A comment of mine to an article was published. The web site is evidently Islamic, but the article is not narrowly religious and it is rather thoughtful, I think, so I have tried to suit my comment to it.
The article has been linked to further up in this thread:
The plea of four siblings in Sweden: Addressing big questionsquranicgen, 11 February 2014
Here is my comment:
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23 February 2014
Marianne Skanland:
Your questions as to ‘children's best interest’ and the Swedish child protection system are spot on.
Unfortunately, most of the debate I have seen in Malaysian publications about this case in Sweden centres on whether the parents are guilty of abuse, whether they deserve to be in prison, whether physical punishment of children is good or bad. Your article too has a long discussion of punishment and its standing in Islam, but it is balanced by other perspectives – issues which are actually more important, in my assessment. Allow me to state that I do not approve of physical punishment of children and I agree that it should be illegal. But that does not mean that the ‘alternative’, i.e. what Swedish authorities do to children and their families in such cases, is all right. Quite the contrary, they hold power and should therefore be obliged to act with completely clean hands all through. But they do not.
One problem is that one can never be sure whether what is said about parents and children, by child protection authorities or indeed in the courts or in their judgments, is true (cf Dag Sverre Aamodt’s article in Free Malaysia Today: “The case handling is generally characterized partly by unsubstantiated opinions and partly by blatant lies.”).
Most other articles and comments in Malaysia that I have seen have left out the question of whether the Swedish concept of the family and Sweden’s treatment of these Malaysian children are more acceptable than what the parents are charged with having done. For those of us who know what the treatment of foster children in Sweden is so often like, Swedish authorities lack an acceptable moral basis for being judgmental about parents. And they certainly lack any justification for having isolated these children from their entire family, denying relatives who came from Malaysia to help, the possibility of even meeting the children, necessitating a Malaysian top government minister coming all the way from Malaysia to get the children out. – But you see, this is the way Western child protection usually behaves and Sweden just about tops the list.
Your article shows considerable insight into the ‘child protection industry’; you probably do not need to be told of further articles to read. May I suggest, for your readers though, that they google ‘Siv Westerberg’ – several of her articles are available in English and can be found on http://forum.r-b-v.net and on http://www.mhskanland.net. Mrs Westerberg is Swedish, she is a leading human rights lawyer who has succeeded in having 9 cases against Sweden admitted to the European Court of Human Rights, most of them child protection cases, and has won 7 of them.****