...it's not dark yet, but it's gettin' there...
I just read Photon Courier's excellent post about the murder of Atefeh Sahaleh by the Iranian government. I call it a murder because I learned in my first year criminal law course that the term is defined as "the unjustified killing of a human being by another." What was Atefeh Sahaleh's crime? Having sex.
Oh, she was 16 years old.
[Still think the Iranians are basically nice guys who can be reasoned with?]
So, that led me to Amnesty International's excessively neutral post about the execution. You've heard of Amnesty International. They're the organization that's always criticizing the United States because we still have capital punishment.
So then I decided to compare stats. Without looking, can you guess which country killed more women last year?
If you guessed Iran, you'd be correct. In 2005, only one woman was executed in the United States.
[Her name was Frances Newton, and she was executed by lethal injection on September 14, 2005, by the State of Texas. When she was 24 years old, she shot her husband Adrian, her 7 year old son Alton, and her 21 month old daughter Farrah with a .25 caliber pistol to collect life insurance money. Frances Newton was 40 by the time she was finally executed for the crimes.]
Then I went over to a site called Women's Forum Against Fundamentalism In Iran. It's worth bookmarking if you're curious at all about the type of society our enemy would like to impose upon us.
Just looking at the left sidebar, which contains links to various news stories, is pretty enlightening. Here's a selection of headlines:
Amnesty International: Young woman, Delara Darabi, 19, facing imminent executionOne of the links contains a story that is enough to make you want to cry. Here it is:A Kurdish woman sentenced to stoning
More crackdown on women
Women-only buses another government run, gender-apartheid program
Iran’s police stop 10-year-old girl for “mal-veiling”
Women ejected by force from Iran stadium
300,000 homeless women in Iran capital
Iran police prevent women from watching football match
Iran's Islamist rulers want sex segregation on pavements
Iran to hang another teenage girl attacked by rapists
Iran to execute two other womenAn Iranian woman in the town of Varamin is sentenced to death by stoning
Iran sentences a woman to death by hanging
Another woman is sentenced to death by stoning in Iran
Female workers are ordered to get home by dusk to serve their families
Senior Iran cleric: Prostitutes must be hanged
Iran to execute two other women
Iran to hang 19-year old mother
Sixty Iranian women activists made a public appeal on Thursday for the release of a Kurdish feminist campaigner
Fundamentalists recruit Women for Martyrdom Seeker Movement in Iran.
Post-election, A New Wave of Crackdown on Women.
Thousands join women’s anti-government demonstration in Tehran.
Crackdown on Women.
Defeating misogyny in Iran .
Save the Women, Save Ourselves.
UN women's rights official raps Iran over abuses.
Four Iranian Women were executed in 2004 by public hanging or stoning. There are 14 women to be hanged or stoned to death in coming days, weeks or months.
A woman is facing stoning in next five daysA 19 year old mentally ill girl is facing imminent execution in Iran
Another woman facing stoning in Iran
13 year old, Jila, facing death by stoning flogged 55 timesIranian Student protest forced veiling
Imminent execution of a 33-year-old Iranian women, Fatemeh Haghighat-Pajouh...
Iran moves to roll back rights won by women...
Violence, poverty and abuse led girl, 16, to gallows...
Amnesty International outraged at the reported execution of a 16 year old girl in Iran...
'Painful' day as mother's death recalled. Zahra Kazemi's son still seeks answers. He has no faith in upcoming Iranian trial.Iran's government has launched a crackdown on women who flout the strict Islamic dress codes during the hot summer months.
An Iranian court has sentenced a teenage rape victim to death by hanging after she weepingly confessed that she had unintentionally killed a man who had tried to rape both her and her niece.Instead of telling us how attractive he thinks Ahmadi-Nejad is, perhaps Mike Wallace should have spent an hour letting the world know about the above, completely barbaric death sentence against an innocent child.The state-run daily Etemaad reported on Saturday that 18-year-old Nazanin confessed to stabbing one of three men who had attacked the pair along with their boyfriends while they were spending some time in a park west of the Iranian capital in March 2005.
Nazanin, who was 17 years old at the time of the incident, said that after the three men started to throw stones at them, the two girls’ boyfriends quickly escaped on their motorbikes leaving the pair helpless.
She described how the three men pushed her and her 16-year-old niece Somayeh onto the ground and tried to rape them, and said that she took out a knife from her pocket and stabbed one of the men in the hand.
As the girls tried to escape, the men once again attacked them, and at this point, Nazanin said, she stabbed one of the men in the chest. The teenage girl, however, broke down in tears in court as she explained that she had no intention of killing the man but was merely defending herself and her younger niece from rape, the report said.
The court, however, issued on Tuesday a sentence for Nazanin to be hanged to death.
