DO NOT VIEW THIS VIDEO IF YOU ARE SENSITIVE. It’s a video of a public hanging in Tabriz in northwestern Iran, posted by an Iranian exile. A young woman is hanged, as a mob shouts "God is great!" The method of hanging is not by knocking someone off a gallows. It’s an excruciating, slow ascent. The woman struggles for a long time. I post it because this blog has long had a policy of looking reality in the eye – whether it be the torture of the CIA and military under Bush or the beheading by Jihadists or this kind of barbaric justice. This is part of a regime we are trying to negotiate with.
Category: The Dish
The Torture Executive Order
Phillip Carter sheds more light.
Barbarism In London
How else do you describe this:
A Kurdish woman was brutally raped, stamped on and strangled by members of her family and their friends in an "honor killing" carried out at her London home because she had fallen in love with the wrong man.
Banaz Mahmod, 20, was subjected to the 2-1/2 hour ordeal before she was garroted with a bootlace. Her body was stuffed into a suitcase and taken about 100 miles to Birmingham where it was buried in the back garden of a house. Her badly decomposed body was found in April 2006, three months after the killing…
Prosecutors said the three convicted men, along with two other suspects who are still at large, had carried out the killing fearing that the authorities were closing in on them. They believed Banaz had brought shame on the family by leaving her husband, an Iraqi Kurd she had been forced to marry at 17, and falling in love with Rahmat Suleimani, an Iranian Kurd.
Her former unnamed partner had raped her as well as repeatedly beating her, the court heard.
The View From Your Window
Houston, Texas, 8.45 am.
Big News In Islam
And good news, believe it or not:
Egypt’s official religious advisor has ruled that Muslims are free to change their faith as it is a matter between an individual and God, in a move which could have far-reaching implications for the country’s Christians.
"The essential question before us is can a person who is Muslim choose a religion other than Islam? The answer is yes, they can," Grand Mufti Ali Gomaa said in a posting on a Washington Post-Newsweek forum picked up by the Egyptian press. "The act of abandoning one’s religion is a sin punishable by God on the Day of Judgement. If the case in question is one of merely rejecting faith, then there is no worldly punishment," he wrote.
In most Muslim countries, Muslims who convert to another religion are considered apostates and can be subject to capital punishment.
I’m no expert on judging the precise significance of this, but I’ll keep tabs.
Best Movie Line Ever
"You’re only supposed to blow the bloody doors off!" "The Italian Job."
A Jihadi Sedition Law
A Republican and Hillary
A reader writes:
Even though I hate to admit it, Hillary consistently wins these debates. My partner and I were watching it last night and I was trying very hard not like anything Hillary said. But finally, I told my partner, "is it just me or does she seem more…." My partner finished my sentence — "responsible" [in her answers]. Particularly with question about meeting with our enemies directly. Rather than take the knee-jerk, get-an-applause response by advocating face-to-face meetings with Syria and Iran, she gave a responsible disclaimer that she would make sure these meetings were vetted properly so as not to become a propaganda tool. To me, that says she gets it and she will not conduct policy in the opposite way Bush and Co. have for the sake of being anti-Bush. But rather, she would see situations as they are and deal with them accordingly.
And I loved her answer on nuclear power and tapping into the ingenuity of the American spirit to find new ways to create alternative energy while creating jobs — classic Bill Clinton. This is what America wants to hear. It’s what helped her husband win and it will help her too. Reluctantly, the more I listen to her, I am finding fewer reasons not to vote for her
And I am a registered Republican.
I see Steve Herbits just endorsed her. From Rummy to Hillary.
Hair
A good Edwards response:
Another Tehran Crackdown
They’re after beauty again:
Iran on Monday launched a new wave of a moral crackdown against women who "dress like models" and men whose hairstyles are deemed unIslamic, police said.
Tehran’s police force dispatched dozens of police cars and minibuses into the early evening rush-hour to enforce the dress rules at major squares in the city centre, an AFP correspondent said.
The new "plan to increase security in society" — which is limited to Tehran but will later extend nationwide — comes after a pre-summer drive by the police resulted in thousands of warnings and hundreds of arrests.
Over a hundred have been arrested for "sex crimes" in the city where they hanged two gay teens. This has happened before, but it’s a useful sign that the regime does not control the minds of the people.
