What Doesn't Offend the Muslims

by Isaac Schrödinger

2006/02/23

THE CROWD GATHERS around as tears flow down her cheeks. Her last day will be her worst. The assorted gang are allowed stones of a particular size: Not bigger than, nor smaller than one-third of, a human digit. Hence, the stones should be around one-half the size of an adult finger. The logic is to inflict the maximal pain. The objective is to stone the adulterous woman to death.

The woman is buried up to her neck as her kids watch the whole scene. The Iranian state forces the close relatives of the woman to attend the public execution. A truck pulls up with the correctly proportioned stones. The verdict is read and then the official of the regime throws the first stone.

The chanting and the barrage start. The stones smash into her delicate face. Soon, the red liquid gushes out of her forehead. The intensity of the direct hits gouges out her right eye. Her nose gets completely broken. Her teeth are torn apart. She inhales a mixture of noxious air and blood. Her face is forever lost.

She streams in and out of consciousness. Shards of bone are sent in all directions as the stones brutally chisel the region where once her face was. The last thing she hears as the crowd extinguishes her frail soul is, "Allah Akbar!"

Such is the fate of women who are found guilty of adultery in Iran. In the modern world, no other state-sanctioned punishment exceeds this heinous display of public savagery.

A FIRE BROKE out in a girl's dormitory in Makkah during March of 2002. The girls, of course, ran out of the burning building. However, the Mutaween -- the Religious Police -- wouldn't let the girls exit the building since they weren't properly covered from head to toe. At least one parent was outside the dorm looking for her daughter. He saw her come out of the blazing dorm but was powerless in front of the Mutaween. He distressingly told her to go back and get her abaya.

She never came back from the inferno.

THREE CHRISTIAN GIRLS were beheaded in October of 2005 as they were walking to their school in Indonesia.

... their heads were found 2 hours later some distance away, including one head found about 100 meters from a church.

Through some cosmic coincidence, the perpetrators of such barbarity -- the stonings in Iran, the deaths by fire in Saudi Arabia and the beheadings in Indonesia -- were Muslims. In all three cases, the acts were carried out in the name of Islam.

Today, a few benign caricatures of Muhammed in a once-obscure Danish newspaper are "causing" a Muslim meltdown. It is, thus, illuminating to see what doesn't make the Muslims go crazy.

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