is it that she feared his reaction even as a schoolboy so much that she did not “dare” remove her headscarf? Surely he was not strong enough, as a schoolboy, to harm her. We know one answer–in a culture that murders women for being raped or for breaking their marriage vows, we can assume that most of them cannot stand up to their husbands and thus will not to their sons, either. Thus the sons are raised as the ultimate expression of the spoiled brat–”Don’t offend me or I will throw a tantrum that will result in your

Let me warn you now: any flaming attacks against Muslims or Islam in general will be deleted and the IP address of those who instigated them will be banned. This is NOT about religious merits. This is about human rights.

Stoning of adultresses was, of course, part of Jewish law. This was never exclusive to one religion.

Of course you’re right, Mr. Snitch. Why, just today I was driving past the Jewish Community Center and saw a whole *bunch* of women being stoned!

/sarcasm

I don’t care who did it or who’s gonna do it, it’s barbaric.

Oh sure, well, since the Jews and Christians did it for what a few hundred years (?), we should give the Islamists a few more decades at least.

just incase you might whant to actually DO something about this, there are suggestions here. but i expect the rightside blogverse would actually prefer to rant on about the comparative evulls of islam or roll around in the dead stinking corpse of Masturgate than to take action.

otherwise…tickticktick. three more days.

and, if you had acrually read Ali’s piece, you would know the stoning is the 12th.

“Stoning of adultresses was, of course, part of Jewish law. This was never exclusive to one religion.”

And your point is? Does your little dive into the Old Testament somehow make it okay for stoning to still occur in the 21st century?

That 1st century (and even B.C.) barbarism is still occuring in 21st century cultures is reprehensible! This goes beyond a violation of human rights and into a violation of modern civilization as a whole.

Women are not property to be disposed of should they be considered “contaminated” — and they most certainly are not pawns to be bandied about in your eagerness to A.) mount a defense of violence and barbarism, and B.) smear modern Jewry.

matoko-chan,
The link you posted is in the main entry. The entry is a call to action. It’s followed by a warning not to engage in generalized ranting. You more than anyone should recognize that the stereotyping of others will only marginalize your influence. And you would be much more influential if you did not start off annoying people. You know who I am, you know I’m offering that as constructive criticism.

Well, obviously, what the country of Iran needs is nuclear weapons. That way, the self-appointed clerics can condemn whole countries to death for their crimes and actually have the wherewithall to carry out the sentence!

“Well, obviously, what the country of Iran needs is nuclear weapons. That way, the self-appointed clerics can condemn whole countries to death for their crimes and actually have the wherewithall to carry out the sentence!”

Well, OBVIOUSLY . . .

This is NOT about religious merits. This is about human rights.

I’ll just say, politely as possible, that those two sentences are contradictory. If you don’t have the stomach for “flaming attacks” to the root of the issue, then you aren’t going to accomplish anything human-rights-wise.

Islam has some doctrine issues. It hard to argue against that when almost by coincidence all muslim countries have this in one form or another and where they migrant, it shows up there where it wasn’t there before like in Europe. We are in the 21 century with almost instant communications, but sadly the there is still no credible muslim reformer movement with any significant clout to rectify these doctine issues. Question is, are we westerners supposed to be patient enough with this childish behavior until they do something in the nuclear age? Time is ticking, if muslim don’t something then they will be at the end of the sword in 25-50 years when westerners conclude that Islam is evil and a threat. Pray to god it won’t come down to that.

I used to use stoning as an example of why we don’t necessarily need to “respect other cultures” when “diversity training” first became popular. I was told it didn’t happen. Has it come back? Is it possible that some aspects of some cultures are actually evil?

It’s a tragedy that a notice about inappropriate comments even needs to be placed here. This is so vile and disgusting that if people can’t check their partisanship at the door I just hope I never have to meet them. I’m not naive about this subject and have followed it and every time I just get shaken up. It’s unbelievable. And unfortunately most of the times I bring it up, all I get is moral equivalency arguments shoved down my throat. Hopefully if we all make enough publicity about it, something can be done. This is just gut wrenching.

