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| Sharia Law: Execution of a woman by stoning |
It was a very sad and strange moment in this community's history, and after being called out on it by any number of outraged residents, the paper never went down that path again. However, and this must also be said, the Mountain Views News never retracted any of its erroneous claims. Or apologized for the personal attacks, either. It all just vanished into thin air.
Just to set this up properly, it is no secret that the target of this bizarre MVN hit piece reproduced below, MaryAnn MacGillivray, is a conservative. And that barbaric and radical fundamentalist interpretations of Sharia Law have become a bete noir for those on the political right. The recent beheadings by ISIS certainly brought this to the fore. But are conservatives the only people who have spoken out against these grotesque distortions of Islam? Of course not. People of conscience everywhere have also condemned these terrible practices.
My survey of mainstream media, women and gay rights websites that deal with the topic of Sharia Law would indicate that this is hardly just a conservative cause. The stoning to death of women for "adultery" in countries such as Afghanistan, or the hanging of gay men in Iran because of their sexual preference, has not gone unnoticed on the liberal side of the political spectrum as well. The revulsion over such barbarity apparently now running across the entire gamut of political opinion.
With the apparent exception of the Mountain Views News, of course.
Here is a portion of the 2010 article in question (link), as penned by that paper's publisher, Susan Henderson. To view the rest of it you can go to the MVN website via the link I have provided here.
As I said above, The Tattler surveyed a number of websites dealing with Sharia Law. And it turns out it is not quite the Sunday School exercise that Ms. Henderson had claimed here. Let's start with Wikipedia.
(Adultery) In accordance with hadith, stoning to death is the penalty for married men and women who commit adultery. In addition, there are several conditions related to the person who commits it that must be met. One of the difficult ones is that the punishment cannot be enforced unless there is a confession of the person, or four male eyewitnesses who each saw the act being committed. All of these must be met under the scrutiny of judicial authority. For unmarried men and women, the punishment prescribed in the Qur'an and hadith is 100 lashes.
(Homosexuality) Homosexual activity is illegal under Sharia; however, the proscribed penalties differ from one school of jurisprudence to another. For example, these Muslim-majority countries may impose the death penalty for sodomy and homosexual activities: Iran, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia and Somalia.
This leads us next to something the website ukgaynews.org.uk covered in July of 2005 (link). Videos of these twin murders by Iran were posted to the Internet by that nation's government.
Iran Executes Two Gay Teens In Public Hanging - LONDON, July 21 – Two gay teenagers were publicly executed in Iran on 19 July 2005 for the ‘crime’ of homosexuality. The youths were hanged in Edalat (Justice) Square in the city of Mashhad, in north east Iran. They were sentenced to death by Court No. 19. Iran enforces Islamic Sharia law, which dictates the death penalty for gay sex.
One youth was aged 18 and the other was a minor under the age of 18. They were only identified by their initials, M.A. and A.M. They admitted – probably under torture, London-based gay human rights group Outrage! suggests – to having gay sex but claimed in their defence that most young boys had sex with each other and that they were not aware that homosexuality was punishable by death.
Prior to their execution, the teenagers were held in prison for 14 months and severely beaten with 228 lashes. Their length of detention suggests that they committed the so-called offences more than a year earlier, when they were possibly around the age of 16.
Ruhollah Rezazadeh, the lawyer of the youngest boy (under 18), had appealed that he was too young to be executed and that the court should take into account his young age (believed to be 16 or 17). But the Supreme Court in Tehran ordered him to be hanged.
Under the Iranian penal code, girls as young as nine and boys as young as 15 can be hanged.
The UK Daily Mail published an article on the brutal uses of Sharia Law in Iran in November of 2007 (link). In this article it is shown that such atrocities are visited upon both gays and women.
Gays should be tortured and hanged, says Iranian minister meeting British MPs - Homosexuals deserve to be tortured and executed an Iranian leader told British MPs during a private meeting at a peace conference, it emerged today.
Mohsen Yahyavi is the highest-ranked politician to admit that Iran believes in the death penalty for homosexuality following recent reports that gay youths were being hanged. President Ahmadinejad, questioned by students in New York two months ago about the executions, dodged the issue by suggesting that there were no gays in his country.
The apparent executions, including those of two underage boys whose public hanging was posted on the internet, has alarmed human rights campaigners. Gay rights groups in Britain, such as Outrage!, accuse Iran of cloaking executions for homosexuality with bogus charges for more serious crimes.
Under the Freedom of Information Act, the FCO released papers about the death penalty being used in Iran for homosexuality, adultery and sex outside marriage.
Minutes taken by an official describe a meeting between British and Iranian MPs at the Inter-Parliamentary Union, a peace body, in May. When the Britons raised the hangings of Asqari and Marhouni, the leader of the Iranian delegation, Mr Yahyavi, a member of his parliament's energy committee, was unflinching.
He “explained that according to Islam gays and lesbianism were not permitted”, the record states.“He said that if homosexual activity is in private there is no problem, but those in overt activity should be executed [he initially said tortured but changed it to executed]. "He argued that homosexuality is against human nature and that humans are here to reproduce. Homosexuals do not reproduce.”
