FA, I never thought I would say this, but I completely agree with your post. I've also read Ayaan's books and seen her movie. I don't exactly think she had a good grasp of the politics in Somalia (or later The Netherlands), but it's certainly a vivid personal account worth reading. Let's hope she doesn't succumb to the same fate as Van Gogh....

That said, Islam is about complete submission. What Lubna Hussein is questioning isn't just the right to wear pants, but the right to question Islam, which in the eyes of many Muslims is far more blasphemous than the original crime. It is this very act that is so offensive about women in Iran refusing to wear the Hijab - it shows a defiance on many levels, one that if allowed, would lead to a domino effect. It could very well turn out that a higher court, one made up of different judges, will find her guilty of not complying with the lower court's findings, and punish her with a much more severe sentence.

On the issue of corporal punishment I do not agree at all that this would solve stupidity. As someone who spent years in schools where this was common practice, I can tell you without a doubt that it did nothing to curb undesired behavior and was seen by most of us as a rite of passage. I still keep in touch with a couple of my classmates and one was arrested for beating his own daughter and the other also regularly punishes his children with the dreaded "belt." Violence begets violence, so to speak, and it only furthers the escalation of violence in the lives of these people.

And this is true in the most repressive and violent countries too. Egypt comes to mind, where despite the most repulsive treatment in prisons (flogging, rape, fingernails, boiling, well you can use your imagination from there), their is no shortage of anti-government militants. Saddam couldn't contain his own republic of fear despite using the most unspeakable repression. We won't even go into the colorful history of Iran under the terror of the Savak, Pakistan's ISID, or the reasons we render the most stubborn "enemy combatants" to Morroco. These countries had/have atrocious human rights records and yet are still amazingly unstable to boot.

If we allow our (surprisingly religiously conservative) criminal justice system to become even more repressive and abusive against its inmates than it already is, then we only create a more violent criminal once he/she is released. Is it any wonder we have one of the highest rates in the Western world of criminals who return to prison? Would any of us allow an ex-con to move next door to our own homes? It matters little what crime they have committed - once they wear that scarlet letter, they can never be trusted again. And why is this? Because the violence inside has made them a person never to be trusted again. Our prison system is in some ways just as violent as the prisons in other countries, but we just pretend it isn't.

As Robin Williams put it so elegantly: once we convict a man for sodomy, we send him to a place where he'll be sodomized regularly. Where is the logic in that?

P.S. And yes, the violence and cruelty of the Crusades was incomparably one-sided.