Free Republic

A court in the United Arab Emirates says a man is permitted under Islamic law to physically discipline his wife and children as long as he leaves no marks and has tried other methods of punishment, the country's top court ruled. The ruling came in the case of a man who slapped his wife and slapped and kicked his 23-year-old daughter, the document said. The daughter had bruises on her right hand and right knee and the wife had injuries to her lower lip and teeth, the ruling said. The court ruled that a man has the right to punish...

Dangerous serial killers and sex criminals roam the Western world. In the not-too-distant past, such remorseless killers, such as Jack The Ripper, Ted Bundy, and the Green River Killer, targeted mainly vulnerable women, including prostituted women, whom they kidnapped, raped, tortured, and murdered. Often, breasts and genitalia were savagely mutilated.Today, these horrific, individual acts pale in comparison to the barbarism of the Islamist world where similar, but legally approved and publicly shared acts of woman-hatred are carried out by national presidents, religious leaders, Vice and Virtue police—and by mobs inflamed by Friday sermons.In 2001, egged on by their imam, hundreds of...

A gunman stormed into a courthouse meeting room in Ankara on Wednesday and shot five judges, apparently in anger at a ruling enforcing a strict ban on the wearing of Islamic head scarves. One judge later died, and top officials, including the prime minister, who himself had criticized the court's ruling, rushed to denounce the attack as a violation of Turkey's secular and democratic traditions. The gunman, who was captured, is Alparslan Arslan, a lawyer. He is not known to have previously displayed strong Islamist views, but during the siege, "he presented himself as the soldier of God," said Tansel...

As violence spread across Iraq during Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's visit to the Middle East this week, kings, presidents and prime ministers told her that they were concerned that sectarian violence could spread across the Middle East. "It came up pretty much everywhere," said a senior State Department official traveling with Ms. Rice. During this trip, Ms. Rice met with leaders of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, the United Arab Emirates and the other Persian Gulf states. One of the senior officials traveling with Ms. Rice said the Arab leaders, in their conversations with her, were particularly concerned that "outsiders...

LONDON – The two meetings by Muslim leaders occurred only three days apart, one in Birmingham and one in London. Both condemned the terrorist attacks in the British capital, but they couldn't agree on one key issue: Are suicide attacks forbidden by religious law? The fact that one group said "yes" and the other group said "not always" could be one reason Muslim radicals sometimes succeed in recruiting disaffected young people as suicide bombers, even in Western democracies such as Britain. Some clerics argue that such strikes can be used against an occupying power – an exception that offers the...