Dr. Al-Qaradawi is simply stating what is prescribed in the Sharia. Here are some examples of Sharia law:

1. Offensive, military jihad against non-Muslims is a communal, religious obligation;
2. A person who is ignorant about Islamic legal opinion must follow the legal opinion of a scholar;
3. The penalty for a Muslim apostate (someone who no longer believes in or no longer follows the tenets of Islam) is death;
4. When slaughtering animals for food, a knife must be used to cut the windpipe and gullet;
5. A woman is only eligible to receive half the inheritance of a man;
6. Marriage may be forced on virgins by their father or father’s father;
7. A non-Arab man may not marry an Arab woman;
8. A woman must seek permission from her husband to leave the house;
9. A Muslim man cannot marry a woman who is a Zoroastrian, an idol worshipper, an apostate from Islam or a woman with one parent who is Jewish or Christian, with the other being Zoroastrian; a Muslim woman cannot marry anyone but a Muslim;
10. A free Muslim man may marry up to four women;
11. Retaliation is obligatory in most cases when someone is deliberately murdered except when a Muslim kills a non-Muslim, a Jew or a Christian kills a Muslim apostate or a father or mother kill their offspring;
12. Non-Muslim subjects (Ahl al-Dhimma) of a Muslim state are subject to a series of discriminatory laws – “dhimmitude”;
13. The penalty for fornication or sodomy is being stoned to death;
14. The penalty for an initial theft is amputation of the right hand. Subsequent thefts are penalized by further amputations of feet and hand;
15. A non-Muslim cannot testify against a Muslim in court; a person who is “without respectability” cannot give legal testimony; a woman’s legal testimony is only given half the legal weight of a man’s (and is only acceptable in cases involving property); to legally prove fornication or sodomy requires 4 male witnesses who actually saw the act;
16. The establishment and continuation of the Islamic Caliphate (by force, if necessary) is a communal obligation;
17. Sodomites and Lesbians must be killed;
18. Laughing too much is forbidden;
19. Musical instruments are unlawful;
20. Creating pictures of animate life is forbidden;
21. Female circumcision, which includes the excision of the clitoris, is obligatory;
22. Slavery is permitted;
23. People may be bribed to convert to Islam;
24. Beating a rebellious wife is permissible; and,
25. Lying is permissible in a time of war (or jihad).

I have posted the full legal clauses for the above examples and references at the following web address:
http://boston.indymedia.org/newswire/display_any/21475

However, here is the legal clause referring to wife-beating:

24. Beating a rebellious wife is permissible

p. 540, m10.12

DEALING WITH A REBELLIOUS WIFE

m10.12 When a husband notices signs of rebelliousness in his wife (nushuz, dis: p42) (O: whether in words, as when she answers him coldly when she used to do so politely, or he asks her to come to bed and she refuses, contrary to her usual habit; or whether in acts, as when he finds her averse to him when she was previously kind and cheerful), he warns her in words (O: without keeping from her or hitting her, for it may be that she has an excuse. The warning could be to tell her, “Fear Allah concerning the rights you owe to me,” or it could be to explain that rebelliousness nullifies his obligation to support her and give her a turn amongst other wives, or it could be to inform her, “Your obeying me [def: (3) below] is religiously obligatory”). If she commits rebelliousness, he keeps from sleeping (O: and having sex) with her without words, and may hit her, but not in a way that injures her, meaning he may not (A: bruise her,), break bones, wound her, or cause blood to flow. (O: It is unlawful to strike another’s face.) He may hit her whether she is rebellious only once or whether more than once, though a weaker opinion holds that he may not hit her unless there is repeated rebelliousness.

Posted by: Mentat at July 11, 2004 7:48 AM

As putrid and sickening as this Sheikh idiot's comments are, they are not surprising to me, and likely not to most people on this forum.

I hope his comments are given a lot of publicity around the world so others, suffering under the delusion that Islam is nice and pretty and peaceful, can see the ugly truth and reality of this sick belief system. But somehow I doubt this will be publicised as widely as it should, or as honestly as it should, because much of the media seems to be obsessed with trying to put Islam in as positive a light as possible. So, unfortunately many people will continue to be deluded about what Islam is really all about - dragging everybody back to the primordial ooze many of us all spent a lot of time and effort extricating ourselves from.

Posted by: feralee at July 11, 2004 8:10 AM

Mentat

Your well researched list of Sharia Law has chilled me.It's almost incredible that people can think like this in 2004!Stonings, burnings,amputations...As for this Qaradawi chappie, he should NEVER have been allowed into Britain in the first place.As for Muslim Clerics they are the worse of the bunch combining barbarism with lust for power and greed - just look at their fancy cars and armed bodyguards.
Am unable to express politely what I think of them
but it goes in lots of four letter words...

Posted by: Morgane at July 11, 2004 8:33 AM

Morgane:

Get the word out! Send my list to all your friends. We must take the ideological battle to the Islamists. They are throwing every ounce of energy they have into attacking us. What do you think these religious vilification laws are? They are being pushed by Muslims as de facto blasphemy laws regarding Islam. Soon, the whole West will be like Pakistan where people can be thrown in jail or executed for saying one critical word against Islam. We have to nip this in the bud, Morgane. Get the word out, please.

