A prominent Muslim psychologist with a practice in Sydney‘s west says opponents of Sharia law are bigots.
Hanan Dover has told her 10,898 Facebookfollowers Australia needed to allow special laws for Muslims.
‘Religious groups can engage the laws and negotiate change in Australia whatever your religious schtick,’ she said.
‘But, only one of those religious laws creates political and media hysteria because it suits political fear-mongering and that’s pretty obvious - Islam.’
Ms Dover compared the idea of allowing Islamic law for Muslims with Aboriginal customary laws in the criminal justice system.
‘The fact that there is only one single law for Australians is BS,’ she said.
‘Australia’s liberal democracy prides itself being accommodating to different codes of law for different groups: halacha law for Jews, canon law for Catholics, tribal law for the Aboriginal communities, Islamic law for Muslims.’
The clinical psychologist described as bigots anyone who opposed special laws for Muslims, after a judge stopped the administrators of a Sydney synagogue from sacking a rabbi.
The Supreme Court verdict in June was hailed by Benzion Milecki, the chief rabbi of the South Head synagogue, in Sydney’s eastern suburbs, The Sydney Morning Herald reported.
‘Imagine if a Muslim stated similar to this after an approved court verdict about Shariah/Islamic law,’ Ms Dover said.
‘These are where the double standards we have to face from politicians/media commentators and bigots.’
Under Section 116 of the Australian Constitution, the federal government is banned from stopping the ‘free exercise of any religion’.
That makes banning Sharia law, an Islamic legal system, a contentious issue.
In Indonesia’s Aceh province, where Sharia law is practised, adulterers are caned 100 times.
Homosexual acts incur the death penalty in Iran, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Mauritania and Nigeria, where Sharia law is applied.
Sharia law has also been applied in the United Kingdom for divorce, however these ruling can be overridden by a regular court.
Not all Muslims in the West embrace Sharia law, with secular followers of Islam content with Australia’s existing laws on religious practice.
Ms Dover occasionally uses the hashtag '#creepingsharia’ on her Facebook page and has recently described Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull as a ‘bigoted, Islamophobic, offensive moron’ for describing terrorism as a ‘disease within Islam itself’.
In 2015, Ms Dover told a conference that young Muslim men charged with terrorism had been treated unfairly, describing it as how ‘young teenagers act out’.
In 2002, she likened homosexuals to ‘thieves, murderers, liars, hypocrites, criminals’ at a forum at the University of Western Sydney, but last year voiced support for gay marriage and distanced herself from those remarks made 15 years ago.
This year, several of her tongue-in-cheek Facebook posts called for Muslims to breed.