Ross lambasts the legal profession for its tolerance of the Tim Pembela Muslim (TPM), the Muslim Lawyers’ Team.

Muslim Lawyers’ Team – who do they represent?

As we wait impatiently for the scumbags [Amrozi, Mukhlas, Imam Samudra] down by Cilacap to be executed, could somebody give us info on the background of the Tim Pembela Muslim (TPM), the Muslim Lawyers’ Team, a body which seems to take precious little interest in ordinary Muslims who get in trouble with the law, nor even in high-profile non-political robbers, rapists and murderers, reserving its energies for those who may go through Islamic rituals but whose spiritual outlook – if such a thing can be said to exist – rather resembles that of horror-comic satanists.

These obnoxious attorneys are treated as respectable citizens, although I find it hard to believe that they are indeed representative of honest Muslim lawyers (I know ‘honest lawyers’ is not a concept Western readers will find easy to take on board, but cut me some slack here).

Ms. Tumini, one of the Bali beasts’ victims, almost alone in the brave way she put up a good effort to expose their sophistries (TVOne on Saturday), cut through all the skull-capped twit’s garbage about Afghanistan and Palestine and the bloody “ummat” ( I hate the way they invoke that sectarian phrase, with its implication that every Muslim, no matter what, must support every other Muslim, no matter how swinish, if they are in conflict with non-Muslims).

The good lady simply stated that she was content to accept the verdict of her country’s laws, which had taken long enough to remove any reasonable doubts of their guilt before sentencing them to the death they so richly deserve. (I have paraphrased her remarks as well as translated them, but I feel I have not misrepresented her.)

Is it not time for decent Muslim lawyers to organise themselves and dissociate themselves from the TPM creeps. It is one thing to argue that every prisoner merits legal defence, but when the defenders openly deploy bigoted Islamist arguments (and neglect to defend common Muslim criminals, like Sumanto the cannibal or that Yati, the 4th wife accused of chopping up her husband, or the copet and preman on the buses whom I loathe, but who are obviously much more decent human beings than Imam Samudra ever could be) then it is the legal profession which ought to take steps to preserve its reputation- such as it is!