More fun from the "religion of peace"

From the UK Telegraph




Hanged for being a Christian in Iran
Eighteen years ago, Rashin Soodmand's father was hanged in Iran for converting to Christianity. Now her brother is in a Mashad jail, and expects to be executed under new religious laws brought in this summer. Alasdair Palmer reports.

A month ago, the Iranian parliament voted in favour of a draft bill, entitled "Islamic Penal Code", which would codify the death penalty for any male Iranian who leaves his Islamic faith. Women would get life imprisonment. The majority in favour of the new law was overwhelming: 196 votes for, with just seven against.

Imposing the death penalty for changing religion blatantly violates one of the most fundamental of all human rights. The right to freedom of religion is enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and in the European Convention of Human Rights. It is even enshrined as Article 23 of Iran's own constitution, which states that no one may be molested simply for his beliefs.

And yet few politicians or clerics in Iran see any contradiction between a law mandating the death penalty for changing religion and Iran's constitution. There has been no public protest in Iran against it.

David Miliband, Britain's Foreign Secretary, stands out as one of the few politicians from any Western country who has put on record his opposition to making apostasy a crime punishable by death. The protest from the EU has been distinctly muted; meanwhile, Germany, Iran's largest foreign trading partner, has just increased its business deals with Iran by more than half. Characteristically, the United Nations has said nothing.

It is a sign of how little interest there is in Iran's intention to launch a campaign of religious persecution that its parliamentary vote has still not been reported in the mainstream media.

For one woman living in London, however, the Iranian parliamentary vote cannot be brushed aside. Rashin Soodmand is a 29-year-old Iranian Christian. Her father, Hossein Soodmand, was the last man to be executed in Iran for apostasy, the "crime" of abandoning one's religion. He had converted from Islam to Christianity in 1960, when he was 13 years old. Thirty years later, he was hanged by the Iranian authorities for that decision.

Today, Rashin's brother, Ramtin, is also held in a prison cell in Mashad, Iran's holiest city. He was arrested on August 21. He has not been charged but he is a Christian. And Rashin fears that, just as her father was the last man to be executed for apostasy in Iran, her brother may become one of the first to be killed under Iran's new law.

Not surprisingly, Rashin is desperately worried. "I am terribly anxious about him," she explains. "Even though my brother is not an apostate, because he has never been a Muslim – my father raised us all as Christians – I don't think he is safe. They assume that if you are Iranian, you must be Muslim."

Her brother's situation has ominous echoes of her father's fate. Rashin was 14 when her father was arrested. "He was held in prison for one month," she remembers. "Then the religious police released him without explanation and without apology. We were overjoyed. We thought his ordeal was over."

But six months later, the police came back and took her father away again. This time, they offered him a choice: he could denounce his Christian faith, and the church in which he was a pastor – or he would be killed. "Of course, my father refused to give up his faith," Rashid recalls proudly. "He could not renounce his God. His belief in Christ was his life – it was his deepest conviction." So two weeks later, Hossein Soodmand was taken by guards to the prison gallows and hanged.

Life for Rashin, her siblings and her mother became extremely difficult. Some Muslims are extremely hostile to people of any other religion, never mind to those who they consider apostates: Ayatollah Khomeini declared that "non-Muslims are impure", insisting that for Muslims to wash the clothes of non-Muslims, or to eat food with non-Muslims, or even to use utensils touched by non-Muslims, would spoil their purity.

The family was supported with financial and other help from a Christian church based in Iran. That support became even more critical as Rashin's mother began to lose her sight. Rashin herself was eventually able to leave Iran. She now lives in London, married to a fellow Christian from Iran who successfully applied for asylum in Germany.

It took years for Rashin to understand how her father could have been legally executed simply for becoming a Christian. In 1990, there was no parliamentary law mandating the death for apostates. What, then, was the legal basis for Hossein Soodmand's execution?

