By VennerRoad, 17th Dec 2014
Allah in Arabic
If you think only an Orthodox Moslem would ask that question, think again. In recent years there has been much hysteria generated in the tabloid press about not only Islamic (ie Islamist) terror plots but about the suggestion by some Moslems that Sharia should be implemented in the UK; some have even said they would like to see an Islamic flag flying over the White House. There have even been ludicrous scare stories about Sharia courts actually sitting in Britain and in one case about Sharia-compliant wills, complete with righteous indignation and mock outrage. The reality is that Sharia civil courts constitute one of the many forms of private law in use in this country, for example, the Football Association and other sports bodies operate under private law.
Leaving that aside, we should again pose the question would Sharia be bad for Britain? The shocking answer is that in all probability it wouldn’t be half as bad as our current set up, criminal and civil, because over the last half century, what was once the finest legal system in the world has been corrupted beyond all measure, indeed it is now so bad that men and women are regularly convicted on the flimsiest of evidence, some of which would be laughable were it not so tragic. In addition to this, not only has the Government passed and is continuing to pass more and more repressive laws but habitual and at times dangerous offenders are repeatedly turned lose onto the public without being rehabilitated, to continue to prey on or even to murder innocent people.
To take just one example, the man once known as Bin Laden’s right hand man in Europe, Abū Qatāda, was detained without trial in the UK for years pending extradition to Jordan where he was wanted for complicity in serious terrorist offences. When finally he agreed to extradition, he was flown out to Jordan, tried, and acquitted. Does anyone imagine he would have been acquitted of such offences here?
The corruption of English law has come from a number of disparate sources, much of it aimed at enforcing the social mores to which some arbitrary, unrepresentative minority decides we should conform, in order to suppress political dissent, and to pander to noisy, mischief-making and at times outright dishonest pressure groups in order to bring about the changes they consider desirable for their own clientele, usually on the pretext of the public good. Here are a few examples of the way in which the rule of law has been perverted in the UK and especially England.
At one time, before someone could be arrested, a warrant had to be issued. Obviously for serious crimes or where someone has been caught in the act – say shoplifting – the police simply turned up and made an arrest, but in recent years, police powers have been extended to such an extent that a police officer can arrest a suspect or indeed any “undesirable” person on mere caprice.
Under the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005, the power of arrest was extended to such an extent that in 2011, one legal scholar wrote in the Cambridge Law Journal that in principle the police can now arrest people without warrant on suspicion of past offences “not only where they are grave, like murder or terrorism, but even where they are trivial, like using an unlicensed TV, or shaking a mat in the street after 8.a.m.”
Once arrested, a suspect is routinely fingerprinted and a DNA sample taken. In theory it is possible to object to both of these procedures, but in practice there is no way to avoid them. Once the police take either, it is again possible in theory to have this information removed from the database, but in practice they will claim to have removed it, and lie about doing so. The British police lie routinely and persistently, but not necessarily consistently. That is of no concern to them, for it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than to obtain redress against a bent copper, and don’t even think about prosecuting one of them for perjury, the authorities will simply laugh in your face.
Entirely innocent people may now be arrested for questioning. Even in the supposedly so repressive Saudi Arabia and Iran the police do not have such Draconian powers.
Not every recent change in the law has been detrimental to the suspect or the citizen. The Police And Criminal Evidence Act 1984 – known as PACE – provided for the tape recording of police interrogations (so-called interviews). Before PACE there were only the Judges’ Rules. Four of these were stated by 1912, and they were increased to 9 in 1918. In 1964, Home Office Circular No. 31/1964, relating to children and young persons, was added, but there was no provision for the questioning of the feeble-minded or otherwise vulnerable suspects.
Up until PACE, the police would regularly “verbal up” suspects, ie put incriminating words into their mouths. In capital and other extremely serious cases, this could have Earth-shattering consequences, but police verbal was used primarily against career criminals and recidivists, ie men who were in and out of prison for most of their adult lives, primarily because they had entered the vicious downward spiral of the social inadequate.
