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Sep 8, 2010

IRANIAN STONING ART



My Indian efriend, an artist in her own right, brought this amazing piece of artistic commentary on the Iranian practice of stoning women. I do not right Muslim. Yes, I know the punishment appears in the Koran. The same punishment appears in the Torah. That does not mean that legal interpretations of the religious injunctions cannot find a way to abolish it.

While allowing for the death penalty in some hypothetical circumstances, scholars of Judaism are broadly opposed to the death penalty as practiced in the modern world. The Jewish opposition is not based on a literal reading of the Jewish Bible, but rather through the lens of Judaism's Oral Law.

Forty years before the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in 70 CE, i.e. in 30 CE, the Sanhedrin effectively abolished capital punishment. As God alone was deemed to be the only arbiter in the use of capital punishment, not fallible people, the Sanhedrin made it a hypothetical upper limit on the severity of punishment.

Muslim scholars are well versed in similar prevarications but Islamists are shunning them in this as in other cases. So far, even leftists have not bought in to this particular"anti-Western, anti-colonialist" act of"defiance."

Let's hope they do not change their mind and justify the stoning of women in the same manner that some leftists justify Sati, the burning alive of women, not to mention female genital mutilation while opposing the cheapest and most effective way of reducing the spread of AIDs - male circumcision.

In the meantime, I can think of nothing better than artists using their special talents of presenting the horror involved. Below is a photo of a satire on the subject



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