Horrific video emerges of Taliban fighters stoning couple to death for adultery (via The Daily Mail)
Instead of a content warning, I suggest that you watch and GET SQUEAMISH.
Horrific video footage has emerged of Taliban insurgents stoning a couple to death for alleged adultery in northern Afghanistan.
Hundreds of villagers can be seen on the video standing around as the woman, Siddqa, is buried up to her waist in a four foot hole in the ground.
Two mullahs pass sentence before the crowd begins to throw rocks at her head and body as she desperately tries to crawl free.
You can hear the rocks crack against her skull. You can see blood stain the shroud that covers her head.
But the 19 (25?)-year-old collapses to the ground, covered in blood – but miraculously still alive.
At this point a Taliban fighter shoots her three times in the head with an AK-47. The crowd can be heard shouting allahu akbar as she is killed.
Her lover, Khayyam, is then marched in front of the crowd with his hands tied behind his back.
He is blindfolded with his own tunic and crouches down close to the ground as he tried to protect his body from the stones.
But he is battered to the floor by a barrage of rocks. He can be heard sobbing before eventually falling silent.
The stoning – the first to be documented on film since the Taliban were ousted from power – took place in the district of Dashte Archi, in Kunduz, last August.
Officials said that Siddqa had run away after being sold into an arranged marriage for $9,000 against her will.
Response on the incident from Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid:
“Anyone who knows about Islam knows that stoning is in the Koran, and that it is Islamic law. There are people who call it inhuman - but in doing so they insult the Prophet. They want to bring foreign thinking to this country.”
Just For Reference™
More on the incident from the BBC here.
Related:
Curious: Is this terrorism? I’d like to see an addendum question to this survey.
Tavis Smiley versus Bill Maher and Ayaan Hirsi Ali
And from Ibn Warraq:
A culture that gave the world the novel; the music of Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert; and the paintings of Michelangelo, da Vinci, and Rembrandt does not need lessons from societies whose idea of heaven, peopled with female virgins, resembles a cosmic brothel. Nor does the West need lectures on the superior virtue of societies in which women are kept in subjection under sharia, endure genital mutilation, are stoned to death for alleged adultery, and are married off against their will at the age of nine; societies that deny the rights of supposedly lower castes; societies that execute homosexuals and apostates. The West has no use for sanctimonious homilies from societies that cannot provide clean drinking water or sewage systems, that make no provisions for the handicapped, and that leave 40 to 50 percent of their citizens illiterate.
I really don’t care for moral and cultural relativism.
And closing question:
Would you feel an ounce of remorse if that crowd of murderers was turned to dust by a drone strike?
Last night at the White House, the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize Winner hosted a state dinner for the guy holding the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize Winner in prison — and the media doesn’t get the irony of this.
Comedian Rush Limbaugh
The Nobel Peace Prize for 2010
The Norwegian Nobel Committee has decided to award the Nobel Peace Prize for 2010 to Liu Xiaobo for his long and non-violent struggle for fundamental human rights in China. The Norwegian Nobel Committee has long believed that there is a close connection between human rights and peace. Such rights are a prerequisite for the “fraternity between nations” of which Alfred Nobel wrote in his will.
Over the past decades, China has achieved economic advances to which history can hardly show any equal. The country now has the world’s second largest economy; hundreds of millions of people have been lifted out of poverty. Scope for political participation has also broadened.
China’s new status must entail increased responsibility. China is in breach of several international agreements to which it is a signatory, as well as of its own provisions concerning political rights. Article 35 of China’s constitution lays down that “Citizens of the People’s Republic of China enjoy freedom of speech, of the press, of assembly, of association, of procession and of demonstration”. In practice, these freedoms have proved to be distinctly curtailed for China’s citizens.
For over two decades, Liu Xiaobo has been a strong spokesman for the application of fundamental human rights also in China. He took part in the Tiananmen protests in 1989; he was a leading author behind Charter 08, the manifesto of such rights in China which was published on the 60th anniversary of the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the 10th of December 2008. The following year, Liu was sentenced to eleven years in prison and two years’ deprivation of political rights for “inciting subversion of state power”. Liu has consistently maintained that the sentence violates both China’s own constitution and fundamental human rights.
The campaign to establish universal human rights also in China is being waged by many Chinese, both in China itself and abroad. Through the severe punishment meted out to him, Liu has become the foremost symbol of this wide-ranging struggle for human rights in China.
Oslo, October 8, 2010
GPICT - Independence Day Edition, Part II.
Go see ‘The Stoning of Soraya M.’
Theater listing.
Based on a true story.
Stranded in a remote Iranian village, a French journalist is approached by Zahra, a woman who has a harrowing tale to tell about her niece, Soraya, and the bloody circumstances of her death the day before…As the journalist turns on his tape recorder, Zahra takes us back to the beginning of her story which involves Soraya’s husband, the local phony mullah, and a town all too easily led down a path of deceit, coercion, and hysteria. The women, stripped of all rights and without recourse, nobly confront the overwhelming desires of corrupt men who use and abuse their authority to condemn Soraya, an innocent but inconvenient wife, to an unjust and torturous death. A shocking and true drama, it exposes the dark power of mob rule, uncivil law, and the utter lack of human rights for women. The last and only hope for some measure of justice lies in the hands of the journalist who must escape with the story — and his life — so the world will know.
If you haven’t seen it, you may have heard how “graphic” and “shocking” it is.
Great.
It is.
But what really is an anvil to the chest is how bound women are in protecting themselves against the flaws of human nature. I don’t think a lot of modern women of my age worry for their lives just for smiling at the neighbor who’s kid they were babysitting.
…
This leaves you ringing. It’s nothing new to anyone inclined towards these types of films, be it Hotel Rwanda or Born Into Brothels you’re always left staring at your hands, what can you do.
I leave you with this. Be aware. Listening is an act of love. Once, in this country when we condoned slavery, Frederick Douglass said he gained his freedom when he learned to read, because no one could lie to him any longer. Eventually he turned that into a lifetime of work of writing and speaking out against slavery. Awareness becomes action.
Essentially, Soraya’s story is still being spread with everyone who hears or sees it. I heard someone the other day regarding Michael Jackson “dying in the information age.” Look at Iran. Let us be aware.
Right on.
Go see it. GET SQUEAMISH. As shocking as it is to watch, just imagine what it’s like TO BE STONED TO DEATH. How trapped you must feel as a woman with no education who lives under the thumb of an oppressive husband. Who couldn’t run away in the night with her children if she wanted because she never learned how to drive. While most of us don’t have to think or worry about it, that this still happens in some corners of the world should move us all. It’s not OK. It’s 2009. The least you can do is sit in a theater for two hours.
A culture [i.e., Western] that gave the world the novel; the music of Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert; and the paintings of Michelangelo, da Vinci, and Rembrandt does not need lessons from societies whose idea of heaven, peopled with female virgins, resembles a cosmic brothel. Nor does the West need lectures on the superior virtue of societies in which women are kept in subjection under sharia, endure genital mutilation, are stoned to death for alleged adultery, and are married off against their will at the age of nine; societies that deny the rights of supposedly lower castes; societies that execute homosexuals and apostates. The West has no use for sanctimonious homilies from societies that cannot provide clean drinking water or sewage systems, that make no provisions for the handicapped, and that leave 40 to 50 percent of their citizens illiterate.
