Tsunami: One Year Later

A year ago the terrible tsunami swept 216,000 lives from the face of the earth in Southeast Asia. Recovery has been long and hard, and there's still a long way to go for the millions left homeless.

People are always trying to come up with reasons for tragedies like these, and some Muslims in Banda Aceh, one of the hardest hit areas, have come up with their own wacky reasoning for the tsunami (h/t Little Green Footballs):

MARLUDDIN JALIL, a Sharia judge who has ordered the punishment of women for not wearing headscarves, was uncompromising: “The tsunami was because of the sins of the people of Aceh.”

Thundering into a microphone at a gathering of wives, he made clear where he felt the fault lay: “The Holy Koran says that if women are good, then a country is good.”

A year after the disaster which many see as a divine punishment, emboldened Islamic hardliners are doing their best to eradicate sin — and women are their prime targets.

With reconstruction slow, irrational fears of a second tsunami high, and nearly 500,000 still homeless along 500 miles of coastline, the stern message falls on fertile ground. A Sharia police force modelled on Saudi moral enforcers enthusiastically seeks out female wrong doers for public humiliation.

The Wilayatul Hisbah, which loosely translates as “Control Team”, has arrested women, lopped off their hair, and paraded them in tears through the streets while broadcasting their sins over a megaphone.

More than 100 gamblers and drinkers — men and women — have been caned in public and some clerics are calling for thieves’ hands to be amputated.

If the lack of headscarves caused the tsunami, then Newport Beach better watch out because you won't see a lot of headscarves down there either.