Sharia Alert from AFP, with thanks to Twostellas:
BANDA ACEH, Indonesia - An Islamic sharia court in the staunchly-Muslim Indonesian province of Aceh has sentenced seven men to a public lashing for petty gambling offences, a report said Sunday. The seven men from Pulo Kiton village in Bireuen district protested the verdict, with one of them saying that their detention for the last two months was punishment enough, the Serambi newspaper said."The six lashes stay and cannot be reduced," Judge Abdullah Tengku Nafi told the defendants.
The sentence was half the 12 lashes recommended by prosecutor Erwin Nasution after the men were caught playing cards for small amounts of money.
Shock horror!
Nafi gave the defendant seven days to appeal before they would be publicly lashed with a cane.The flogging, if it takes place, would be the first in Aceh since the government allowed the province to implement sharia law as part of broader autonomy granted in 2001 to curb a separatist Islamist
insurgency.The province, where armed separatists have been fighting since 1976, has so far only partially implemented the strict Islamic laws, enforcing Muslim dress codes, and other sharia requirements such as prayers five times a day, fasting and alms...
Only partially? How do they hope to head off more tsunamis that way?
Isn't Indonesia supposed to be 'moderate'?
I wonder how Shurki would respond to this, since he's in favour of sharia. Maybe they were all "fornicators" too?
Geoff
It's in the cards:
Islam is such a systematic organization of the frustration of all natural organismic impulses that, if it doesn't stike outward at others, it will implode of its own anti-instinctual rancor.
You can't play a game of penny poker.
You can't have a cold brew or a tasty leibfraumilch afterwards.
You can't create images of any living thing (sort takes the all fun out of Art, unless you like doodling LSD-esque curlicues on tiles or writing the Koran's seismic squiggles in your own blood).
You can't hold hands or kiss in public.
You have to pray 5 times a day. (I don't like doing anything, and I mean anything!, more than 3 times a day.)
Is it any wonder the Muslim world is a mass of self-supressed Freudian nightmares trying to excuse their re-routed and curdling sexual tension into the sanctified 'release' of the icy orgasm of 'holy war'?
(Is it any wonder mosques look like gigantic maternal mammmary domes surrounded by four looming phallic minaret guards?)
I'll bet the religion of Allah will collapse if its own internal contradictions if it is contained to killing only its own members.
It is too unnatural a creed for such lusty, curious, daring and progressive animals as humans prefer to be.