"After the revolution of 1979, Iran's rulers wanted to turn Iran into an Islamic state, and to abolish the secular laws of the Shah," explains Alexa Papadouris of Christian Solidarity Worldwide, a human rights organisation that specialises in freedom of religion. "So the clerics instituted a mandate for judges presiding over criminal cases: if the existing penal code did not include legislation on whether a certain kind of behaviour is an offence, then the judges should refer to traditional Islamic jurisprudence." In other words: sharia law.

"That automatically created problems" says Mr Papadouris, "because Islamic jurisprudence is not codified law: it is a series of formulations developed across generations by scholars and clerics. Depending on the Islamic school or historical era, these formulations can differ and even contradict each other."

On one subject, however, sharia law is unequivocal: men who change their religion from Islam must be punished with death. So when the judge heard the case of Rashid's father, he could refer to sharia and reach a straightforward decision: the death penalty. There was no procedure for appeal.

Nevertheless, in the 18 years since Hossein Soodmand's execution, there have been no judicially sanctioned killings of apostates in Iran, although there have been many reports of disappearances and even murders. "As the number of converts from Islam grows," notes Ms Papadouris, "apostasy has again become a serious concern for the Iranian government." In addition to 10,000 Christian converts living in Iran, there are several hundred thousand Baha'is who are deemed apostates.

There is another factor: President Ahmadinejad. "The President didn't initiate the law mandating the death penalty for apostates," says Papadouris, "but he has been lobbying for it. It is an effective form of playing populist politics. The Iranian economy is doing very badly, and the country is in a mess: Ahmadinejad may be calculating that he can gain support, and deflect attention from Iran's problems, by persecuting apostates."

The new law is not yet in force in Iran: it requires another vote in parliament, and then the signature of the Ayatollah. But that could happen within a matter of weeks. "Or," says Papadouris, "it could conceivably be allowed to drop, were there a powerful enough international outcry".

Time may be running out for Rashin's brother. She believes that the new law will be applied in an arbitrary fashion, with individuals selected for death being chosen to frighten others into submission. That is why she fears for her brother. "We just don't know what will happen to him. We only know that if they want to kill him, they will."

_________________

Remember folks, these are the people that liberals remain silent about. These are the people that socialists DEFEND

Where is the Outcry from the Useless Nations (UN)?

Anyone?

Buehler?

Buehler?

Thank you Jimmy Carter

Bush Derangement Syndrome worms its way into Bhutto assasination

What the feck?

Someone had to find a way to blame Bush, didnt take them long did it?

From Yahoo News:

Where Bhutto's Death Leaves the U.S.



By MARK THOMPSON AND BRIAN BENNETT/WASHINGTON 1 hour, 35 minutes ago

The weeks to come will determine just how severe a blow Benazir Bhutto's death is to Pakistan, but debate over Washington's role in the run up to this tragic day will continue well beyond that. Even as the smoke still lingered in Rawalpindi, President Bush demanded that those responsible for Bhutto's death be caught and punished. "The United States strongly condemns this cowardly act by murderous extremists who are trying to undermine Pakistan's democracy," Bush told reporters in Crawford, Texas, where he had arrived Wednesday to begin a long New Year's holiday. "Those who committed this crime must be brought to justice."

But there are some who think the Bush Administration is not without blame. Hussain Haqqani, a former top aide to Bhutto and now a professor at Boston University, thinks the U.S., which has counted Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf as a key ally against terrorism since 9/11, bears some of the responsibility. "Washington will have to answer a lot of questions, especially the Administration," he says. "People like me have been making specific requests to American officials to intervene and ask for particular security arrangements be made for her, and they have been constantly just trusting the Musharraf Administration." U.S. officials said they were leery of intervening in another nation's internal affairs, and didn't want to give Bhutto Washington's imprimatur.

Haqqani is not shy about pointing fingers. He blames Musharraf himself, above all, for Bhutto's death. "It's quite clear that Musharraf does not want an election - you can quote me - he is the one who has constantly wanted anybody who can threaten him or his power, out." Haqqani told Congress in October that U.S. aid for Pakistan has for too long been tilted toward the Pakistani military. "Since 1954 almost $21 billion had been given to Pakistan in aid," he told the House Armed Services Committee. "Of this, $17.7 billion were given under military rule, and only $3.4 billion was given to Pakistan and the civilian government."