With the taping of interrogations, police verbal disappeared literally overnight, but the police are nothing if not imaginative, and took to using informants and “grasses” to do their dirty work. The Metropolitan Police in particular had used supergrasses since at least 1970, but the evidence given by such men has proved unsurprisingly unreliable, and many cases in which their evidence was central have ended up before the Court of Appeal. The case of Karl Chapman was extraordinary, the police bent over backwards to butter him up, and at least one of them – a policewoman – bent over forwards.
Having said that, the case of Michael Stone is in a class by itself; he was convicted twice of the notorious Chillenden Murders, solely on confession “evidence” from other prisoners. At his retrial the sole witness to fact against him was Damien Daley, who claimed Stone shouted his confession through a prison wall. In November this year, Daley was himself convicted of murder, which may be karma, but it doesn’t help Stone. Under Sharia, a trial based on such ludicrous non-evidence would never have been permitted.
Likewise, the Operation Yewtree witch-hunt which resulted in the convictions of a number of celebrities, most notably A List entertainer Rolf Harris, would never have been entertained by Sharia. One of the charges against Harris was so patently ludicrous that it beggars belief it would have been charged, that the judge would have admitted it, and a jury convicted. In 2014, this man stood trial inter alia for an alleged indecent assault that was said to have taken place around July 1969, on a woman who at that time was a young girl.
In 1969, Harris had been riding high with the musical side of his career, and if he had performed at a small community centre in Portsmouth, there would surely have been some kind of extant paper trail, yet nothing was found, nothing.
At the end of the day the only “evidence” against him was the word of an obviously demented woman, yet he was convicted of that and other offences based on evidence that was hardly anymore substantial. Even in the United States, where there are statutes of limitations for all offences except murder, such nonsense would not have been entertained. Sharia law recognises the fallibility of such testimony, and would not have given allegations of this nature the time of day.
The line peddled by the police and the CPS with the Operation Yewtree prosecutions is whoever you are, regardless of how famous or wealthy, you will not escape justice. Justice indeed. What happened in the case of Cliff Richard is extremely telling. Richard is widely believed to be homosexual because he has never married, and after his initial success in the 1950s he has never shown much interest in the opposite sex. The same innuendo was once levelled at Jimmy Savile, whom we are now led to believe was the most prolific groper of young women and girls these islands has ever produced.
With Operation Yewtree in full swing, an allegation of sexual assault was made against Cliff Richard, this time by a man, an allegation that was said to have dated from the 1980s. So what did the police do? With Richard out of the country, they raided his home, tipping off the BBC – which followed the raid with a helicopter. The police removed a number of items from his home, including computer equipment. A team of no fewer than eight officers was said to have spent hours searching the premises, which begs the question why?
This was clearly a fishing expedition, something the police are not supposed to do. How precisely does an allegation of indecent assault from three decades ago warrant the seizure of a computer? Far more insidious though was their tipping off the BBC; this was clearly designed to solicit further allegations against Richard from either demented individuals or chancers. If enough allegations are made then they are said to corroborate each other, a process known as corroboration by volume. Again, Sharia law does not entertain such nonsense, and real evidence is required of wrongdoing, not thirty year old false memories or scurrilous allegations made by those seeking criminal injuries compensation money, sympathy, notoriety, or fifteen minutes of shame.
Incidentally, the computer seizure in this case was nothing new. Nowadays the police seize computers almost as a matter of routine in order to pressurise or intimidate suspects, even in quite trivial cases. Before any computer is examined by the police, a backup is made. This is meant to be destroyed in the event of the case being dropped or the accused acquitted. The police claim such backups are destroyed, but the simple fact is they are not, again they simply lie. There is hard evidence of this from a case dating to 2001. And if they do it in one case, they do it in all cases, make no mistake. In this connection it is interesting to compare the criminal procedure in the “democratic” UK with that of the Islamic theocracy of Saudi Arabia. The restrictions on the police in the latter appear to be greater than here.
