Peer Criticises Muslim "Hotheads"

Muslim peer Baroness Warsi has hit out at Muslim "hardliners and hotheads" who use Islam to argue against voting and equal rights for women.

It is good to see a Muslim who is actually speaking out against the hardliners, rather and continually against "Islamophobes" who point out that these hardliners exist. It's also good to see her saying that Muslims should stop trying to claim the victim status and become more active in society.

I have problems with a couple of her comments, though.

"I've got a clear message to the hardliners and hotheads who claim to speak for British Muslims. When you say that voting is un-Islamic, you're wrong."

If this is the case, then one wonders why Islamic-based societies have always been so stringently un-democratic.

"When you say that women should not have access to education or employment; that women's equality is un-Islamic; or that women should not adopt leadership positions like politics, you're wrong, wrong, wrong."

In that case, Miss Warsi needs to explain just what is meant by the Qur'anic passages that say women are inferior to men and must be ruled by them (4:34), that a woman's testimony is worth half that of a man's (2:282), that a daughter's inheritance is half that of a son's (4:11), and other such decrees which seem to deny women equality of rights with men. Would Warsi be willing to explain how hardliners have misunderstood these passages? If so, she needs to do so because plenty of Muslims around the world seem to take these passages quite seriously.

"Islam was "unambiguous" in its rejection of forced marriages,"

Depends what you mean by "forced marriages". Muhammad, the Perfect Man in Islamic theology, allowed his soldiers to take the widows of their opponents as war booty after various battles. The Prophet himself married a young girl whose husband he had just ordered beheaded after the siege of Khaybar. So obviously Islam isn't quite "unambiguous" on the matter at all.

On the other hand, there is one more beacon of hope:

"She called on all members of the Muslim community to help in the fight against terrorism.

"We must accept that we're in all in this together - but Muslims have an added responsibility to defeat extremism, because extremism is claimed in the name of Islam," Baroness Warsi said."

Islamophobe!

Seriously, it is nice to see a Muslim actually acknowledging that it may be the Muslim community's RESPONSIBILITY to eradicate radicalism from within their own ranks, just as I have been saying for ages now, much to the constant criticism of dhimmis everywhere, who unfathomably find this totally unreasonable. How Baroness Warsi plans to do this, she doesn't say, but it is more than we have heard other "moderate" Muslims in Britain say for years.