(Did you like my alliteration?) As you recall, I wrote a post on how I didn’t think Sam’s original idiotic stunt was sexist, but of course he then made a real d&$#head of himself and went and said a whole bunch of sexist things. Now, Sam and co-host Garry Lyon, and the Nine Network are being sued by one of the women who claims her reputation was tarnished. (Sam called her and the other women who wrote a letter complaining over the Wilson stunt, liars and hypocrites among other things.) Actually, I think it is probably boosted by standing up to the Footy Show, but it will be interesting to see what happens.

The mistake that Mr Howard et. al. made in pursuing the political decision to leave Hicks and Habib to be thrown to the wolves, was that Hicks and Habib are actually human beings. Now that they are back in Australia, being very human, this political decision is coming back to shame the former Howard government, and the Australian population generally for not speaking out against it.

Under international law, the conventions to which Australia is a party, and the general principle of diplomatic protection, a state has an obligation to defend the rights of it citizens overseas, irrespective of their actions or opinions, and in particular when their human and legal rights have been breached. This responsibility should be absolute, and not subject to political discretion when a key ally, such as the US, is involved. (Ref)

The neo-con nightmare, which is the War on Terror, is a fundamentalist vision. In common with all fundamentalist visions–whether Christian, Muslim, or any other fundamentalist flavour–it paints a dichotomy between ‘us’ and ‘them’ in which we represent the Good and they represent the Bad.

If you have a surf over to right-wing blogs supporting this War on Terror (I don’t recommend it, but I need to make a point) ‘they’ have no redeeming traits. Now, depending on your blog, ‘they’ can be Al-Qa’ida, radical Muslims, Hizbullah, Iran, asylum-seekers, or even just Muslims generally. But ‘they’ are painted as lacking any basic human characteristics. ‘They’ are a mob. ‘They’ follow Satan. ‘They’ hate the West for our freedoms. ‘They’ are willing to throw their babies into the sea.

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According to LP, we need a few more of ‘em in Western finance too. A friend of mine emailed me this article in the Arab News. This paragraph really stuck out:

Of course the two most important regulators in financial services in Malaysia are also women — Tan Sri Dr Zeti Akhtar Aziz is the globally respected Governor of Bank Negara Malaysia and Dato Zarinah Anwar is the chairperson of the Securities Commission of Malaysia, the securities regulator. Dr Zeti is often regarded as the most powerful woman in international finance, widely respected and who won the FT’s ‘Central Banker of the Year’ Award a few years ago.

We are often presented with the trope that Westerners liberate women whilst Muslims oppress them. Given the dearth of similarly powerful women financiers in Australia, it’s pause for thought that one of our nearest Muslim neighbours has one-upped us despite all our rhetoric (good on ‘em).

I’m watching Who Do You Think You Are with Alistair McGowan. From the BBC site:

With the assistance of a local historian, Alistair finds a reference to Suetonius McGowan in a religious pamphlet. He learns that Suetonius [of Irish descent] married a noble Muslim lady, whose name was omitted from the baptism record because she refused to convert to Christianity. And thus the mystery is solved: here is the Indian link that Alistair had felt sure he would find. He does have Indian blood after all.

Here are the interesting factoids from the show. When the British colonised India in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the men were encouraged to take Indian wives to cement the British hold on the area. The Anglo-Indians (people of mixed race, North-West European with at least one Indian female ancestor) tended to marry among themselves, and they took British culture, names, dress, and were Christians.

Nevertheless, there were at least some Muslims who agreed to marry their daughters to British–and Christian–men. The reason, is because Alistair’s female Indian ancestor was a noblewoman (the Muslims in that area were landowners in that time). She would have required her father’s consent for marriage. So interracial and more importantly inter-religious marriages between Muslim women and Christian men seem to have been considered possible.

This is contrary to the present widespread view that marriage between a Muslim woman and any type of non-Muslim man is (and always has) been completely prohibited. What were the religious scholars of that time and place saying about such interreligious marriages? I would be fascinated to know.

I have long suspected the scholarly censure of interreligious marriage, came out of the notion that to marry your daughter to a non-Muslim would be to set up an unequal relationship implying the woman in a higher position than her husband (i.e. non-Muslims not carrying the same status as Muslims), but I imagine in colonized India, where non-Muslims were in a higher position of status this may not have been a problem, hence a Muslim nobleman and land-owner giving permission for his daughter to marry a British Christian. Fascinating!!

[Update: it turns out Suetonious was a non-trinitarian Christian–a follower of Swedenborg–who respected the Muslims rather than being a missionary trying to convert them. Gosh sometimes I wish I was a historian, this is fascinating stuff.]

Those of us who have anything to do with Indonesian Muslims knew this already, but the ABC is reporting that the “Australian Strategic Policy Institute” (who are they?) have released a report saying that - surprise surprise - Indonesia is not full of radical Islamists.

Isn’t it a bit ironic that the photograph chosen to go along with the article is unrepresentative cleric Abu Bakr Bashir. Couldn’t they have got a stock photo of happy Indonesians all getting along or something. Like the one I found on Flickr (photo credit to kasperwiet)?