Author: Ophelia Benson

I’m just echoing Norm here, but what the hell.

Sakineh Mohammadie Ashtiani is due to be stoned to death on a bogus charge of “adultery.” She’s already had 99 lashes, but the authorities in Iran have decided to be thorough about it.

“She’s innocent, she’s been there for five years for doing nothing”, [her son] Sajad said. He described the imminent execution as barbaric. “Imagining her, bound inside a deep hole in the ground, stoned to death, has been a nightmare for me and my sister for all these years.”

Yes. Naturally. And there is something hideously, deeply, intolerably wrong with people who can not only contemplate doing that, but actually do it. Who consider it not a nightmare but Justice. It’s so ugly it turns me sick every time I contemplate it. Burying a woman in the ground up to her neck, pinning her with only her head sticking out, then throwing stones at it, small stones, so that the disgusting terrifying shaming filthy process will take longer.

Five years ago when Sakineh was flogged , Sajad was 17 and present in the punishment room. “They lashed her just in front my eyes, this has been carved in my mind since then.”

Torture the woman and her children – for, at most, sex outside marriage.

The US State Department does not entirely approve.

“We have grave concerns that the punishment does not fit the alleged crime, ” Assistant Secretary of State P.J. Crowley said Thursday. “For a modern society such as Iran, we think this raises significant human rights concerns.”

Calling Iran’s judicial system “disproportionate” in its treatment of women, Crowley said, “From the United States’ standpoint, we don’t think putting women to death for adultery is an appropriate punishment.”

I hate to say it, but I think they could use a bit of Bush-speak for subjects like this. I realize they have sane reasons for avoiding Bush-speak, but I wish they could say torturing a woman to death for putative adultery is something more than inappropriate.

Cristina Odone is there, announcing to a breathless world that She is Praying for Christopher Hitchens. Well good, because that is the first thing that leapt to my mind, of course – will Cristina Odone be praying for him?

While condemning the intolerance of religious organisations, he shows zero tolerance for believers: a person of faith must be a fanatic, or a fraud. (Mother Teresa, according to his book The Missionary Position, was both.)  He refuses to consider the evidence of religious do-gooding, found in the Catholic Church’s AIDS clinics in Africa, Anglican schools in Asia, and Jewish charities around the globe. He is determined to persecute Pope Benedict XVI, and would like to see him arrested on his forthcoming visit to Britain.

Mother Teresa was both. It’s not that she must have been, it’s that she was. Hitchens didn’t say “persons of faith” must be fanatics or frauds and therefore “Mother Teresa” was both; he investigated “Mother Teresa” in an effort to find out if her actions matched her reputation, and found out that they did not.

And Hitchens is not determined to “persecute” the pope, unless by “persecute” Odone means “tell the truth about.” It would be stupid for Hitchens to be determined to persecute the pope in any other sense, because it’s stupid to be determined to do the impossible, and Hitchens is about as unstupid as anyone alive. It’s impossible to persecute the pope, because we can’t get at him. He’s protected by layer upon layer upon layer of immunity and holiness and specialness and law and guards and bubble cars. We can’t get at him to tell him to his face that he’s doing bad things. (Yes there was that woman last Xmas, but all she managed to do was tip him over for a second. That’s not great for an elderly fella, but it’s not persecution.)

Hitchens is of course determined to see the pope prosecuted – and so he should be. The pope has real temporal power, and he uses it; he uses it to protect criminals and keep crimes out of the hands of secular law enforcement and rebuke countries that take law enforcement into their own hands. The pope should be subject to prosecution for, at least, heading an organization that abets criminals.

As for Hitchens – I hope medical science can keep him around until he reaches the pope’s current age, at least.

Simon Jenkins wrote the stupidest article I’ve seen in some time for Comment is Free. I’m sure he’s not stupid, but the article is.

A “mammoth of research” is about to rise behind London’s St Pancras station, a biomedical centre costing £600m and housing about 1,250 “cutting-edge” scientists. Ask not its value. Science jeers at the idea. The UK Centre for Medical Research and Innovation has already been dubbed a “cathedral of science”, justified by faith, not reason.

That’s just the first paragraph. Look how stupid it is. What are those quotation marks for? Who is being quoted? Who “dubbed” the biomedical centre a “cathedral of science”? Anyone? Apart from Simon Jenkins? What on earth does he mean “justified by faith, not reason”? He doesn’t say, he just goes on with very tired familiar “ooh I hate science” boilerplate.

This business of inventing quotations and implying that somebody is saying things when in fact it’s you who’s saying it reminds me of the Times story last year that said “there are fears” about Does God Hate Women? when there weren’t, it was just that the reporter thought there could be and so she might as well say there already were, without actually adducing any.

The last paragraph is striking too.

I share Rees’s glory in the wonder of science. I wish the wonder could be taught in schools, which still prefer to be kindergartens for lab technicians. But science research is one lobby among many. The BBC should not lavish it with favours against less-fashionable claimants for its platforms. One thing is for sure, Rees’s subsidies must come from taxes on the professions he most despises – banking and finance. I bet no one devotes a research grant or a Reith lecture to them.

Now why would anyone have a somewhat skeptical attitude toward banking and finance these days? I can’t imagine, can you? No indeed, it’s science that deserves all the opprobrium for being so fashionable, and pointless, and theiving, and faith-based, and money-grubbing, and cathedraly.