Iran: The Sodom of the 21st Century

As I read Amil Imani's account of behavior that Iran's 'Islamic Republic considers 'compassionate,' I could not help but think of biblical Sodom where a tall guest was put in a short bed and cut down to size while a short person was put in a long bed and stretched all night long. Local residents who welcomed guests were bound to be punished, and in fact one young girl was punished by being tied to a tree covered in honey. You can guess what happened to her. Iran, which considers itself to be moral and religious, sounds remarkably like Sodom in the way it treats those who are different.

Months later, she was informed that the sentence would be implemented at dawn the next day. This presented the last chance for the jailers to beat her as severely as they could before she died. They were intent at making the most savab (performing religiously meritorious acts) they could while they had the chance.

The beating she received on that day was so severe that she lost consciousness. When the executioners arrived to hang her, they could not revive her. They faced a serious problem. How can an unconscious woman who cannot stand on her feet be hanged?

A temporary stay of execution was ordered. In due time, Mrs. M regained consciousness only to suffer many more months of the dreadful ordeal. On several occasions, the order to hang her was re-issued. But the severe repeated beatings had shattered her body as well as her mind. She could no longer stand on her feet. She got around only by crawling. The jailers were relentless in their viciousness. On several occasions, they staged mock hangings. They would come to her cell and say the fatehe (prayer for the dead), place the noose around her neck, and hold her up and let her collapse on the ground.

Eventually, no one knows why, she was released from prison, a barely able to walk. She did not get to die in one day, as did her innocent beloved husband. The demonic agents of the Islamic Republic saw to it that she got to live a life of dying every day for the rest of her life.

The Islamist’s credo is fairly straight forward in dealing with religious minorities or infidels living in their midst: if you can’t reason with them to change their belief then literally beat some sense into their heads. And if that doesn’t work, then a bullet to the head or a noose around the neck ought to put an end to the “problem.”

Read the whole thing.

Labels: cruelty, Iran, religious freedom, Sodom

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 12:55 AM

Assault on Misurata: How much longer can it go on?

The scale of destruction is brutal, in every corner a ghost of what could have been a family's escape, only it seems shelling by pro-Gaddafi forces left no refuge for civilians.

Al Jazeera's Andrew Simmons, from the besieged city.
Category:

News & Politics
If the citizens of Misurata lose, their children will be sodomized, their mothers raped and fathers beheaded.

Prison Rape is an Intolerable Offense

Prison Rape is an Intolerable Offense
The News Tribune

Rape and sexual abuse remain too much a fact of life behind bars.
That’s intolerable. In the United States, our criminal justice system sends convicts to prison as punishment, not for punishment.
The recommendations of the federal Prison Rape Elimination Commission could be a step toward changing the prison culture that permits sexual abuse to continue.
The commission found that more than 60,000 prisoners are the victims of rape and sexual abuse each year. Many inmates are afraid to report such crimes and even those who do are often ignored or dismissed.
Not only hardcore criminals are being victimized. The commission heard from former inmates who made relatively minor mistakes – a political protest gone wrong, a drunken driving arrest or a probation violation – and ended up being brutally raped.
No matter what they did to land in jail, captives are a vulnerable population. They depend on prison authorities to protect them, and it’s in the best interests of those officials to do so.
Prisoners will seek protection where they can find it. When the only safe harbor is a gang, the repercussions affect not only prison safety but also public safety when prisoners carry their gangster ways to the streets after their release.
The commission is recommending that Attorney General Eric Holder issue standards that require prisons to have zero-tolerance policies on rape, better staff training and improved screening to identify prisoners vulnerable to abuse, among other measures. States could lose federal prison money if they fail to comply.
The cost to staff and equip jails and prisons accordingly will be high. But so too is the cost of the status quo.
Washington officials just agreed to pay $1 million to settle part of a class action lawsuit by current and former female inmates who claimed they were sexually assaulted by corrections officers at the state’s Purdy prison. Still pending is a dispute over what the state will do to prevent other inmates from being abused and to keep abuse allegations from languishing in files.
The rape commission’s report is significant not just for its recommendations but also for its attempts to quantify the problem. As much as sexual abuse has been assumed an inevitable consequence of confinement, its actual scope hasn’t been well documented.
In 1994, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a prison system’s failure to prevent sexual abuse of inmates can be a violation of the constitutional prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. The caveat was that corrections officials must have known or should have known about the abuse.
Credible deniability, if there ever was such a thing, is in short supply today.


On September 10, 2004, Vili and Mary announced that they have been together constantly since her release. They plan to marry and Mary is willing to have more children for him. After her release from prison Vili petitioned the courts to lift the court imposed restraining order so they could see each other. The judge lifted the order barring contact between Mary Kay Letourneau and Vili Fualaau..

A suburban Seattle school district elementary school teacher, Mary Kay Letourneau, was 34, and the married mother of four children in 1996, when she and Vili Fualaau, her sixth grade student entered into a sexual relationship. She was arrested in 1997 when she was pregnant with their child and sentenced to six months in jail and ordered to have no contact with Vili. A month later she was caught her car with him and she was pregnant with their second child. She served seven and a half years in prison for having sex with a minor. She was released from prison on August 4, 2004. Mary will be staying with a former coworker in a home close to where her girls live with their father's family. It is rumored that Mary and Vili plan to write another book together. Their first book was published and popular in France.

Mary wrote a book about her affair with Vili. Mary's former cellmate, Christina Dress, a close friend and co-author of her book said when Mary arrived at Purdy women's prison in 1998, she was harassed by inmates and guards.
"Inmates were preparing and sending her food with chemicals in it, spit in it, things like that. Tama Lisa and I put a stop to that...already been at prison, we knew how to handle it." Christina Dress - King 5 TV News