Posted by: Mentat at July 11, 2004 8:42 AM

We will never defeat the Islamists unless we can freely criticize Islam. That is why they are desperate to stop public discussion of Islam and control the debate. We have to crush all this talk of protecting Islam from being discussed and debated. Our countries will end up becoming cess pools like the Muslim countries if we do not allow freedom of speech and freedom of thought.

Posted by: Mentat at July 11, 2004 8:46 AM

Folks you have to see this hilarious comic book about Islam:

http://davidsonpress.com/islam/index.htm

Posted by: Mentat at July 11, 2004 10:29 AM

The really ironic thing is that Ken is a raving leftie. If these views on rape victims, gays etc were being expressed by a right wing Christian leader Ken would be the first to condemn them.

Increasingly the Left allies itself with Islamofacism.

The only consistency running through lefty politics is hatred of the West and of America. Nothing else can explain this bizarre alliance.

Posted by: Interestd at July 11, 2004 12:46 PM

Folks:

The gloves are off at the Telegraph in Britain. I urge all of you to write a letter to the Telegraph in support of Will Cummins. Also, send the most thoughtful letter to the editor that you can muster criticizing Islam. They just published a letter comparing Muhammad to the Anti-christ. That means they are going to publish just about anything.

Write a letter. I urge you. I implore you!

Posted by: Mentat at July 11, 2004 2:40 PM

And here's the letter:

Re: Mohammed is the Anti-Christ
Date: 11 July 2004

Thank you for the courage you have shown in publishing the excellent article by Will Cummins - who is not bereft of courage himself. He has shone the light of wisdom and truth into a dark region where the less stout-hearted fear to gaze.

To deny the validity of Islam is to invite the attention of murderous fanatics, as it has been for the last 1,400 years, and also to incur the wrath of the establishment that has neither the wisdom to recognise the truth, nor the guts to speak out.

Mohammed is not merely a false prophet, he is the Anti-Christ. Jesus stood between the fallen woman and the lynch-mob, whereas Mohammed would have been the first to cast a stone. Jesus allowed his enemies to kill him. Mohammed had his critics assassinated. The God of Jesus loves the sinner, even the unbeliever, but Allah hates the transgressor.

We must not allow the likes of Dr Rowan Williams to fool us. Allah is not God. The two are not the same. Islam does not recognise the concept of universal love, as do all the great religions of the world.

From:
Robert Baehr, Haselbury Plucknett, Somerset

Posted by: Suzan at July 11, 2004 3:18 PM

We have to have the right to criticise Islam like we criticise the nazism or communism in former times, we have to be freedom speech.

Posted by: Franze at July 11, 2004 3:19 PM

Who knows the email address of the British Telegraph. I want to write them as well. I've already written the BNP on a previous issue we discussed in this forum.
Dase.

Posted by: Dase at July 11, 2004 5:26 PM

Mentat
Shall be using your list to show friends, also to quote from when writing to newspapers etc.
Suzan - a brilliant letter.
There are so many intelligent comments, knowledge to be gained, wit, on this forum, one can only be cheerful as to the positive outcome. As they say'the pen is mightier than the sword...'

Posted by: Morgane at July 11, 2004 5:53 PM

Morgane,

I have to agree with you. Until I discovered Dhimmi Watch I thought that I and my friends were the only ones who were troubled by the growing Islamic threat.We grew depressed by the pro_Muslim bias of the televised media and the mainstream press. But now I feel the tide is finally turning - I realise that there are people out there (smart, intelligent, aware people) who are alert to the threat. We all need to inform our friends about this site and to use the information it provides us to take on media organizations like the BBC who pursue an active pro-islamic agenda. As the saying goes (forgive me if I misquote it) "For Evil to succeed it takes good men to do nothing."

Posted by: Son Of Albion at July 11, 2004 7:00 PM

Sheikh Qaradawi is a great believer in the Naughty Knickers Defense: she was provocatively dressed, and being a man, what else could I do? Of course, when he invokes this defense, he is really talking about Muslim women. For non-Muslim women, they are in every respect -- the way they walk, the way they talk, those bedroom eyes we all know so well -- simply asking for it, and Muslim men have every right to do what they wish.

It is not understood that Western women are not so much regarded by most Muslims as individuals, but as "their women," the women who "belong" to hostile Infidels. They are booty, to be taken, just as the land of the Infidels someday will drop, it is believed, into Muslim hands -- by demographic conquest rather than military conquest. It has worked in many parts of Africa; and if Muslims fail to reproduce even faster than they do, there is always the expedient of killing the remaining Infidels.

