This article taken from the NY Post should suffice to make you sick to your stomach.
WHY THE WEST IS BETTER
By MARK GOLDBLATT
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January 30, 2002 --
SUFIYATU Huseini is scheduled to be executed as soon as her 11-month-old daugher Adama turns 1. The crime? Adultery.
The reason Sufiyatu Huseini is not dead already is that the court in the Nigerian state of Sokoto that convicted her also granted a stay of execution for one year so she could breast feed her daughter. But when the year is up, Sufiyatu will be stoned to death - the punishment prescribed by the strict Muslim legal code called the Sharia.
Sufiyatu claims she was raped by a cousin (who already has two wives). He denies this; charges of adultery against him were dismissed after he claimed in court that he'd never even met Sufiyatu - even though the two live in the same small village.
The fact that he'd admitted to the affair previously, in the presence of two policemen, did not come up in court because, under Islamic law, a man who withdraws his confession must be acquitted unless four witnesses to the act itself can be found.
Things would have gone easier on Sufiyatu if she'd been a virgin. The charge against her would have been mere fornication - for which the Sharia prescribes public flogging.
Unfortunately, Sufiyatu is divorced. The charge of adultery was required because she used to be married.
Thus, Sufiyatu Huseini will soon be stoned to death. Asked if he was concerned about the extremity of the punishment, the state attorney general of Sokoto, Aliyu Abubakar Sanyinna, replied, "It is the law of Allah. By executing anybody that is convicted under Islamic law, we are just complying with the laws of Allah, so we don't have anything to worry about."
The method of execution? Sanyinna says the stones themselves will be the size of fists. The logistics, however, are up to the local judge. The villagers may tie Sufiyatu to a tree and stone her straight on, or they may dig a pit deep enough so that she cannot climb out, drop her in, and then rain stones down on her from above. Regardless, the execution is liable to be drawn out: The Sharia forbids the stone-throwers to aim for the head.
Cultural relativists will point out that Jewish law (Leviticus 20.10), like the Islamic Sharia, prescribes death for the crime of adultery; the Book of Deuteronomy (22:23-24) even mentions stoning as the punishment for adultery.
But what such apologists are unwilling to confront is that no one in the Judeo-Christian West takes such exhortations literally.
Even the fundamentalist strains of Hasidic Judaism and Evangelical Christianity, which cling, devoutly, to diehard literalism in matters of biblical interpretation, make no effort to enforce the Old Testament legal code in its full severity. They don't, for example, ritually sacrifice animals. They don't methodically kill homosexuals. (And please let's not further abuse the memory of Matthew Shepard by invoking it in this context.) And they don't earnestly stone adulterers.
In the West, devotion to the Word of God is tempered by the constraints of human law. Faith does not trump reason but coexists with it.
If you want a nine-word reason why the Judeo-Christian West is culturally superior to the Islamic East, that's it.
Mark Goldblatt's novel, "Africa Speaks," will be published in February. E-mail: [email protected]
The true Kingdom of God is located in your heart, not an organization of hypocrites.
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