Returning to the Operation Yewtree cases, there are those who defend this tyranny on the grounds that victims should be “believed”. If historic prosecutions are curtailed, they claim, perpetrators will go unpunished and will go on to commit further crimes. Sharia has the answer to that, because it acknowledges wisely both the reality of false allegations and the weakness of the flesh.
Under Sharia, sexual offences against especially the young are far less common because men do not have the same access to underage girls they do in the West. And where sexual offences are proved, the penalties imposed are extremely severe. In Malaysia and Singapore, rapists can be caned.
One other point should be mentioned in this connection, in recent years there has been a scandal over the grooming of vulnerable girls – those in care or from broken families. These girls, some aged only thirteen or even younger, have been sexually active with gangs of mostly taxi drivers, some of them have been forcibly raped, and treated like sex objects. Although the scale of this decadence may be questionable, there is no doubt that it happened; the evidence includes CCTV of some of the victims being taken to hotels and the like. Because nearly all the perpetrators were of Asian origin, the politically correct imbeciles who run our local councils kept the lid on this.
When the secret could be contained no more, those at the other end of the political spectrum made capital out of it, the perpetrators were described as members of Moslem rape gangs. The reality is that these men were nominal Moslems; girls from Islamic families are not preyed on in such fashion because of their family values, and if white girls were seen as easy meat, it was with good reason. Parents who don’t keep their young daughters on a fairly tight lease should not be surprised when they are led astray, if not by gang rapists then by other predators, sexual or otherwise. As for those victims who were in local authority care, precisely what kind of “care” were they being given?
In Islamic states, organised sexual abuse on this scale is all but unknown, and again with good reason. Four years ago, two Pakistani nationals were convicted of raping a woman during a home invasion robbery in Saudi Arabia. They were sentenced to death and executed, Saudi justice has been widely criticised as barbaric, including by Moslems, but it has its supporters, like the man who wrote in a September 1997 letter to the Daily Telegraph:
“Why was it that, within six months of returning to a ‘civilised’ country, I was threatened at a local bus stop by a gang of youths? Why is it that, as a law abiding citizen, I would fear for my life walking around the back streets of London? Why was it that, when I lived in an ‘uncivilised’ country for six years, there was not one single occasion when I was remotely threatened by anyone? Why was I able to walk around the back streets of Riyadh without a worry in the world?”
That was of course a rhetorical question.
In addition to the erosion of the rights of the accused, we have seen a plethora of laws passed in this country since the 1960s aimed at controlling the great unwashed and at protecting the imbeciles who do the state’s bidding. Anti-harassment laws, so-called, were brought in to combat “stalking”, a word that has no real meaning, and can be used in such a wide context as to be devoid of what little meaning it may once have had.
Originally the purpose of this law was to protect women from former partners; sometimes when a relationship ends on a sour note, one of the former lovers turns nasty, and it is usually – though by no means always – the woman who is on the receiving end. The misnamed Protection From Harassment Act may have been so designed, but it is drafted in such wide terms as to criminalise much lawful activity. A course of conduct (so-called) may require as few as two acts, and often they need not be of a sexual nature. This pernicious law has been used against journalists who have been investigating matters of genuine public interest. Other laws, in particular anti-terrorist legislation, have been used against peaceful protesters on numerous occasions.
The perversion of law in the UK extends far beyond the mere criminal, and has insinuated itself into both the family courts and the civil law. Straddling the criminal and the civil law is civil asset forfeiture, something that originated in the United States and has found its way here.This enables the authorities to seize property from suspected criminals and then demand they prove they have a rightful title to it, ie reversing the burden of proof.
In April 2009, a man who might be described as an eccentric billionaire was the victim of civil asset forfeiture; Christoffel Hendrik Wiese was carrying £120,000 in his hand baggage, and considerably more in his cases.
This money was seized by the Border Agency, as a result of which it took three years for him to retrieve it via an application to the High Court, and at the end of the day he was saddled with a legal bill, which must have been considerable in itself.
