Yes, actually, they were. There is no question that the mullahs of Iran have imposed their own cultural interpretations onto the law of Iran, but there are also clear cases where they simply abused their power. That is the problem with lumping every act under some broad code word, then using that code word to condemn the every incident where the word appears. Shari’a establishes the principles under which the law is to be directed and enforced. If they are making up the rules as they go along, they are in violation of Shari’a. This is not to say that Shari’a would be fine if everyone just held true to it. There are aspects of Shari’a that are rooted in seventh century Arab culture that are no more acceptable to a secular state than the complete Torah would be. However, abuse of a system remains abuse and the examples gum provided were examples of abuse.
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Actually, unless one is an admirer of Hitchens, Sullivan, and Pipes, one rarely encounters the word Islamofascism which tends to be used only by their admirers and not even very much by those three, these days.
I understood your use of the term Islamofascism; my point was that you did not use it until you finally made clear that you were not referring to all Islam as fascist.
(There are no friendly Neo-Cons (and none of them are neighborly), but a Left-winger who decides that his youthful firtation with the Left was a grave error and who spends the rest of his days marching on the Right and casting aspersions on his former associates is pretty much the definition of the first wave of Neo-Cons. (That is where the “neo-conservative” term originated.) Hitchens qualifies.)
I see, it’s all America’s fault, like everything else. I’ll grant you the idiot CIA cowboys who installed the Shah did us no favors in Iran, but could it just POSSIBLY be that the Sharia law and the way it’s administered is an accurate reflection of the cultural opinions of many Iranians? And what about the Ottoman Empire? Surely they did some bad things in Iran, too.
In any event, thank you, thank you, thank you for not representing yourself as a liberal.
Well, SOME Iranians have been struggling against the theocracy, others seem to like it. Kinda like the US with the red states and the blue states.
But is it necessarily broad-brush to say extremist Islamic culture is bad? I CERTAINLY don’t think so. This seems to be the majority opinion here – the judge is a fair reprensentation of extremist Islamic culture, and it stinks to high heaven. Surely you have no problem with that. After all, the only thing the judge had to fake to get permission to strangle the girl to death was her age. If she had been 21, apparently it would have been all fine and dandy with the legal powers in Iran. In short, the Iranian leadership is still a bunch of shit-eating scum.
Since the US Innocence Project started in 1992, it has exonerated 149 men who were on death row. The Project only works with cases where, “DNA testing of evidence can yield conclusive proof of innocence.”
The ACLU says this, "A study published in the Stanford Law Review documents 350
capital convictions in this century, in which it was later proven
that the convict had not committed the crime. Of those, 25 convicts
were executed while others spent decades of their lives in prison.
Fifty-five of the 350 cases took place in the 1970s, and another 20
of them between 1980 and 1985. " http://www.lectlaw.com/files/cri03.htm
There is an article which discusses this issue at some length
here from the journal “Law and Contemporary Problems”.
Whereupon you responded with even greater silliness.
We recognize that you can’t bring yourself to give up your xenophobic hijack-abetting practices. Things must be dull indeed in Eire these days.
By the way, I’ll overlook the damage you caused to my Incredibly Lame-O-Detector® (the needle got repeatedly slammed against the stop and ruined the calibration) if you’ll excuse the problems you’re having with your gizmo.
If you wish to believe that everything is the fault of the U.S., that is your prerogative. It is not my belief. I responded to the specific question as to why the mullahs are currently in charge. In this case and one or two similar ones, I think the U.S. created the situation.
Are there people in Iran who support the mullahs? Absolutely. However no reading of actual events in Iran over the last 20 years can support a claim that the mullahs rule with overwhelming or even slight majority popular approval. The mullahs recently had to shut down most of the opposition political parties because they had grown large enough to challenge the ruling party, despite rules in effect that negated the power of the opposition parties. Claiming that Islam is bad is part and parcel with claiming that “communism” is bad and will lead to the same sort of stupid decisions that harm us in the future. (While I am already “blaming the U.S.” for things, I will point out that the U.S. basically made the Taliban the force that took over Afghanistan. There were multiple war lords and freedom fighters opposing the Soviets and the U.S. chose to selectively support only a few of them–depsite protests at the time from intelligence people that the groups being supported were religious zealots who hated the U.S.) Perhaps if we actually paid attention to whom we were supporting and condemning instead of painting everyone with black and white labels, we would make fewer mistakes that would haunt us in the future.
And? How many is this many you’re talking about? At which point can we start assigning repercussions from actions like this to the man on the street? You know him, he’s the one that would be killed if we “turned the middle-east into a parking lot”.
So tell me, how many is this “many” you refer to. What percentage levels of this type of action being an “accurate reflection of the cultural opinions” of Iranians is necessary to assign group culpability?