It is Musharraf's iron grip on power that has made Washington's own policy toward Pakistan such a target of criticism. While Washington has publicly extolled the virtues of democracy and hoped that Bhutto's return to Pakistan in October would usher in a power-sharing deal with Musharraf, it was also clearly nervous about the instability if the country's strong man were to lose power entirely. Pakistan - the world's second-most-populous Muslim nation, with elements of al-Qaeda and the Taliban controlling lawless mountainous pockets in the northwest - is also the only Islamic state with a nuclear arsenal. And though Washington publicly says Pakistan's nuclear weapons are safe, there are always private concerns about their security, concerns that will only heighten in the wake of Bhutto's assassination.

The U.S. has few options in Pakistan. One thing is clear, says Peter Galbraith, senior fellow at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation: It is "not a good idea to have 70 nuclear weapons in the hands of a country that is falling apart." Some observers believe that U.S. policy in Pakistan has favored personalities over principles. "We have a bad habit of always personalizing our foreign policy," says P.J. Crowley, senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. "We've done it with Musharraf, and we did it with respect to Bhutto. We are very good at providing technical support to the Pakistani army. We are not good at building indigenous or effective local political processes or strong institutions of government." Given the realities on the ground, the U.S. is likely to continue to throw its support behind Musharraf. "In terms of political leadership, Pakistan does not have a deep bench," says Crowley.

Some will say Bhutto had a death wish; one U.S. official even termed her presence at large-scale campaign rallies "foolhardy", given the Karachi suicide bombing that killed more than 140 people on October 18, the day she returned from exile. She returned to Pakistan and faced a range of powerful anti-democratic enemies, including both religious extremists like al-Qaeda and corrupt branches of the Pakistani military and intelligence services. "When you have the criminal and corrupt in the same camp it makes for dangerous bedfellows," says Arsalan Iftikhar, contributing editor to Islamica magazine. "In a sense Benazir knew she was on a martyrdom mission. She was willing to give up her life for democracy."

Senator Joseph Biden, the Delaware Democratic and presidential candidate, echoed Haqqani's view that Musharraf, at a minimum, didn't provide Bhutto with adequate security. In fact, he twice urged the Pakistani President to bolster Bhutto's protection. "The failure to protect Ms. Bhutto raises a lot of hard questions for the government and security services that must be answered," said Biden, who is also chairman of the foreign relations committee. "The U.S. should offer any assistance necessary, including investigative teams, to get to the bottom of this horror."

Still, the former top U.S. military commander in that part of the world said it's wrong to blame Musharraf, or the U.S. "I think it is al-Qaeda - they're the only ones who gain from this," says Anthony Zinni, a retired four-star Marine general who served as chief of the U.S. Central Command - responsible for Pakistan - from 1997 to 2000. Zinni rattled off reasons for al-Qaeda's wanting Bhutto dead, including her commitment to democracy, her secular views, the blowback it will create for Musharraf, and her gender. Beyond that, Zinni says al-Qaeda - making marginal progress in Afghanistan, backsliding in Iraq, and rebuffed in Somalia - is looking for a new battlefield. "I really think they're trying to ignite Pakistan into the kind of chaos they need to survive," Zinni says, "and create a fundamentalist, even radical, Islamic government." "This is one of the worst things that could happen to Musharraf," he continues. "In part, because he'll be accused of doing it."

Zinni also disputes the idea that Washington could have done anything to prevent the assassination. "You want Blackwater out there providing security for her?" he asked, referring to the controversial U.S. private-security firm implicated in the deaths of many Iraqi civilians. "The losing of Pakistan - to whatever degree we've lost it, and I wouldn't write it off yet - goes back to after the first Afghan war," Zinni says, when Washington neglected the Afghan-Pakistan border roiling with insurgents. "We put them in a bad situation that we helped create," Zinni says. "I'm no fan of this Administration, but you can't criticize this Administration for what they inherited."

