This unintended-consequences nightmare makes my stomach turn (via the London Times):

WHEN people around the world sent millions of pounds to help the stricken Indonesian province of Aceh after the Boxing Day tsunami of 2004, few could have imagined that their money would end up subsidising the lashing of women in public.

But militant Islamists have since imposed sharia law in Aceh and have cornered Indonesian government funds to organise a moral vigilante force that harasses women and stages frequent displays of humiliation and state-sanctioned violence.

International aid workers and Indonesian women’s organisations are now expressing dismay that the flow of foreign cash for reconstruction has allowed the government to spend scarce money on a new bureaucracy and religious police to enforce puritan laws, such as the compulsory wearing of headscarves.

Some say there are more “sharia police” than regular police on the local government payroll and that many of them are aggressive young men…

…Fatimah, a human rights worker, was arrested after a seminar at a hotel in Banda Aceh when sharia police burst in to find her without a proper headscarf while chatting in the corridor to a male colleague.

Accused of “khalwat”, a vague term that covers proximity between unmarried men and women, she was dragged off to a police station, where she was detained, deprived of sleep and questioned for three days before being released without charge. “It was a nightmare that I will not be able to forget for the rest of my life,” she said.

For international donors, who gave generously to end the nightmare of the tsunami, the next few months will pose hard choices. “Nobody intended our aid to subsidise this,” said one United Nations official.

Ed Morrissey observes:

Western nations need to develop new methods of aid delivery. We cannot simply refuse to help when people starve to death or when tsunamis strike, but we also cannot fund the imposition of shari’a and other kinds of oppression. We need to insist on controlling the delivery channels for aid to ensure that it reaches the real victims. When we have successfully done so, we have seen the benefits of our generosity reflected in the improved lives of the downtrodden. When we do not, we become accessories to the violence and abuse that the powerless receive.

There is a larger issue that needs to be confronted: Islamic misogyny. Iranian-American Amil Imani takes the issue on in the American Thinker today:

Here are some rules that keep women in their Muhammad stipulated place.

* If a Muslim woman is murdered, her beneficiary is entitled to one-half dyyeh-blood money, or compensation-as that of a murdered Muslim male.

* A woman’s testimony in the court of law is worth one-half that of a man.

* A woman must provide four witnesses to substantiate her claim of being raped.

* A man can divorce his wife by simply saying to her, “I divorce you,” three times.

* A divorced woman is entitled to a miserly compensation and automatically forfeits her rights to her children.

* Women are barred from the lucrative and powerful cast of clergy.

* Husbands are entitled to punish their wives corporally.

* Men are allowed to have four wives at any one time and as many concubines as they desire and can afford.

* Saudi Arabia, the custodian of “true Islam” imposes a raft of restrictions on women such as: women are not allowed to drive; they are not permitted to leave the country without accompaniment or explicit permission of their male kin; they are barred from most government jobs and much much more.

* Among other Muslims, such as the Taliban and the Pashtoon of Afghanistan-Pakistan region, women are barred from education and not even allowed to leave the house unless accompanied by a male kin.

* Since education, particularly professional education is often denied to women in many Islamic societies. There is scarcity of women physicians and male doctors are often forbidden to treat women patients.

Such is the plight of women under Islam. There is hardly the need to provide an exhaustive list of Islamic misogyny to qualify it as a shameful, discriminatory and oppressive religious apartheid.

Will Muslim women ever break out of their bondage and claim their rightful place among emancipated non-Muslim women?

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