It’s appalling. Thanks for the info & the links.

OT
but i expect the rightside blogverse would actually prefer to rant on
PartisanRanterSezWhatnow???

By the time you read this, seven more women in Iran will most likely have been stoned to death after being convicted of committing adultery.

Karl, if Kate had actually read Ali’s piece, she would know the stoning is the 12th. the women can’t be dead yet.
it is three days away. two.

i asked the instapundit to link this five days ago.
i guess he is still P.O’d at me for fisking maulkin.
that’ll teach me to remember my place.

The governments of the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, North Korea is repsonsible for millions of deaths. However, if anyone mentions communism I’m gong to ban you. This is about human rights.
Is it possible to to mention those deaths without discussing the ideology responsible for those deaths?

“but i expect the rightside blogverse would actually prefer to rant on about the comparative evulls BLAH BLAH”

I have no idea who you are or whatever politics you might fixate on, but by your posts above I’ll simply assume you’d prefer to rant on about the horrible TOR-CHAR the evil US endoreses at Gitmo… and promptly ignore you.

It’s not just women who’ve suffered in Iran. Remember the Basiji?

“After Iraq invaded in September 1980, it had quickly become clear that Iran’s forces were no match for Saddam Hussein’s professional, well-armed military. To compensate for their disadvantage, Khomeini sent Iranian children, some as young as twelve years old, to the front lines. There, they marched in formation across minefields toward the enemy, clearing a path with their bodies.”

“In the past”, wrote the semi-official Iranian daily Ettelaat “as the war raged on, we had child-volunteers: 14-, 15-, and 16-year-olds. They went into the minefields. Their eyes saw nothing. Their ears heard nothing. And then, a few moments later, one saw clouds of dust. When the dust had settled again, there was nothing more to be seen of them.”

Somewhere, widely scattered in the landscape, there lay scraps of burnt flesh and pieces of bone. Such scenes would henceforth be avoided, Ettelaat assured its readers. “Before entering the minefields, the children [now] wrap themselves in blankets and they roll on the ground, so that their body parts stay together after the explosion of the mines and one can carry them to the graves.”

Iran’s Leader, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, was a former Basiji Instructor…

First off: Thank you Glenn for linking this.

Secondly: Hundreds, if not thousands, of women are killed worldwide every year because they “shamed” their family honor, and whether that shame is brought on by their failure to wear a veil in public, their conversations with a male outside their family, or the meagerness of their dowry - a price paid to their husbands for the burden of taking them on - it is still a death and it is still abominable.

As for you, Matoko-san, I am considered one of those “rightside” bloggers you castigated when you wrote:
but i expect the rightside blogverse would actually prefer to rant on about the comparative evulls of islam or roll around in the dead stinking corpse of Masturgate than to take action.

I’m not ranting. I’m calling my fellow humans to arms. Stop wielding yours to guard your face and you will see the shame we all bear for allowing this to continue.

And to anyone else who reads this: we have a choice to dither about politics or to exhibit the depth of humanity. Every moment you waste slinging “rightsided” and “right wing” or “left wing”, as well as “Christian belief says…” and “Islam is founded on…” is another moment that someone else is being sacrificed in the name of God/Allah/apathy because people like us would rather debate the details than speak for those who have been silenced.

Have you no shame?!

“any flaming attacks against Muslims or Islam in general will be deleted… This is NOT about religious merits. This is about human rights.”

And God forbid we offend anyone.

If you criticize this hideous act on the basis of human rights, and I support you in that regard, why not criticize Islam which mandates it? In criticizing the very entity which requires stoning, are we not simultaneously speaking out against stoning and thus helping to prevent it?

If you criticize this hideous act on the basis of human rights, and I support you in that regard, why not criticize Islam which mandates it?

Because you can’t show me a religon that doesn’t claim a moral justification to slaughter those who contradict it. And, because I maintain there is a difference between religion and faith.