___________________________

Ok, so since when is the safety and security of leaders of countries the responsibility of the United States and NOT the government of that country?

For years we have been hearing cries to stay out of middle east policy, now we hear that we need to intervene at such a micro level as to manage the security for leaders?


I wont even go into to who was President after the first Afghan war but suffice to say that we didnt invent this situation, it was created by another country altogether.

Bush derangement syndrome...seriously, it should be listed as a mental health issue

This may be a rhetorical question....BUT

Why arent we hearing from the left on this?

From YAHOO news


In Basra, vigilantes wage deadly campaign against women By Jay Price and Ali Omar al Basri, McClatchy Newspapers
Thu Oct 4, 5:03 PM ET

BASRA, Iraq — Women in Basra have become the targets of a violent campaign by religious extremists, who leave more than 15 female bodies scattered around the city each month, police officers say.

Maj. Gen. Abdel Jalil Khalaf , the commander of Basra's police, said Thursday that self-styled enforcers of religious law threatened, beat and sometimes shot women who they believed weren't sufficiently Muslim.

"This is a new type of terror that Basra is not familiar with," he said. "These gangs represent only themselves, and they are far outside religious, forgiving instructions of Islam."

Often, he said, the "crime" is no more than wearing Western clothes or not wearing a head scarf.

Before the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, Iraqi women had had rights enshrined in the country's constitution since 1959 that were among the broadest of any Arab or Islamic nation. However, while the new constitution says that women are equal under the law, critics have condemned a provision that says no law can contradict the "established rulings" of Islam as weakening women's rights.

The vigilantes patrol the streets of Basra on motorbikes or in cars with dark-tinted windows and no license plates. They accost women who aren't wearing the traditional robe and head scarf known as hijab. Religious extremists in the city also have been known to attack men for clothes or even haircuts deemed too Western.

Like all of southern Iraq , Basra is populated mostly by Shiite Muslims, so sectarian violence isn't a major problem, but security has deteriorated as Shiite militias fight each other for power. British troops in the area pulled out last month.

Khalaf, who has a reputation for outspokenness in a city where that can get you killed, scoffed at the groups, calling them no better than criminal gangs. He said he didn't care if some were affiliated with the militias, he planned to crack down on them.

"If there is a red line related to the insurgents and militias, we will pass it over, because it's one of the factors that destroy the society," he said.

The violence is displacing the few members of religious minorities in the area. Fuad Na'im , one of a handful of Christians left in the city, said Thursday that the way his wife dressed made the whole family a target.

"I was with my wife few days ago when two young men driving a motorbike stopped me and asked her about her clothes and why she doesn't wear hijab," he said. "When I told them that we are Christians, they beat us badly, and I would be dead if some people nearby hadn't intervened."

That was enough, he said.

"I'm about to leave the city where I was born and where my father and grandfather were buried, because I can't live in a place where we're asked about our clothes, food and drink."

Elsewhere in Iraq on Thursday, Mua'awia Jibara, a leader in the tribal movement to fight the group al Qaida in Iraq in concert with U.S. troops, was fatally injured when a roadside bomb exploded near his convoy southwest of Samara . He died in a hospital. Three of his guards also were killed.

Around 10 a.m. , the deputy governor of Iskandariyah, about 30 miles south of Baghdad , was killed by a roadside bomb that targeted his convoy. Three guards also were killed.

There were several incidents of violence in Baghdad . In the eastern part of the city, a bomb planted in a minibus exploded about 9:30 a.m. , killing four people and injuring seven.

Around noon, a car bomb exploded in the Wihda neighborhood of east Baghdad , killing three people and injuring eight. A roadside bomb exploded in the Waziriyah neighborhood in north Baghdad , killing one person and injuring two.

(Price reports for The News & Observer in Raleigh, N.C. Basri is a McClatchy Newspapers special correspondent. Special correspondent Hussein Kadhim contributed to this story.)

___________________________

Yep.....gotta love em...right?

More Muzzie Murder - Screw Politically Correct B.S.#links

More Muzzie Murder - Screw Politically Correct B.S.#links