I am not a great fan of right-wing news outlets like the WELT newspaper in Germany, but at least they can reasonably reliably be trusted to inform us about murder committed by Iran's President Mr Ahmadinejad and his fellow Muslim compatriots. While the political left has been busily wringing its combined hands over the botched hanging of secular mass murder Sadddam Hussein, there is an eerie silence from that crowd when Islamic states engage in the slaughtering of the innocent. No wonder, one doesn't want to be seen sitting in the same boat as US President Bush and other religious Christian fundamentalists in their condemnation of anything not Christian. Well, frankly, I think this won't do.In this lengthy blog entry journalist Stefan Wirner reports about the barbaric public hanging of 16 Iranian (innocent) citizens. In the same week 2 journalists critical of the regime were sentenced to death. Funny enough, there have been no demonstrations in front of Iranian embassies the world all over reported. Presumably 'progressive' people were too busy decrying the force-feeding of Islamic prisoners in Guantanamo Bay. To be clear, the very existence of Guantanamo Bay is unacceptable, and so is the force-feeding of prisoners in that facility. Surely, however, the execution of 16 Iranians whose only crime has reportedly been that they were homosexuals (or were assumed to be homosexuals) should have led to a substantially larger international outcry, yet there has been near-complete silence.
There is still time to do something about the two journalists, Abdolwahed Bohimar and Adnan Hassanpur. They were reportedly condemned to capital punishment because they were found guilty to be 'enemies of God'. This suggests that my blog entry just below, if I were unfortunate enough to be a citizen of Iran, could put me comfortably in the very same situation as Bohimar and Hassanpur. As always, one hasn't heard from the ever-growing number of Islamic human rights organisations, usually busying themselves with fighting for women's alleged 'right' to wear complete veils, as well as decrying cartoons of their respective God while displaying silence on cases such as those just described. A s soon as this sort of double-standard is pointed out (usually by someone conservative - which, incidentally I am not), invariably someone (liberal) will come to their defense and mumble something about besieged religious minority and stuff like that. My honest take on this is that a lot more people would take Islamic human rights activists seriously if they became active in such matters, too. After all, as Muslims their protests would likely have a bigger impact on a regime such as the Iranian than my biased bickering. So, may I suggest that civil rights are indivisible and everyone playing in this political arena should go out of his/her way to ensure that he/she is seen to treat them like that.
