Pointing the Bone

Two of the ozplogosphere’s most prominent pseudonymous bloggers, Professor Bunyip and Gummo Trotsky, are having a squabble about stoning adulterous Nigerian women to death. Bunyip reckons Fairfax journo Pamela Bone (and presumably Gummo) is an inconsistent leftie and a willing tool of the Muslim feminist movement (?) for advocating that western opponents of the stoning of Nigerian woman Amina Lawal should desist from emailing letters and petitions of protest for fear of provoking the mullahs. Gummo reckons Bunyip is, well, just a tool.

I have a solution. Someone should accept one of those 60 million dollar email offers from a prominent Nigerian public figure. When the millions arrive in your bank account (as they surely will), you can use them to bribe the mullahs into agreeing not to stone Amina. It makes at least as much sense as sending emails and protest letters to Nigeria.

On the other hand, is Pamela Bone (or Gummo) seriously suggesting that we should simply do nothing and place our trust in the mullahs’ mercy? There are almost always women under sentence of death by stoning in Nigeria, and the necessary result of following Pamela Bone’s advice is that we would be passively condoning this evil practice in perpetuity.

Sure it’s a dumb idea to send letters and emails to Nigeria. But we certainly should be pressuring western governments to begin exerting all possible diplomatic, economic and (if all else fails) military pressure on regimes like this to take decisive action against barbarous religiously-driven practices. Of course, that would require some on the left to engage in real critical analysis of their comfortable moral and cultural relativism, and conclude that fundamentalist Islam is a downright evil ideology that shouldn’t be placated, condoned or accommodated. That isn’t “new imperialism” or “colonialist”, unless you’re an airhead like Pamela Bone.

Actually, to be fair to Bone, she doesn’t actually defend fundamentalist Islam as such, she just thinks it’s “largely been dreamed up by men to suit men”, and is best combatted from within the culture rather than by interfering westerners. That sounds very much like the same leftie argument that conceded Saddam Hussein was an evil bastard, but asserted it was up to Iraqis to get rid of him despite the patently suicidal nature of any such attempt. In the interests of non-sexist abuse, and on Scott Wickstein’s suggestion, Pamela Bone is a silly punce (rather than a twat).