Serious Adultery

Malaysia Starts Caning Love Cheats

Malaysia: Feb 18th.

Three women have been caned having been found guilty of adultery by an Islamic court. Home Minister Hishamuddin Hussein admitted that he wanted to draw attention to the case following an outcry over a similar punishment handed to a woman for drinking in August last year, which he claimed had been ‘overhyped.’

“People are saying that no woman has been caned before… today I am announcing that we have already done it”

The belief that public examples of justice are a necessary part of law enforcement – the so-called deterrent theory – is something that is common to lawmakers across the world. Calls for criminals to be used a ‘examples’ are hardly unknown in our own country, for example.

But in the Islamic world, the increasing stridency of such calls and the extreme nature of the punishments meted out mark the ascendency of a more extreme form of Sharia law. Stonings in Somalia have attracted much attention in recent months, but these represent just the tip of an iceberg.

Whether such punishments actually work to prevent a higher rate of adultery is really an unknown. Even when the penalty is death, it is apparent that women and men alike still fall prey to temptation.

What is certain is that the polarisation between the West and the Islamic world is brought into stark relief over the issue of affairs and adultery. Our own debate about Jon Terry’s affair centred on whether we believed he should be stripped of his captaincy of a football side. Aside from Arsenal fans, almost no-one called for him to be publicly whipped.

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