Sunday Papers

Reading the Sunday papers takes me further and further into the week these days. This week I managed to finish them last night but they left me fuming at the injustices towards women in some extremist Islamist countries/states. I read of the caning of a woman in front of a mosque full of baying men, and of schools closed in Afghanistan. And I wondered what answering salvo there could be from the west other than bombs and missiles. Don’t get me wrong. I certainly do not advocate violence; nonetheless my blood boils at the inequality of women over much of the globe. And I worry over attitudes creeping towards our own freedoms.

As I enjoyed watching the England v Pakistan test match, I found myself thinking about the boycott of South Africa in worldwide sport because of apartheid, and wondered when liberated nations would do something similar to protest against nations with outright oppression of women. But then, perahps the plight of women is not worth the general embarrassment of men. As to the application of Sharia Law where a woman raped has to provide four male witnesses before it can be substantiated, otherwise she is liable to be stoned for adultery, if married, or flogged, if unmarried. A recent poll revealed that four out of ten Muslems in Britain were in favour of introducing Sharia Law here. God forbid!

It appears that I can still enjoy the current Test Match in the hope that Pakistan are seeing sense and becoming part of the 21st century. Wikipedia tries to give a slightly less emotive view of the subject than I do. Read it if you want your consciences to be less troubled than mine.