Free Speech Death Watch Update — more on this story: “Austrian far-right legislator convicted of anti-Muslim incitement,” from DPA, January 22 (thanks to Gudrun):
Vienna – Austrian far-right parliamentarian Susanne Winter was convicted Thursday of incitement because of her anti-Muslim statements, including the claim that Islam’s prophet Mohammed was a paedophile.
Is truth no defense? Of course, the whole concept of pedophilia did not exist in Muhammad’s day, but when he is taken as the supreme example of human conduct and imitated today, what results is…pedophilia. Muhammad’s consummation of his marriage with Aisha when she was nine is in the hadith collection Muslims consider most reliable, Bukhari, several times: 5.48.234; 5.58.236; 7.62.64; 7.62.65; and 7.62.88.
What’s more, it is clear that Muslims take this seriously and imitate Muhammad in this. Article 1041 of the Civil Code of the Islamic Republic of Iran states that girls can be engaged before the age of nine, and married at nine: “Marriage before puberty (nine full lunar years for girls) is prohibited. Marriage contracted before reaching puberty with the permission of the guardian is valid provided that the interests of the ward are duly observed.”
The Ayatollah Khomeini himself married a ten-year-old girl when he was twenty-eight. Khomeini called marriage to a prepubescent girl “a divine blessing,” and advised the faithful: “Do your best to ensure that your daughters do not see their first blood in your house.”
Time magazine reported in 2001: “In Iran the legal age for marriage is nine for girls, fourteen for boys. The law has occasionally been exploited by pedophiles, who marry poor young girls from the provinces, use and then abandon them. In 2000 the Iranian Parliament voted to raise the minimum age for girls to fourteen, but this year, a legislative oversight body dominated by traditional clerics vetoed the move. An attempt by conservatives to abolish Yemen’s legal minimum age of fifteen for girls failed, but local experts say it is rarely enforced anyway. (The onset of puberty is considered an appropriate time for a marriage to be consummated.)”
The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) reports that over half of the girls in Afghanistan and Bangladesh are married before they reach the age of eighteen. In early 2002, researchers in refugee camps in Afghanistan and Pakistan found half the girls married by age thirteen. In an Afghan refugee camp, more than two out of three second-grade girls were either married or engaged, and virtually all the girls who were beyond second grade were already married. One ten-year-old was engaged to a man of sixty.
And it’s a good thing that this Saudi “marriage officiant” isn’t in Austria, or he could face charges also, for saying the same thing. But how many Muslims are in Austria now who believe that Muhammad consummated his marriage with Aisha when she was nine, and that that was perfectly fine? And why isn’t the Austrian state going to prosecute them?
A court in Winter’s home town of Graz also found the 51-year-old politician guilty of humiliating a religion.
How can you humiliate a religion? A religion has feelings?
She was sentenced to a fine of 24,000 euros (31,000 dollars) euros and a suspended prison term of three months, Austrian news agency APA reported.
The politician, who took a seat in parliament last fall for the Freedom Party (FPOe), made the anti-Islamic remarks in January 2008.
She also proposed in a discussion with students that Muslim men should commit bestiality rather than making “indecent advances” on girls.
Re bestiality, see Mark Steyn here.
The politician had pleaded innocent Thursday, claiming that she “did not want to insult anyone, but only to point out problems.”
The verdict is not yet legally binding….
Not yet legally binding? Until what?