Judaism requires stoning for a multitude of reasons. Christianity authorized the Crusades. The culture of machismo in Spain rationalized the abandonment, beating and occasional murdering of women in the name of… what? WHAT?!

What is so damn important to us that we can justify this kind of treatment of a child, a woman, a fellow human being?

I don’t care about offending anyone on the basis of their religous beliefs. But if we are to have a rational discussion - and a global call-to-arms — it better be about something more humanly intrinsic: this is not how any human being should be treated.

And if I offend someone in the process, well, that’s on MY head. But I will not provide a forum for those whose offensive tendencies will derail this into an ultimately anecdotal discussion of faith.

A call to arms, indeed. These powerless women need to free their minds, stand up en masse, and fight back. They don’t need sympathy, pity, or feel-good liberals “advocating” for them. They need power. They need guns. Women who carry weapons and know how to use them are rarely abused. We need to send some .40 caliber Glocks to these oppressed females, and fast.

Of course, international pressure and attention wouldn’t hurt either.

Stoning is indeed a horrible and archaic means of justice. But where are you getting your facts from? I have never heard of stoning being so commonplace. If what you said was true, Iran would be out of women in a few years.

I mean, it’s so easy to make up statistics if they sound realistic, right? By the time you read this post, 48 Americans will die of complications due to obesity.

See? It doesn’t make it true.

This is sad, but what do you expect us (Western civilization men) to do about it?

As a Western civilization male, I have been stripped of all reproductive rights, and the Western Civilization female has been invested with total reproductive autonomy.

The result is a plummeting population in western civilization. As for me, I don’t have 5 sons to send off to battle or 5 daughters I need to protect from these outrages.

So, although we regret these honor killings, they are the wave of the future. But, since people like us won’t have any grandchildren, we shouldn’t care.

Another woman in Iran is being hanged for killing a man while he was raping her. When I saw the story, I remember thinking, at least she is going to be spared the agony of being stoned. And she has the satisfaction of knowing that she took one with her.

kate, i object fiercly to both you and glenn saying the stoning has already happened.
It happens on the twelfth.
Why would anyone possibly want do anything if the women are already dead?
You didn’t read the link.

shukran for nothing.

“Judaism requires stoning for a multitude of reasons. Christianity authorized the Crusades.”

Strawman, and BS. Neither of those things have been part of the mainstream of either of those religions for CENTURIES. There is only one religion whose followers are practicing their scriptures calling for stoning and holy war today: ISLAM!

But of course you can’t say that, because there’s also only one religion today whose followers will track YOU down and throw acid in YOUR face or kill YOU if you point out those inconvenient facts: ISLAM.

And this is not anecdotal: the headlines and pictures are there every day.

The first step in solving a problem is to accurately identify it and the cause. I submit that the religion of Islam as currently practiced is incompatible with liberty anywhere it thrives.

Well if they want to live with stone age rules they should live completely within the stone age. It’s time to bomb them back to the stone age which means no wheeled vehicles (trucks, cars, roads and without them bridges become unnecessary and will be targeted until they are useless), no running water (dams and water towers are targets), no electricity (dams and distribution systems), etc.

If they don’t like it then they need to rethink their cultural rules.

It seems to me this is a cultural issue, in which, as is so often the case, religion is the “cover” under which cultural practices are given legitimacy. “God demands it!” sounds so much more authoritative than, “That’s the way we do things around here,” even though the latter is precisely the reason. “Stoning is rare …” say the apologists; of course it is. It is a horrible punishment meant to remind a subjugated group (women) just who is in charge (men). Slaves in the old South were probably not horsewhipped very often, either. Memories are long of horrible punishments. In my view, the Muslim predicament is not religious, it is cultural. Backward Muslim societies cannot remain so in the modern world, and those with power in those backward societies chafe at the thought of change. The hyperbolic nature of Muslim offense at the “decadence” (liberality) off the West is absolutely diagnositic of the inner fear of and rage at the changes that threaten the Muslim male-dominated societies.