You know, fuck Mike Wallace, fuck Ahmadi-Nejad, and fuck the fucking mullahs. These people are so completely evil, I can't even finish what I was going to write.
Update: Thanks to Beth of MVRWC, I've been alerted to this update regarding the Nazanin case.
On 3 January, 18-year-old Nazanin was sentenced to death for murder by a criminal court, after she reportedly admitted stabbing to death one of three men who attempted to rape her and her 16-year-old niece in a park in Karaj in March 2005. She was 17 at the time. (See Iran: Amnesty International calls for end to death penalty for child offenders, MDE 13/005/2006, 16 January 2006). At the end of May the Supreme Court rejected the death sentence against Nazanin, reportedly on the instructions of the Head of the Judiciary, Ayatollah Mahmoud Hashemi Shahroudi. The case will reportedly be retried in August and sent to a lower court for further investigation.One more thing. The Wikipedia article on Nazanin points out that Iran's death penalty can be applied to males as young as fifteen, and females as young as nine!
The Iranian government really is waging a war against women!
Thanks, Annika. In case you missed it, see also the first paragraph of this post.
Posted by: david foster on Aug. 24, 2006How terrible. And good for you Annika . . . for your mind, your passion, your commitment to justice.
I'll keep this girl in my prayers. May God see her decency and courage.
Posted by: Roach on Aug. 24, 2006Yeesh, shades of the Inquisition. Thanks for bringing these topics to light here. Keep this up and you'll become a blog center of gravity for Iranian news and analysis.
I was puzzled by your Mike Wallace reference, as I didn't see a link provided; he spent an hour talking about how good she looked??
Posted by: will on Aug. 25, 2006Annika,
This is among many, the serious and frightful aspects of the unrelenting will of Islam to be a government as well as a religion. The devout practitioners of this religion are not at peace unless the divide between religious and civil law is erased. I am constantly saddened by the plight of women in the Islamic world.
Wallace did an interview afer his interview with the Mad Man in which he among other things talked about what an attractive man he (the Mad Man) is -not just physically. Apparently, according to Wallace, the guy has "presence." To which I say, so fucking what: so did Hitler and so does Castro. (I suspect one doesn't become a successful tyrant without a pretty compelling personality.)
Wallace discredited himself in both interviews - the one he conducted and the one he gave.
Posted by: Blu on Aug. 25, 2006Excellent post, you would think this is an issue the MSM would pick up on, considering all the factors are memes they like to harp on, but hey, its too much to have Mike Wallace ask about that. Or CNN. There is no fucking perspective in the news we are given and its making this country stupider by the day. The War on Terror will be lost if such mass misinformation continues. There is no venue for a sustained discussion of these matters, just people talking past each other waiting for the next election, and then they'll do it all again.
Posted by: Scof on Aug. 25, 2006Scof-
America, baby! When has it ever been different? The venal leading the confused
Posted by: strawman on Aug. 25, 2006I agree completely Annika- fuck 'em, fuck all of the ragheaded a**holes. I'm glad you tell it like it is, unlike the supposedly-mainsteam media.
Really enjoy your blog, btw!
Posted by: zman on Aug. 25, 2006 I was amused once when I heard the old historian Author Schlesinger debating with one of those multi-cultural wonders who were arguing about the worth of Ideologies like Islam.
Now Art was an old time big lefty. But he didn't buy into the new trends. When the arrogant little wannabe said "But we have so much to learn from the great cultures of the third world" Arthur asked him
"And what things would those be? Cannibalism, polygamy, slavery, Sutee, genital mutilation, foot binding?"
zman,
i say if you are willing to write "fuck" then, what the heck, go for it and write "ass" as well. nobody around here gets too worked up over profanity.
Posted by: Blu on Aug. 25, 2006Nice quote Kyle. Schlesinger was one of the good minds on the Left. Wrong on a lot of issues but often correct on some larger issues - espcially multi-culturalism and political correctness. Daniel Patrick Moynihan was another guy on the Left that often got some of the bigger issues right. He understood early on the legacy that welfare would leave on the poor - especially the Black poor. Hard to imagine a time when the Left wasn't completely nuts, isn't it?
Posted by: Blu on Aug. 25, 2006Blu wrote: "Wallace did an interview afer his interview with the Mad Man in which he among other things talked about what an attractive man he (the Mad Man) is -not just physically. Apparently, according to Wallace, the guy has 'presence.'"
Thanks for the info, Blu. I'll have to track it down.
And oddly enough, Mike could have been talking about GWB during the 2000 election, though it would have been more down home presence.
Posted by: will on Aug. 25, 2006I know sweety, this is really bad. There are some who are watching it all. Those in charge over there will be held acountable. Be patient.
Peace, take care now.