A sickening story in the NY Daily News May 8 relates how eight "vigilantes" in Indonesia's autonomous enclave of Aceh attacked a 25-year-old widow they believed was about to have "adulturous" sex (despite the fact that her husband is deceased!), gang-raped her, brutally abused both her and her putative boyfriend, covering them in sewage—then marched her over to the local sharia court, where she was sentencted to be "caned." That's publicly whipped with a cane, nine strokes for the woman and putative lover apiece, the gang-rape and sewage affair apparently being deemed insufficient punishment. Note that the woman and putative lover were "about to" have sex—that is, they never even consummated the act. At least we are told that "[p]rominent Islamic leader Teungku Faisal Ali said he supported the caning, but that he thinks the rapists should be treated more harshly than the couple."

For those of us who were rooting for the Aceh rebels before the 2005 peace deal, this is especially painful news. The local autonomy instated by the deal seems to have been usurped by clerical reactionaries—although Aceh merely appears to be emulating Malaysia. Or Brunei, where the sultan's new implementation of extreme sharia measures has sparked celebrity protests in Hollywood over his ownership of a posh Beverly Hills hotel. Celebrity activists are also calling for Brunei to be iced from the Trans-Pacific Partnership. (Politico, May 7) This should give pause to advocates of a "peace-for-sharia" deal in Pakistan and Afghanistan...