Why won’t Westerners condemn Sharia law? | Hacker News Reader

Why won’t Westerners condemn Sharia law?

spiked-online.com

5 pointskiki58 comments

This is a serious question which i don't understand.

I know muslims, jews, buddhists, orthodox, christian, lutherian and atheist people, some are my friends, some i know from work. All of them (being in a educated sphere of influence) condemn exclusive traits, like sharia.

So why do we (try to) tolerate people trying to adhere to sharia law?

Oil maybe? Military ties to one such country?

Maybe we are just getting started asking why as people?

Because the condemnation of Sharia law was co-opted, and subsequently ruined for everybody, by the genocidal maniacs.

Sadly this appears to be true. But still i don't understand why we accept (in this extreme case) death penalty for homosexuals. Or women not having the right to decide for themselves. The list goes on.

Define "accept". Not criticize as loudly as we should? OK, that's fair. Beyond criticizing, though, what are we supposed to do? Invade and institute regime change? No, that's probably not the answer. Impose sanctions? If we don't impose sanctions, are we accepting sharia? I'm not sure it's that cut and dried.

Note that I don't have a suggestion. I see problems with most of the possible answers, though.

>But still i don't understand why we accept (in this extreme case) death penalty for homosexuals. Or women not having the right to decide for themselves. The list goes on.

Many Westerners consider homosexuality to be morally wrong and a sin against God, and aren't going to be that upset about gays being killed anywhere. Many Westerners also consider feminism to be a socially corrupting force, abortion to be murder, and a woman's place to be subservient to their husband, as per the Bible.

The elephant in the room here is that the West opposes Sharia law because it's Islamic, and because its extremism violates the laws of the land, but many tend to agree with it on general principle, and won't put up much protest to defend groups they already vilify.

Nobody i know agrees on homosexual people being of less value than others.

My wife is a developer from a eastern european country. She is very intelligent and i learn as much from her as she from me.

A colleague of mine is from france. His wife is from russia.

Another friend of mine earns (way!) less than his wife.

I could go on. Nobody thinks females are of less value in my circle of friends and acquaintances. Same for homosexuals.

I don't get this attitude of "you're opposed to sharia -> you're opposed to islams -> you're basically a nazi -> you oppose female rights" etc. This is factually not right and it is hard to defend against.

I don't support people oppressing other people based on their religion, sexual orientation. Still i hate people being killed based on their sexual orientation. This does not sound as a contradiction to me.

I was more talking about conservative Christians, evangelicals and right-wingers. You and your circle of friends are not necessarily representative of the mainstream. I've seen more than enough of both play out in popular culture and the media that I refuse to believe such views are not normalized throughout the Western world.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com