Aceh judiciary, Mayor Aminullah Usman and Muhammad Rushdy #fundie

Aceh judiciary, Mayor Aminullah Usman and Muhammad Rushdy #fundie japantoday.com

A trio of canoodling couples were publicly flogged in Indonesia's Aceh province on Thursday, charged with breaking local Islamic law that outlaws public displays of affection.

Despite international condemnation, whipping is a common punishment for a range of offenses in the deeply conservative region on Sumatra island, including gambling, drinking alcohol, and having gay or pre-marital sex.

Aceh is the only region in the world's biggest Muslim-majority country that imposes Islamic law.

On Thursday, a masked sharia officer rained down between 20 and 22 strokes from a rattan cane each on three men and three women caught behaving amorously. They had all served several months in prison.

One woman winced and fell over from the painful punishment, which was carried out in front of a mosque in the provincial capital Banda Aceh. Dozens of onlookers, including some visiting Malaysian students, watched the spectacle.

"I'm nervous because this is the first time I've seen something like this," said visitor Muhammad Rushdy. "But it can serve as an important lesson for us from other countries to comply with local regulations."

Banda Aceh's mayor Aminullah Usman repeated his long-held claim that the punishment is a deterrent.

"But we keep telling visitors not to be afraid to visit Banda Aceh... because you won't be flogged if you don't break the law," he said.

13 comments

This is inhuman.

"But we keep telling visitors not to be afraid to visit Banda Aceh... because you won't be flogged if you don't break the law," he said.

Why would anyone want to visit your weird Theocratic enclave?!

On the upside; Perhaps someone can set up a means for more liberal residents to move out of that dumbass province.

Frankly; As much as I LOATHE theocracies and dictatorships, I don’t have much issue with small enclaves set aside for people who WANT to live under that if it’s a compromise.

Indonesia can be as secular and Progressive as anything while the holly-rollers move to Aceh (likewise, progressive minds in Aceh can be given resources to move out.

Whipping people for romantic sexy mushy stuff is just stupid and inhumane.

But we keep telling visitors not to be afraid to visit Banda Aceh... because you won't be flogged if you don't break the law

So why don't you tell that to people watching your adverts promoting your country as an ideal holiday destination...?!

So much for the honeymoon market. There's always other countries that aren't so prudish.

Why would anyone want to visit that hole in the first place, unless they’re already as brainwashed as the rest of them? Seriously, if they want their little flogging paradise, go ahead but FFS, let people the fuck out of there, YES WITH TAXPAYER MONEY IF NEED BE. Jut being able to technically switch countries does you nothing in this world, @Spukikitty unless your passport has enough power to get you to a first world country and you have either friends, or resources to re-establish yourself there. I know, from my own experience. The current refugee system is broken and hard to go through, even with a legitimate grievance, an automatic system that would move “undesirables” from an oppresive shithole to a first world country would be much, much better for everyone, save the racists, perhaps and I really don’t give a shit what racists want. Problem is, this would be an almost completely new concept for the politicians here and to even tackle it, we must first show as a people, that we WANT them in, we WANT them to switch to our places and that WE are ready and willing to provide support for them, while still establishing themselves. I do it already on a very micro scale,helping folks through the process and providing a safe haven for those who can make it here ubt ofc I’m just one person of this almost 40 million nation. though I know a couple other folks like me.

Why would anyone want to visit your weird Theocratic enclave?!

There’s tourists going to North Korea, so visiting Aceh might find takers.

@SpukiKitty: Frankly; As much as I LOATHE theocracies and dictatorships, I don’t have much issue with small enclaves set aside for people who WANT to live under that if it’s a compromise.

While I agree with that sentiment, and it could work in theory, there’s a caveat: Want. Some of the people who are born in places like that really don’t belong there. The compromise would be that you’re free to treat your own citizens as you wish, even if it’s highly abusive by the standards of the rest of the world, provided you don’t prevent them from leaving. “Preventing them from leaving” includes cutting off people from information about the rest of the world and outright lying about what it’s like. Some children will be traumatized, but at least they can find a better place and heal as adults.

Unfortunately, the more necessary this is for any particular enclave, the less likely it is to be applied in practice, were they to be completely autonomous. This would mean either they can’t be completely autonomous, or in else in many cases the “compromise” would only be with the enclave’s first generation, and after that they’d be more of a self-enforced containment zone than a freedom zone… to the detriment of people born into a nightmare which requires both heroic effort and abandonment of everything they’ve ever known to escape, assuming they even know there’s anywhere to escape to at all. And then there’s the issue of what if they start excluding outsiders completely, do the next generation of similar-minded extremists born elsewhere get their enclave too, and then maybe eventually exclude outsiders as well?

I’m not saying we shouldn’t do this, hell, a lot of the time I think we should - there are a lot of non-mainstream subcultures which can’t truly live out their lives according to their own ideals, and not all are inherently abusive. Those deserve their spaces just as much as or more those who crave theocracies. It’s just… there’s a lot of limitations and drawbacks to that approach.

@Skide & Zinnia

Of course, I must STRESS that there MUST be things put in place to help people defect.

"But we keep telling visitors not to be afraid to visit Banda Aceh... because you won't be flogged if you don't break the law," he said.

The problem is knowing what is against the law… Logic tells us that affection is good, while harming people is bad. Your laws are quite the opposite.
In most western countries it’s not against the law to show affection, nor to drink alcohol. What’s against the law here is to whip people raw, and to punish people for showing affection.

What Swede said. Really; Theocrats have weird priorities.

I still hold to my concept of certain faith-based moral laws becoming obsolete over time due to factors rendering the reason those laws were made moot. All those sex laws were written in a time when medicine and contraception was very primitive, Germ Theory wasn’t a thing, STIs passed around willy-nilly and paternity, inheritance and family structure was VERY SERIOUS BUSINESS.

That’s why organized religions tend to be somewhat sex-negative or sexually restrictive…it was a matter of life and death in an ancient, primitive, savage era when everybody was chill with solving all disputes with “Put a sword in ‘em” and “Human Rights” was an alien concept. The same goes for dietary laws and circumcision.

Now that Human Rights, better hygiene, better medicine, better knowledge, better contraception, better knowledge of non-violent conflict resolution, etc. are a thing, many prohibitions can be simply ignored and focus put of teaching promoting love, charity and not hurting others.

But many STIs are treatable, curable, preventable; Contraception is more sophisticated, DNA tests can discover “who’s the daddy” and social structures vary. Stuff like flogging may be in The Quran but it’s no longer needed.

USE YOUR NOODLES AND READ BETWEEN THE LINES, RELIGIOUS PEOPLE! FAITH & REASON GO TOGETHER! SPIRIT OF THE LAW TRUMPS THE LETTER! BETTER TO “CANOODLE” THAN TO KILL!

And…flogging…REALLY?!

Well. I can cross Indonesia off my to visit list.

Shame too, as I've heard it's quite beautiful.

As far as I know; It’s mostly just one province while the rest (with a few exceptions, as seen here on FSTDTs) is mostly moderate and secular (this is the country that gave us the martial arts cult-classic action flick series, The Raid. Three of the series’ actors also played much of The Kanjiklub gang in Star Wars TFA).

So; If you wish to visit Indonesia; Avoid Aceh Province, which has been set aside as an enclave for the frummies who think a strict IslamoFrum theocracy is the bee’s knees.

I look upon these sort of thing as an incentive. An incentive to get the fuck out of there.