All over France there are cases of rapes, by MUslim gangs, of French girls. In Australia, in 2000, Bankstown and Greenacre (in Sydney) had a succession of gang-rapes, in which the victims testified to the particularly gruesome details of being assaulted by a dozen or more men at a time, screaming at them for being "Aussies" or "Christians." It made a big splash in Sydney, when the cases came to trial in 2002. Alan Jones, an Australian commentator, noted: "Let's not mince words here -- these are racist attacks against ordinary Australian girls carried out by out of control Muslim Lebanese...." The girls themselves all testified to the fact that the attacks were full of observations about, not race, but religion -- and the confusion of Jones here is understandable. The Western world is still groping to understand something of which it had been so remarkably and indeed, in some ways so fortunately unaware; it is the attitudes engendered toward Infidels -- a Frenchman who is beaten to death for trying to retrieve his daughter's stolen bicycle, a mother and her year-old-child assaulted on an RER train near Louvres, the thousands of assaults which are a modern version of the rape and pillage that Muslim conquerors were permitted whenever they conquered Infidel lands. This is not mere crime, but ideologically-justified crime or rather, in Muslim eyes, attacks on Infidels scarcely qualify as crime.

Have we forgotten the mass rapes, at the hands of Muslims (Turks, Kurds, and in the Syrian Desert, Arabs) of the Armenian women, those helpless "giavours," in the first full-scale massacres in modern times, those of 1894-1895, and then the genocidal campaign that began in 1915 and went on for years? Have we all forgotten what happened to the Assyrian Christian women during the Assyrian massacres of 1933, when -- just a few months after the British left -- Muslim Iraqis had a high old time with their helpless Christian population? What about the rapes of the Christian women, kidnapped in Ramadi, Iraq last year -- never to be returned to their husbands, and now the permanent property of the Muslims who kidnapped them? Shall one recall what happened to the Christian Maronites in Damur, at the hands of the PLO? What about the Copts, in Egypt? Or, during the Algerian War the mass rape of Christian and Jewish women by the FLN (scarcely given enough attention in Alastair Horne's reticent "A Savage War of Peace" but given much more by such writers as Jacques Soustelle, the great ethnographer of Mexican culture, and a perceptive analyst of the Algerian situation and the real nature of Islam -- akin, in his way, to Andre Servier).

The figures on Muslim rape of Western women in Europe are astounding. In Denmark and Norway, between 65% and 70% of all rapes are committed by Muslims, who as yet still less than 5% of the population. One local judge in Norway actually exonerated one rapist by accepting his defense that the victim's dress was taken by him to mean that she was egging him on. Her dress was nothing special to Norwegians, but the judge found it to be unbearably provocative to this poor Muslim immigrant. A curious argument, is it not? Even if she had been dressed a la Gisele B
Bundchen doing a shoot for Victoria's Secret -- and she of course was not -- rape is not an acceptable response.

The argument now seems to be: Western moeurs are offensive. Western women are cheap and offensive. We Muslims are here, here to stay, and we have a right to take advantage of this situation. It is our view of the matter that should prevail. Western goods, like the land on which we now live, belong to Allah and to the best of men -- his Believers. Western women, too, essentially belong to us -- our future booty. Western laws may "apply" but not in any sense that really counts or that we reocgnize. We recognize Islamic law, the sharia, and according to that we are simply exhibiting the attiudes toward Infidels that are drummed into us, that are right and according to the laws of Allah. Why should we act differently? Oh, and if we happen to act, as some of the Islamic websites tell us we can act, in accordance with the local laws -- but only insofar as they do not contradict Islam -- that is only because of darura, the doctrine of necessity -- and that necessity, that darura, is of course only temporary.

In other words, when in Rome, if you are Muslim, do any damn thing you please and justify it by saying you didn't realize you were in Rome, or what the Romans did, and anyway, the Romans are Infidels so who cares what they do, or expect. A fascinating attitude. The sooner this is fully grasped by Infidels, the fewer victims, ultimately, there will be.

Posted by: Hugh at July 11, 2004 8:43 PM

Mr Fitzgerald: do us all a favour and write a book. You have the eloquence and the knowledge concerning Islam that most of us lack.

As to the rest of us, the best we can do is spread the word in a civilized manner. The common people are starting to open their eyes thanks to the efforts of people like Mr Spencer and your own.

Our worst enemies aren't even the Muslim radicals, the passive Muslim moderates, nor the leftist Islamophiles but the extreme-right radicals who - with the help of the leftist mainstream media - will try to alienate the bulk of the population. That is why your eloquence is so badly needed. The internet is important to inform, but it doesn't get the recognition of something on paper. Please write that book.

Posted by: alex221166 at July 12, 2004 11:16 AM

Radical right-wing. speaking of which....:

http://www.american-pictures.com/gallery/ku-klux-klan/index.htm

I would also like to point out that the Southern Poverty Law Center has a couple of good articles on the ties between these idiots and islamofascists, also.

Posted by: Gary at July 12, 2004 4:08 PM

Well there you go... That surely puts things into perspective. Muslims can make friends with infidels after all and they choose to do so with the finest examples of our American heritage.

(dry sarcasm/off)

Thanks for the weblink Gary.

(Rollseyes, and asks rhetorically, "Just what is this world coming to?")

Posted by: paula at July 14, 2004 5:49 AM