Skip to main content

The blot on Iran

To Westerners what the Iranians intend doing in executing a woman who has allegedly committed adultery is barbaric.

Salon provides an up-to-date report on where things are at in the case of the to-be-executed woman:

"Iranian officials have "given the go-ahead" to execute Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani, according to CNN. As you might recall, the 43-year-old mother of two was sentenced to death by stoning for adultery. Authorities have since claimed that she was also convicted of murdering her husband, but activists say that is an outright lie and that she was actually acquitted.

International outrage over the case has calmed somewhat and, given that she could be killed as soon as Wednesday, the International Committees against Stoning and Execution is making a last ditch attempt to get "international bodies and the people of the world to come out in full force against the state-sponsored murder of Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani." This is an issue of basic human rights, of course, but it's also uniquely relevant to women's status in the country. I'll leave you with Ashtiani's own words about why she is being executed, while the man convicted of murdering her husband gets to live:

The answer is quite simple, it's because I'm a woman, it's because they think they can do anything to women in this country. It's because for them adultery is worse than murder -- but not all kinds of adultery: an adulterous man might not even be imprisoned but an adulterous women is the end of the world for them. It's because I'm in a country where it's women do not have the right to divorce their husbands and are deprived of their basic rights."

It may well be too late, by go here to register your protest to Iran's barbaric actions in intending to execute this hapless woman.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Pentagon's eye-popping spending....and waste!

Only a gigantic bureaucracy could get away with spending of such dimensions - and the amazing waste involved in part of that ginormous spend.   Think US Pentagon..... "From spending $150 million on private villas for a handful of personnel in Afghanistan to blowing $2.7 billion on an air surveillance balloon that doesn’t work, the latest revelations of waste at the Pentagon are just the most recent howlers in a long line of similar stories stretching back at least five decades.  Other hot-off-the-presses examples would include the Army’s purchase of helicopter gears worth $500 each for $8,000 each and the accumulation of billions of dollars' worth of weapons components that will never be used. And then there’s the one that would have to be everyone’s favorite Pentagon waste story: the spending of $50,000 to investigate the bomb-detecting capabilities of African elephants. (And here’s a shock: they didn’t turn out to be that great!) The elephant research, of course, represe...
Post a Comment
Read more

Video: Israel demolishing a Bedouin village

From Mondoweiss - Israel's supposed "most moral army in the world", the IDF, engaged in immoral, and according to international law, illegal action.... "Israeli forces have demolished every home in the Bedouin village of Khirbet Taha in the northern West Bank district of Nablus during three separate demolitions since the start of the year. Unlike most Bedouin villages, the residents in Khirbet Taha own their own land. However that land falls in Area C, territory in the occupied West Bank under full Israeli control. The village’s only school was also destroyed, leaving children to study in a dilapidated 100-year-old mosque — the only structure left standing in the village. According the United Nations, Israel has demolished half as many Palestinian buildings in the first few months of 2016, as they had in all of 2015. In February alone, the UN found that more Palestinians homes were destroyed than any other month since 2009, when the organization began its docum...
Post a Comment
Read more

Robert Fisk's predictions for the Middle East in 2013

There is no gain-saying that Robert Fisk, fiercely independent and feisty to boot, is the veteran journalist and author covering the Middle East. Who doesn't he know or hasn't he met over the years in reporting from Beirut - where he lives?  In his latest op-ed piece for The Independent he lays out his predictions for the Middle East for 2013. Read the piece in full, here - well worthwhile - but an extract... "Never make predictions in the Middle East. My crystal ball broke long ago. But predicting the region has an honourable pedigree. “An Arab movement, newly-risen, is looming in the distance,” a French traveller to the Gulf and Baghdad wrote in 1883, “and a race hitherto downtrodden will presently claim its due place in the destinies of Islam.” A year earlier, a British diplomat in Jeddah confided that “it is within my knowledge... that the idea of freedom does at present agitate some minds even in Mecca...” So let’s say this for 2013: the “Arab Awakening” (the t...
Post a Comment
Read more