Venomous Kate, you are quite incorrect.

You are incorrect because you are not educating yourself about the true nature of Islam. In Islam, religion is faith, and faith is religion. Any woman going “renegade” for any reason is to be put to death. Adultery is considered renegade to Islam, so the only possible answer is death for the offender, since they have left Islam.

You also incorrectly assume there are human rights in Islam. There are none, save the “rights” proscribed by Mohommad. Even then, if you “offend” Islam, or anyone in Islam who judges you guilty sans trial or evidence, you are put to death.

Unless, of course, you are a man, then the punishment may be as stiff as 80 lashes and off you go.

http://inmuscatine.com/?p=626

That details one man’s punishment for just asking questions about Islam. Just questioning Islam or Mohommad is reason enough to torture a person.

Don’t bash Islam you say? I say it is far past time for speaking up about the true barbarity at the heart of Islam.

Anoth posted “Don’t bash Islam you say? I say it is far past time for speaking up about the true barbarity at the heart of Islam.”

Hand chopping, stoning, beheading (swift or slowly), lashing, clitorectomy, etc are called for in the Koran and important parts of Islam. It is what gives the so-called “religion of peace” its core. A rotten core.

That is a muslim problem, not a Christian problem. Not mine, not yours, not the Jew on the Tev Aviv street corner. “Moderate” (what a woosey word) muslims MUST take the bestiality out of their belief system if they want others to recognize it as a “religion” and not simply a cult of brutality.

Only muslims can civilize Islam. If that means redacting 30% of the Koran, so be it. Otherwise Mohammod is a thug and a gang leader makquerading as a prophet (something the Cripes should think of?). Strong words, but true.

what did i say?
QED on the contents of this thread.
and dr. yes was too preoccupied with masturgate when i BEGGED him to link this on the 4th.

you just validate my hypothesis, kate.
too little, too late, and dont get yerr hands dirty. lipservice for women you thought were already dead.

thats why im not a neocon anymore. ha ha, actually i got stripped of my colors and cashiered out of the regiment for having subversive thoughts.

Excuse me for my lack of sympathy, but I live in a culture where, if a wife gets pregnant by somebody other than her husband, the husband still gets to pay the child support. Meanwhile manipulative and hypocritical feminazi bigots continue to propogate this myth that women are victims and men are villains.

Before the advent of reliable paternity testing, stoning women to death for adultery was almost certainly just one of a variety of imperfect guarding behaviors designed to terrify women into not cuckolding their husbands.

For what its worth, guarding behavior occurs in many bird species where there is significant paternal investment in offspring. The males in most mammalian and bird species solve this problem by being deadbeat dads.

Enjoy your self-righteous hypocracy ladies.

matoko-chan, What are you ranting about? This post mentions no specific person by name. How can she be dead or alive now? There is no ’she’?

Venemous, what would you have us do? I think we - Western Civilization (and I’ll even include Old-Europe in this one) - are unanimously agreed: Stoning people to death is bad. Man, woman, cause don’t matter. It’s a Bad Thing(tm). Is there anyone out there who doesn’t know this is going on? 7th Heaven - bland, trite TV from the 50s - ran episodes on women under the Taliban a decade ago. This is not news.

I’m supposed to write a letter to the guy who wants to nuke Isreal telling him this? Bwah! Ha! Ha! Make his day, it will. He can pile them up under his framed copies of the United Nations strongly worded rebukes.

Thanks for pointing it out. If you come up with something useful to do in response, let me know.

matoko-chan, the opener is hyperbole that grabs people who might otherwise skip the item. The context later makes clear that these particular women need help. When you grow up, you might learn that it’s not always about you, and that every blogger is not required to measure up to your iconoclastic standards. Again, I generally like you and am urging you to set aside your own rather sizable ego for a moment and think about it. It’s not all about you and your increasingly paranoid fanatsy reasons for why IP will or will not link you. Kate is trying to help, just as you are. She does not need or deserve your criticism for doing so. I imagine she could care less about your criticism, but you are only marginalizing yourself with the sort of drama you bring to a thread like this one.

