Plan B Forum

A Muslim man who was allegedly lashed 40 times by four men who broke into his Sydney home as a punishment for drinking alcohol says his Islamic faith is a beautiful religion.

Chris Martinez, 31, also said the Muslim community has been supportive of him despite the events that allegedly took place on Sunday.

Two men have been charged over the alleged incident, which has raised broad community concerns about the application of Islamic law in Australia.

In an interview with the community forum MuslimVillage.com published on Wednesday, Mr Martinez said he had a drinking problem and that he had been drinking on the day of the alleged incident.

"I have a problem with drinking that I have been trying to overcome," he told the forum, which released an interview transcript and pictures on its internet home page.

Mr Martinez, who says he has been Muslim for about three years, praised Islam for helping him in his life.

"Islam is a beautiful religion, it's a great guideline to life, it's a real way to live your life," he said.

"I mean, I'm not perfect.

"But in saying that, Islam helped me get through all of that, helped me get through my past, and now I believe I'm a better person because of Islam.

"This was about some individuals, not religion."

Mr Martinez said his wife had been upset by the incident, which is being investigated by NSW Police.

He also said "mainstream media" had been hounding him and had offered him money to tell his story, which he had rejected.

"I feel like a victim twice over from their hounding and threats of blackmail," he said.

On Wednesday, Wassim Fayad, 43, was granted bail in Burwood Local Court on charges of aggravated break and enter with intent to commit an indictable offence.

He is also charged with detaining a person in company with intent to obtain advantage and two counts of stealing from a dwelling.

On Tuesday, Tolga Cifci, 20, of Auburn was granted bail at the same court on charges of aggravated break and enter, committing a serious indictable offence and inflicting actual bodily harm.

Both matters will return to the court for mention on September 14

Aard Vark wrote:In the past other religious "cults" have been closed down because of the abuses of the members by the leaders why should Muslims be treated differently?

Or to be blunt if our country's laws aren't good enough for you F#$K OFF!!

In the past other religous "culis" have been closed down because of the abuses of the members by the leaders why should Muslims be treated diferently?

"This was about some individuals, not religion."

"This was about some individuals, not religion."

1. Islam commands offensive and aggressive and unjust jihad.
2. Islam orders apostates to be killed
3. Islam orders death for Muslim and possible death for non—Muslim critics of Muhammad and the Quran and even sharia itself.
4. Islam orders unmarried fornicators to be whipped and adulterers to be stoned to death
5. Islam commands that homosexuals must be executed
6. Islam commands that highway robbers should be crucified or mutilated
7. Islam commands that a male and female thief must have a hand cut off
8. Islam allows an injured plaintiff to exact legal revenge—physical eye for physical eye
9. Islam allows husbands to hit their wives even if the husbands merely fear highhandedness in their wives.
10. Islam commands that drinkers and gamblers should be whipped.

"This was about some individuals, not religion."

Take your pick, flogging or prison
Originally published: July 20, 2011 7:43 PM
Updated: July 20, 2011 7:47 PM
By PETER MOSKOS

Peter Moskos, the author of "In Defense of Flogging," is an assistant professor of law and police science at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. This is from The Washington Post.

Suggest adding the whipping post to America's system of criminal justice and most people recoil in horror. But offer a choice between five years in prison or 10 lashes and almost everybody picks the lash. What does that say about prison?

America has a prison problem. Never in the history of the world has a country locked up so many of its people. We have more prisons than China, and it has a billion more people than we do. Forty years ago America had 338,000 people behind bars. Today 2.3 million are incarcerated. We have more prisoners than soldiers. Something has gone terribly wrong.

The problem -- mostly due to longer and mandatory sentences combined with an idiotic war on drugs -- is so abysmal that the Supreme Court recently ordered 33,000 prisoners in California to be housed elsewhere or released. If California could simply return to its 1970 level of incarceration, the savings from its $9 billion prison budget would cut the state's budget deficit in half. But doing so would require the release of 125,000 inmates, and not even the most progressive reformer has a plan to reduce the prison population by 85 percent.

I do: Give convicts the choice of flogging in lieu of incarceration.

Ironically, when the penitentiary was invented in post-revolutionary Philadelphia, it was designed to replace corporal punishment. State by state, starting with Pennsylvania in 1790 and ending with Delaware in 1972 (20 years after the last flogging), corporal punishment was struck from the criminal code.

The idea was that penitentiaries would heal the criminally ill just as hospitals cured the physically sick. It didn't work. Yet despite the failures of the first prisons, states authorized more and larger prisons. With flogging banned and crime not cured, there was simply no alternative. We tried to be humane and ended up with more prisoners than Stalin had at the height of the Soviet Gulag. Somewhere in the process, we lost the concept of justice and punishment in a free society.

Today, the prison-industrial complex has become little more than a massive government-run make-work program that profits from human bondage. To oversimplify -- just a bit -- we pay poor, unemployed rural whites to guard poor, unemployed urban blacks.

Of course some people are simply too dangerous to release. But they're relatively few in number. We keep these people behind bars because we're afraid of them.

As to the other 2 million common criminals -- the 2 million more than we had in 1970 -- we can't and won't keep them locked up forever. Ninety-five percent of prisoners are eventually released. The question is not if but when and how.

Incarceration not only fails to deter crime but in many ways can increase it. For crime driven by economic demand, such as drug dealing, arresting one seller creates a job opening for others.

Incarceration destroys families and jobs, exactly what people need to have in order to stay away from crime. Incarcerated criminals are more likely to reoffend than similar people given alternative sentences. To break the cycle of crime, people need help. And they would need less help if they were never incarcerated in the first place.

Flogging, as practiced in Singapore or Malaysia, is honest, cheap and, compared to prison, humane. Caning succeeds in part simply because it is not incarceration. Along with saving tens of billions of dollars a year, corporal punishment avoids all the hogwash about prisons somehow being good for the soul.

Some would argue that flogging isn't harsh enough. While this moves beyond the facile belief that flogging is too cruel to consider, if flogging shouldn't be offered because it's too soft -- if we need to keep people locked up precisely because overcrowded jails and prisons are so unbelievably horrific -- then perhaps we need to question our humanity.

Is there a third way, something better than both flogging and prison? I hope so. But until we figure out what that is and have the political fortitude to adopt it, we shouldn't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Flogging may be distasteful, but surely there's little harm in offering the choice. If it takes a defense of flogging to make us face the truth about prison and punishment, then bring on the lash.