In an earlier post on a New York Times article on state oppression in Iran, I pointed out the oddity of the reporter Neil McFarquhar’s claim that a judicial decision not to carry out a public stoning of an adulterous couple makes Iran “a difficult country to separate into black and white.” As is often the case when the supposedly liberal-minded try not to sound too judgmental, the meaning of the assertion is not clear.
If the reporter (or copyeditor) meant that you can’t judge the Iranian people by the actions of its government, he is right, but the point is obvious. If he meant, though, that we shouldn’t be too emphatic in our condemnation of the Islamic Republic of Iran because it’s capricious and unpredictable in its use of state violence, well, I disagree, to say the least. That Iranians are sometimes able to prevent their government from carrying out unjust and barbaric practices does not change the fact that any state that punishes adultery as a crime with stoning deserves condemnation, not suspension of judgment.
The hedging and moral muddle of that paragraph have been rendered superfluous, anyway. According to Iranian feminist site Women’s Field, Jafar Kiani, the male half of the couple, was stoned to death July 5, while his fellow accused, Mokarrameh Ebrahimi, waits in prison with her children.
Norm rounds up some of the condemnations, from the United Nations High Commissioner and Amnesty International and elsewhere, of this barbaric criminal act, carried out by an institution, the state, whose primary role in a just world would be to protect the rights of its citizens.
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