Iran, Mauritania, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, the United Arab Emirates, Yemen and Nigeria apply the death penalty for homosexuality, according to the International Lesbian and Gay Association.
On August 10th of 2010, The Post Chronicle newspaper published the following (link):
Iran, Mauritania, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, the United Arab Emirates, Yemen and Nigeria apply the death penalty for homosexuality, according to the International Lesbian and Gay Association.
On August 10th of 2010, The Post Chronicle newspaper published the following (link):
Taliban Executes Pregnant Widow: Whipped 200 Times, Shot - A pregnant widow has been executed by the Taliban in Afghanistan, but the woman was whipped 200 times before she was shot to death, reports CNN. Sanam Gul, also known as Sanam Bibi Sanubar, 35, was accused by the Taliban of becoming pregnant as a result of adultery by having "illicit affairs," and they summarily executed her with 3 shots to the head and chest after whipping her with 200 lashes.
The website The Religion of Peace.com gives the following explanation for the stoning of adulterers under Sharia Law (link):
Islamic law (Sharia) requires that adulterers be put to death, since it was the example set by Muhammad. In practice, the women are executed far more often, since they bear the burden of sexual responsibility (in a male dominated society) and are, perhaps, more likely to confess their indiscretion. Rape victims are sometimes convicted if they speak out. Reporting a rape means a confession of adultery under Sharia law if four male witnesses cannot be found to confirm the victim's claim.
While many Muslims today do find the practice distasteful, there is simply no arguing that killing grown adults over consensual sex is firmly rooted in Islamic theology. In fact, according to this recent fatwa, merely denying that it is appropriate to stone married adulterers in the modern age is a sign of apostasy.
Numerous examples of stoning adulterers under Islamic law persist, from the Islamist frontier of Somalia to the modern state of Iran. In 2010, the Taliban planted a couple having unauthorized sex in the ground and brutally pelted them with stones (the man had to be finished off with three gunshots) only a few days after flogging a pregnant woman 200 times and then shooting her in the head. In "condemning" the killings, the "moderate" president of Afghanistan would only say that they were wrong because they were not preceded by a trial.
The website Women Against Shariah describes its mission this way (link):
It is our position that shariah law imposes second class status on women and is incompatible with the standards of liberal Western societies and the basic principles of human rights and the protection of individual freedoms. The shariah code mandates the complete authority of men over women, including the control of their movement, education, marital options, clothing, bodies, place of residence and all other aspects of their existence.
Then there is this from the famed liberal news site Daily Kos (link):
15-Year Old Rape/Abuse Victim Sentenced, Under Sharia Law, To Public Lashing For 'Fornication'- On the paradise island of Maldives, where tourists delight in beaches, sex, and rose petal bungalow beds with breathtaking views, a 15 year-old girl was arrested after years of sexual abuse. Police discovered a dead newborn buried in an outdoor shower. The girl’s stepfather had been raping her for years. Her mother ignored the cries of her daugthter. When the girl became pregnant as a result of rape, they pulled her out of school and waited out the nine months, then killed and buried the newborn after delivery. The stepfather was arrested and charged with pre-meditated murder, child sexual abuse of and possession of pornographic materials. The mother, also arrested faces charges for concealing the alleged sexual offenses.
While most would assume the 15-year old girl would be put into child protective custody and receive immediate counseling and support, the girl was arrested, interrogated and charged with fornication. Authorities claimed during her 'interrogation', she confessed to having consensual sex with another man. She was sentenced to a pucblc flogging of 100 lashes and eight months of house arrest. The identity of this other man, or whether he was charged, is not known. And it might not matter.
In Maldvian Sharia-Common Law, in cases of fornication, 90 percent of those flogged, are women.
On Facebook the site WOMEN OF THE WORLD UNITED AGAINST ISLAMIC/MUSLIM SHARIA LAW details atrocity after atrocity, and on an almost daily basis. You can link to ithere.
There is much more in this vein to be found on the Internet, but I think you get the point.
To answer the obvious question, no, I do not believe that The Mountain Views News advocates these acts of state terrorism by certain radical fundamentalist Islamic societies against their own people. Rather its publisher was so blinded by an irrational anger that she sided with something truly abhorrent on the strange assumption that if MaryAnn MacGillivray was opposed to it, then it must be good.
I guess we should be grateful that it wasn't the late 1930s and MaryAnn had been speaking out in defense of those brutalized by Nazi Germany.
To be perfectly clear, I do not mean to disparage anyone else's religion. One of the great virtues of American democracy is that its people are free to worship as they choose, and no government should ever be permitted to persecute those it feels have strayed from what they might arbitrarily call God's will. And after all, Islam is hardly the only religion to fall prey to that sort of thing throughout history. Any reading on the Spanish Inquisition or the religious pogroms of Tsarist Russia will help you get past any such misconceptions rather quickly.
However, if certain extremist elements within an otherwise benign religious community proclaim that their God has somehow empowered them to gruesomely murder people whose lifestyle choices don't gibe with theirs, and then use their positions of power to hold barbaric public executions to entertain the mob, then I'd say they are more than fair game for our criticism. These are acts that cannot be defended.
Despite what the woefully misinformed publisher of the Mountain Views News might have had to say on this topic one day not all that long ago.
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