Well said, Karl.

On other religion’s moral equivalence in killing, torturing etc., with or without state approval…
The important lesson is that fundamentalist religions can change, often over centuries and after a lot of bloodshed, and reach the point where individuals can join or leave Christianity, for example, without physical threats. The 30 Years War established a baseline for mutual tolerance (without “Dhimmi taxes” for the most part in most places, although Catholics still were economically disadvantaged in several countries until earlier in the 20th century). Even burning or hanging women (and men, children and the occasional barnyard animal) for adultery or on suspicion of witchcraft was mostly done by the early 18th century. The 17th century was actually pretty foundational for establishing modern norms for Western civilization - thinking here of Friedrich Spee’s arguments for the rule of law and limits of torture’s efficacy, and Hugo Grotius’ arguments for international law. Point is, it took about 1300 years (dating from the Council of Nicea as an arbitrary starting point) for Christianity to adopt norms of behavior that excluded the equivalent of stoning, burning, etc. BUT it did change, adopt new norms of “civilized” behavior, and that same expectation of change can be demanded of mainstream Muslims. Reformers like Asra Nomani, Nimat Hafez Barazangi or Asma Barlas are promoting women’s rights to reinterpret the Koran to reflect modern norms like international human rights standards and genuine religious tolerance (not just dhimmitude or slavery for other religions) - a reinterpretation called “ijtihad.” The more we can support these women (and some men) who are trying to reform Islam from within - the new Luthers and Spees - the more we help create a counterweight to the extremists who require public stonings, lashings and imprisonments to terrify the general populace into submission. All too often Muslim reformist leaders are killed or simply “disappear” after publishing an article or book or two, without a word of support or protest from the West. So kudos, Venomous, for helping with your comments above.

“Let me warn you now: any flaming attacks against Muslims or Islam in general will be deleted and the IP address of those who instigated them will be banned. This is NOT about religious merits.”

Well then Kate, oh human rights defender you, since a lost verse from the Koran (long story) proscribes the death penalty for adulterers by stoning, how exactly do you plan to convince the governments of those countries to stop the stonings? And how exactly are your readers to know what’s going on if Islam and Muslims are off-limits?

Bah.

Both Christianity and Judasim are effectively ‘reformed’, and modernized. Both religions have had their teeth pulled.

Hinduism and Buddhism have no deadly requirements, to my knowledge. But the world’s 2nd largest religion (20% of the population, or 1.3 Billion people) is still based on the cult of the warrior who was the only author of it’s tome. The lack of progress towards modernization is guaranteed by the fear used by it’s leaders to quiet the ‘moderates’. There is no current internal path to reform.

Unfortunately, the only solution to the problem is to directly confront that religion, and force reform.

Unless you have another suggestion?

You don’t know me. I don’t know you. I linked to you and some other people about this post at the site above, and didn’t know if it was proper blogger etiquette or not to notify you, so I erred on the side of caution.

Matoko Chang

Looks like you are AGAIN going out of your way to offend, with no real reason to.

Just as long as you are within certain safe pre-determined parameters.

Wimp.

This is Horrifying.
Thank you for posting it, I hope it is widely seen.

All religons are wrong.
They all promote superiority and intolerance by their very nature.
“The” Way to God.

Religons are DEAD.

Genuinely encompassing a true sense of Spirituality - day by day - is the only Way.
Like now. Like at the Happy Mart. Like when you feel rise of Negative Emotions and decide to stop them “in their tracks”.

ANY doctrine advocating violence - is False.

Louise, I started writing a response but I got stuck on “Happy Mart”. If you call that spirituality, there is no hope for you at all.

Agnostically Yours,
- Mark

Including “Happymart”.

Basically “everywhere”.
That’s the gist of it.
Sorry to be so (apparently) obtuse.

Kate’s proposal is that we take the dialog out of religion bashing and into the civil rights arena. I think it’s one worth looking at because religion of any kind has so much baggage.