Here’s a hint, there is not a government/administration of a sovreign nation on this planet which operates on unamious consent of their citizens. Historical scholars recognize that the American revolution was incited, and fought, by a small minority of the colonists(I’ve seen estimates as low as 4%). The majority, as so often happens, just put their heads down and then waited till the smoke cleared to see if the new boss was tolerable. Even in the modern world where each citizen is given political power via the democratic process most elections are still decided by small minorities of the electorate. Check the voter turnout statistics kept by the FEC. Even in really big elections(Presidential) the turnout barely cracks 50% of the voting age population. National average for registered voters for the 2000 election was 67% turnout. Two-thirds of the nation voted, vote was split about 50/50, so that means about 1/3 of the registered voters(about 25% of the voting age population) controlled the election of the executive. Beyond his election, his actions are not necessarially representative of even those who voted for him. So how, exactly, are we supposed to implicate entire groups of people when even in the nations/governments with the MOST distributed systems of political power and the MOST politically powerful “man on the street” is so isolated from the actions of individuals like the judge in question?
Come back and tell me the names, addresses, and have sworn statements of individuals who believe the judge did the right thing and we’ll talk. It is not justice to condemn entire populations unless that population is extremely carefully defined and checked to ensure all the individuals share the characteristic which causes the condemnation.
To reiterate **Mtgman[\b]'s point, what happened to this girl does not represent Persian culture AT ALL. The majority of the populace of Iran does not support the mullahs. In fact, of the Persians I know (and I know a lot of Persians) none are even very devout Muslims. Iran is currently controlled by a very small yet very powerful group of people and the majority of the Persian people are just the same as you and me. The majority of Persians there and here condemn the actions of the judge.
My response contained an aside (that was in fact logically consistent), which you seem to have deemed the main thrust of my argument.
This is the royal we? Coz I don’t see anyone else hassling me with this false allegation. Can you please quote the xenophobia to which you allude?
Minor nitpick: it’s incorrect to refer to the country as ‘Éire’ unless one is speaking in the Irish language. ‘Ireland’ or ‘the Republic of Ireland’ is correct in English.
Dude, you’re displaying symptoms of a persecution complex.
You’ve failed to illustrate the attitude you claim I possess, because I don’t possess it. Criticism of an aspect of a country does not equate to xenophobia.
Piously inveighing against moral absolutism, declaring that one can have “no genuine appreciation of another culture’s mores” and then calling the U.S. “barbaric and bloodthirsty” over the death penalty* and comparable to Iran, equates to moronic.
A nice little birthday greeting, but one suspects you posted it as a deliberate counterweight to all the tiresome Yanqui Go Home diatribes in which you take such pleasure, and to show that you’re really Americans’ buddy-roo.
What tripe.
*We’ll skip over your apparent and mistaken assumption that there is some federal policy in the U.S. which mandates nationwide availability of the death penalty .
Piously inveighing against “moral absolutism”, declaring that one can have “no genuine appreciation of another culture’s mores”, and then calling the U.S. “barbaric and bloodthirsty” over the death penalty* and comparable to Iran, equates to moronic.
Nice little birthday greeting, but one suspects you posted it as a deliberate and linkable counterweight to your typical, tiresome run of Yanqui Go Home diatribes.
What tripe.
*Speaking of appreciating others’ cultures, dude, you should know that there is no federal policy in the U.S. mandating availability of the death penalty nationwide, and thus shaking your tiny little fist at America as a whole is a bit excessive (there are, I believe, 12 states plus the District of Columbia that do not have the death penalty).
That second photo, “American Girl in Italy”, has always given me the creeps. There is a restaurant nearby that has a huge repro of it on the wall, and I don’t like looking at it. I can just imagine the woman walking on, trying to ignore the catcalls and taunts and come-ons until suddenly she’s knocked down and they descend on her like a pack of dogs. (shudder) Fierra had a similar experience in a hotel in Italy, where a large pack of 20+ Italian boys started rampaging through the hotel, kicking in doors of the British female students on holiday and harassing, fondling, and in one case even raping them. And of course, there were not only no guards, but no phones in the rooms to call the police…
The clothing in the first photo is very attractive; I could see me in that, I really could.
I’m sorry, but every time one of these atrocity stories comes bubbling out of the Middle East, there’s always several people saying, “This isn’t REALLY representative of what people in < fill in the blank > are like.”
After awhile, one gets kinda cynical about this stuff. Just like there are people saying Bush doesn’t REALLY represent all Americans."
Well, he represents about half of us, apparently, according the the last election and the projections for this one. That means we’ve got a shitload of crapheads in this country.
Same goes for Iran, I suspect. The SUPPORTERS of the mullahs probably aren’t out there personally killing teenage girls, but they’re nodding in agreement at the general notion of forcing women to “be honorable.” Just like Bush fans aren’t torturing people in Abu Ghraib, but they’re dismissing it as “no big deal.”
Shitheads all. And I’d like to extirpate a LOT of cultures, yes I would.
