ammo boxes as alters but I got sufficient ‘ticks in boxes’ to front the alter) Mufti Taj Din al-Hilali hasn’t moved on, if anything he has regressed and he is a religious leader of some 300,000 Australians. What is worse is too many of those 300,000 have supported him by applause and too few have condemned him publically. Michael Costello doesn’t excuse the Mufti but he does throw in the “we’re not perfect either” line and I think that blurs the focus. Others are quick to point to the Crusades for the same reason and the counter “Yeah, but that was centuries ago, we have moved on and the radical Muslims haven’t” is so obvious I wonder why people even raise it.