Editorial: Archaic values impossible to excuse

I SUPPOSE we've always lived in a strange old world, filled with head-scratching wonders and contradictions, warped values and strange ideas, but the advent of instant communication and news on tap has brought a lot of it to our attention.

The shootings in Orlando, Florida, have emphasised the extreme horror that lurks on the planet, but the case of a woman raped in Qatar brings another repugnance to the surface.

Briefly, a 22-year-old Dutch woman was allegedly raped while in the Arabian sovereign state - so she was charged and convicted of adultery by a Qatari court. Sex outside marriage is illegal in the Muslim country.

Her attacker, a Syrian man, was sentenced to 140 lashes for sex outside marriage and for drinking alcohol. He was not charged with rape and her rape allegations were not investigated.

According to the strange way these religious fanatics think, she had sex and she was not married to the person with whom she coupled. That she was drugged and taken by force is irrelevant, apparently.

Many people have trouble coming to terms with religious laws, especially if they are not of that particular religion, but some dogmatic codes are worse than archaic - they are nonsense.

To blame a victim is abhorrent, but to do that under the protection of religious law is even worse. This is not just a strange custom of a foreign land, it is an unjust judgement based on a religious tenet that is ridiculously out of place in the modern world. It reeks of ignorance in an unbending, insecure, patriarchal system.

That a rape victim should be prosecuted is so far removed from common sense, or, at least, our version of it, that the instinctive feeling is one of disbelief. But it happened and probably happens all the time to their own citizens. Are we, then, wrong for failing to understand?