Piety in action
Nasrin Sotoudeh, an internationally renowned human rights lawyer jailed in Iran, has been handed a new sentence that her husband said was 38 years in prison and 148 lashes.
Sotoudeh, who has represented opposition activists including women prosecuted for removing their mandatory headscarf, was arrested in June and charged with spying, spreading propaganda and insulting Iran’s supreme leader, her lawyer said.
She was jailed in 2010 for spreading propaganda and conspiring to harm state security – charges she denied – and was released after serving half of her six-year term. The European parliament awarded her the Sakharov human rights prize.
38 years in prison and 148 lashes.
It still just astonishes me that anyone would think they have a right to whip another person. It would never occur to me to have that right, let alone to use it.
It is a long chain, especially when there are huge reserves of oil involved.
In 1953, the CIA and Britain’s security service (Eisenhower and Eden) collaborated to help the Shah’s supporters overthrow the democratically elected Iranian government led by Mohammad Mossadeqh. When the Shah was eventually later overthrown, it was not by democratically inclined Iranians, but by repressive Islamic fundamentalists led by the Ayatollah Khomeini and his mafia of mullahs. They had in the mean time come to the political fore and had convinced enough Iranians that only Islam, and certainly not liberal democracy, could keep the country safe from The Great Satan.. Severe repression (read murder and imprisonment) of Iranian liberals and democrats followed.
As someone once said: “As ye sow, so shall ye reap.” Very true in this case. Unfortunately, the people who put themselves up as candidates in democratic elections tend themselves to be lukewarm on democracy, if not dead-set against it; as anti-democrats.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/19/cia-admits-role-1953-iranian-coup
You’d think if a god was really pissed off at something, like uncovered female hair, that retribution would be clear and unambiguous as to the nature of the offence and the source of the smiting. Curious how punishments from the divinity are always meted out by humans.
So it turns out it actually is unambiguous as to the nature of the offence and the source of the smiting. The humans just want to be able to disavow responsibility and claim they were just following orders.
@ YNnB,
Yes. By all means, if God is as powerful as his adherents and fans say he is, let him do his own smiting. Human beings are too puny to judge.