Most countries at least give lip service to human rights, so this may be a common ground to begin a worthwhile discussion.

Start with religion and you end up arguing a millenium of offenses, many of which may not have ever happened.

We have so much work to do in the civil rights arena. A friend of mine talked about meeting a beautiful young woman from Afghanistan. Through an interpreter, she asked this young woman, who had been freed from the previous regime, what her and her friends thought about sex. Her answer was she didn’t have any friends, she had never spoken to anyone about sex, didn’t know anything about it herself, and was forbidden, EVER, to leave the house, for any reason. Period.

Although I am in favor of self protection, it seems to me that if you gave a gun to this young woman, she won’t have the courage to shoot it anyway, because she would have to weigh the consequences. She would probably be stoned to death.

We have a long way to go to resolve these issues, and most will not be solved with a war. It may take generations of dialog. We may not resolve it before someone blows us up.

I have been rather appalled (and at times sadly amused) over this whole thread, frankly. For those who find reading most of the above comments a little too tedious, let me summarize them for you:

1. So what? You conservatives don’t really care about human rights. We Democrats have the market on that. I already wrote about this, when I wasn’t writing about anime. How dare anyone else get attention for writing about this but us. Besides, they’re not dead YET. Whah. Whah, whah, whah.

2. So what? Let them all kill each other and let God sort them out.

3. So what? Let’s talk about how Islam is intrinsically messed up since it doesn’t recognize human rights like we enlightened Westerners do.

4. So what? Life sucks in lots of places.

5. So what? This has been happening for years.

And then there have been the all-too-rare comments acknowledging that religion is used to cloak actions, (particularly by those whose political power is drawn from their religious stature) and while a religion can’t be changed, a culture’s acceptance of certain acts CAN be.

Should anyone wonder why more people don’t get involved writing about human rights violations, this has been a perfect example.

I think the problem is, when anyone voices an opinion or tries to start a dialog, the attacks begin. It’s like someone slips into piranha infested waters, and they are picked to the bones in minutes.

Everyone needs to take a deep breath, step back and think.

First, we need to acknowledge that most of us, Liberals and Conservatives alike, are good, well intentioned people. Although most of us agree about the problems that need solving, many times we strongly disagree about the solutions.

Where we go wrong is in taking the easy way out and attacking the other person at a personal level. This never works.

Think of the last time you had an argument with your spouse, and it degraded into a screaming match. How did that go? Was anything gained by yelling, throwing in a bunch of memories of past wrongs, and not really listening to the other?

No. In fact, it took weeks, maybe months just to get back to ground zero.

That is what we have on an international level- a bunch of five year olds throwing temper tantrums, each screaming at the other and pointing fingers.

I further believe that many of our leaders are corrupt with power, and love to see us slice each other to pieces. As long as we are divided and fighting each other, we won’t be looking at them too closely.

As Conservatives, we need to stop saying that the Dems don’t have an agenda. They do! Here it is:

1. Impeach the President for a war they voted for
2. Remove the tax cuts Bush put in place
3. Remove or cancel any restrictions on illegal immigration
4. Put liberal,(progressive)judges in the Supreme Court
5. Increase the power of the UN
6. Attack 2nd amendment rights
7. Increase our submission on international law
8. Leave Iraq, possibly before the Iraqi government is ready to take charge of its new government.
9. Possibly pass a national health care package
10. Reduce funding for our Military

If you don’t want that, vote cfor Conservatives. If you do, vote for the Liberals.

See, how easy was that? No personal attacks- just a straight address of the issues.

Now, can we have a discussion on the issues? How soon before I get personally attacked?

Evidently not. Witness the Farking.

There is one man who again is challenging the Muslim faith…Salman Rushdie, I guess the only voice for reform.

Submitted for Your Approval…

Submitted for Your Approval First off…  any spambots reading this should immediately go here, here, here,  and here.  Die spambots, die!  And now…  here are all the links submitted by members of the Watcher’s Council for t…

I linked to FARK.

I think I need to take a shower…