The world’s original failed state Somalia has given us some crackpots over the years since it was “Game Over” in the virtual war between the USA and The USSR.
The front runner in the religious loony stakes at the moment is, without doubt, the Islamist al-Shabab. Hard on the heels of their prohibition of music and their idea that women who refuse to get married will be beheaded, is the banning of “mixed-sex handshakes”. Men and women who are not related are now also forbidden to walk together and talk to each other in public. A public flogging, at least, will result.
Your heart goes to the poor people that have to live under this reign of terror. Imposed on them by gangsters and carried out by murderous thugs who have found a niche in the ruins of Somalia’s societal collapse.
Am I the only one that thinks these guys spend their spare time, (when not terrorising the population and committing murder and rape that is), thinking up more and more ludicrous laws to give themselves, in their own deluded minds, a legitimised excuse to carry out their atrocities.
Just what is it that their afraid of?
Is it that the Somalian libido is such that a handshake between a man and woman within earshot of someone playing an Oud would bring down their world in an orgy of sexual permissiveness?
Well, it hasn’t up till now.
Is it that woman who don’t particularly wish to marry some gun-toting bampot who threatens to rape and behead them, are somehow a threat to Islam?
Of course not.
It’s about power. Power over the lives of ordinary people.
Its nothing knew. Throughout history, bully-boy regimes like that of al-Shabab have always attracted the socially inadequate misfits of the civilised culture that they aim to replace.
But al-Shabab has the backing of clerics. And that, one would have thought might be of concern to other Islamic countries and Muslims throughout the world. If the Organisation of the Islamic Conference really has concerns about the West’s perception of Islam’s associations with human rights violation then Somalia might be a good place to start.
If what radical Islamists such as these do is acceptable to other Muslims then, so be it. If other Islamic countries are fearful of criticising them, so be it. If it’s none of their business, so be it.
History suggests that al-Shabab and these demented clerics will be allowed to run riot because - if they’re doing so there, they’re not doing it elsewhere.
Not at the moment anyway.
