Conservative Soup - food for thought

By Banafsheh Zand-Bonazzi FrontPageMagazine.com January 27, 2005
Elio Bonazzi and Alireza Saghafi were co-writers of this special feature. (This picture, smuggled out of Iran, was taken in 1992 in the town of Arak)

Given Iran’s incessant foreign policy saber-rattling—including its continued development of nuclear weapons, support for Islamist terrorist groups, and facilitation of the terrorism in Iraq—it’s easy to lose sight of the horrifying domestic situation within the Islamic Republic. The mullahs have not only destroyed the lives of countless foreigners through their worldwide export of Islamic terror and extremism; they’ve also plunged the Iranian people into a violent, hellish abyss of torture, repression, hopelessness, drug addiction and despair.

Women sentenced to death by stoning are buried in the ground up to their necks. Iranian law regulates the size of the stones used by the executioner crowd; stones cannot be big enough to kill the sentenced woman too quickly, as the purpose of this barbaric ritual is to inflict as much pain as possible before death. On the other hand, stones cannot be too small, as each blow must be dramatically painful.

While stoning captures the imagination of Westerners as the most barbaric act committed under Shariah laws, other forms of sentencing perpetrated by the Islamic Republic are just as horrific. For example, Iran employs several types of body mutilation, from the amputation of hands, arms and legs to the macabre procedure of plucking out the eyeballs of the sentenced without the use of anesthetics. Even minors and those who are physically and mentally disabled are regularly executed.

The international community, in particular European countries, has been quite indifferent to such atrocities. It prefers to engage the Islamic Republic in lucrative business deals, relegating the human rights issue to a mere footnote, a ritualistic and rhetorical passage usually present in high-level discussions with Iranian officials, but never taken seriously or enforced.

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