Still Stoning Women To Death, And Iranians Wonder Why Others View Them as Barbaric
An Iranian mother, Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani, was charged with the murder of her husband. After she was acquitted of that charge, the judges slapped her with a punishment of “stoning to death” based on their “judicial knowledge,” at which they arrived based upon nothing else but their raw emotions.
If this is not mockery of justice, then what is?
Ashtiani had already received 99 lashes, and now she is facing the barbaric medieval punishment that the civilized world abolished long ago. Ashtiani’s own 22-year-old son, Sajad, and her 17-year-old daughter, Farideh, told the press that their mother had committed no crime.
Ashtiani’s story received a wide audience when Mina Ahadi, a Germany based activist, launched a campaign after learning about Ashtiani's misfortune from her own children. Mina came to know about two other women who are being held in Tabriz Prison awaiting death by stoning.
I checked the Islamic Society of North America’s (ISNA) website to see if they had issued any condemnation of these actions and found none. I know that they have just completed their annual convention with great pomp, and their members may still be weary from all the exertion of arranging such an event. Moreover, the incident may be too puny for their attention, since the subjects are poor hapless women whose worth is only half that of men anyway. However, if their slogan is “Inspiring People, Changing Lives,” then they need to do more.
Iran claims to be an Islamic Republic, and Quran is their law book. Quran does not condone the punishment “stoning to death,” so where does this practice come from? A nation state that rules by the name of Islam, how can they go against the tenets of their own holy book?
And where are the devoted Muslims, who live and die by the words of their holy book? If anyone is not repulsed by the sheer inhumanity of the punishment, I advise the person to watch a movie named The Stoning Of Soraya, M, which is based on an incident during Ayatollah Khomeini’s rein.
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