Most people are not billionaires, of course, and most have considerably smaller sums seized, but if the only way to retrieve such money is through an expensive legal action, such seizures amount to theft by proxy. Some people, those involved in political activism or humanitarian relief for example, often receive money from donors on condition of anonymity; others may simply not wish the source of a windfall to be identified – a sugar daddy perhaps. Islamic courts do not tolerate such nonsense, taking the common sense approach that a man’s finances are his own affair unless evidence can be adduced to the contrary.
Although civil asset forfeiture is a fairly recent development, the tax system and those who collect such taxes have a long history of tyrannising people lower down the food chain. Anyone who has some money saved or who wishes to protect his or his family’s assets is likely to be so targeted. This arbitrariness has led to many of the better off seeking effective ways to avoid tax, and this has led in turn to the concept of “aggressive tax avoidance”. As one legal pundit put it: You’re now guilty until proven innocent if the taxman decides to visit. Again, Sharia courts do not pander to such nonsense.
In the civil courts, litigants had long complained of both extortionate costs and contumelious delays, especially in cases involving allegations of medical negligence. It was nothing unusual for the latter to drag on for a decade or more. As a result of this, Lord Wolff – later Lord Chief Justice – was given the task of streamlining the system, updating it, and making it more user friendly. The result was anything but. Among other things, the cost of issuing a libel writ was to rise from £25 in 1993 to a staggering £500 in less than a decade.
The Wolff reforms were called Access To Justice; Legal Aid “reforms” have reduced such access for those who most need it. No one would claim there is no injustice in Islamic countries, but whether or not one believes in the divinity of the Holy Qur’an, the principles laid down by Islam and all the world’s great religions have shown themselves to be far superior to “progressive” ideas about justice, punishment and the nanny state.
What though of non-Moslems who live under Sharia, including for example homosexuals? Homosexuality used to be called the love that dare not speak its name, but today it won’t shut up. Although it is technically illegal under Sharia, the Islamic prohibition against homosexuality is more a means of social control than repression. Here is white convert Hamza Yusuf explaining how under Sharia homosexuality is not permitted to pollute the public space; the same is true of alcohol.
Also, under the rule of the Ottoman Empire there was the concept of multi-ethnic states; some might consider this a better model than nationalism (so-called) or the diversity that is being inflicted on all Western nations by both repressive legislation and media brainwashing.
As one blogger wrote earlier this year: “Every town had four quarters: Armenian, Jewish, Muslim and Orthodox (as the Old City Of Jerusalem still does). They all lived together in peaceful co-existence under the overlordship of the Sultan at Istanbul. All that was required of them was paying taxes, which by present standards were very low. Since the Empire’s demise and its partition into rival states by the Treaty of Sevres in 1920, atrocity after atrocity has ensued, eg depatriation of Palestinians, civil war and massacres in Jordan, Lebanon and Syria, violent revolutions in Iraq and Yemen etc”.
There is though one aspect of Sharia which if applied universally would benefit all mankind, namely the abolition of usury, or as it is known in Islam, ribā. Islam prohibits the charging of interest on loans, which under the current system are conjured up out of thin air. The imposition of Western banking practices on the Islamic world is perhaps the most insidious form of corruption our masters have ever exported, but now there are concerted efforts to overthrow this perfidious system, not simply by Moslems but by Westerners and others who have seen the light. One again the old ways are the best.
There are things about Sharia which most people do find repulsive. In Iran, there is retributive justice which three years ago led to the authorities being faced with the possibility of blinding a man who had committed an unspeakable crime against a woman who had rejected his advances. In Saudi Arabia, it is sometimes possible for a murderer to escape the death penalty by the payment of blood money. The most notorious such case was and remains that of the two expatriate nurses who murdered a third at Dhahran. One was sentenced to death by beheading, the other to eight years and 500 lashes. They were eventually allowed to return to the UK, having made the usual noises about how their confessions were extracted from them, and how they were fitted up, but it soon became clear they were guilty.
While Islamic justice may be less than perfect, it is some ways clearly superior to the system we have now, which often punishes the innocent while serving first and foremost the interests of those who control it. No thoughtful person should allow himself to be frightened off Sharia by scare stories spread by both the ignorant and those who for whatever reason wish to maintain the status quo.
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