Make no mistake, I am opposed to Capital Punishment for the reasons set out in the Catechism of the Catholic Church. But when I see an Appeal signed by the Great and the Good, demanding clemency for an Iranian woman sentenced to be stoned for adultery and murder, it makes me wonder if the Great and the Good are barking mad. This missive is addressed to a state which claims to be Islamic and to follow Islamic Law. Moreover, it is a state which is trying to achieve parity of nuclear menace with the state of Israel. Yet the Appeal numbers among its signatories ... well-known Jews and women notorious for their life-style.
Would it not be more likely to be taken seriously by the Iranian Government if it did not flaunt the support of Jews and of immoral women? Or are the Great and the Good more concerned to polish and display their Greatness and Goodness before their own admiring Western media than to save this poor woman's life?
As a born-Jew and, in my salad days, a fairly notorious sinner, I agree. It would do this poor woman no good to have my support if I were rich and/or famous.
ReplyDeleteYou are, of course, absolutely right, both as to the idiotic failure to choose 'horses for courses', and as to the probable motives of the signatories.
ReplyDeleteI, too, find it unpleasant, though sometimes a demand of conscience, to support causes promoted by certain prominent people.
I can only imagine the feelings of the average 'hardline' Iranian Muslim.
My view on capital punishment, like my view on nuclear weapons, is that of Enoch Powell. Its locus classicus specifically concerns a woman taken in adultery.
ReplyDeleteBut the luvvies are really objecting to a state, as such, which expresses in statute its disapproval of adultery, as our own rightly used to do both of adultery and of desertion when, although not in themselves illegal, they were nevertheless recognised as grounds for divorce.
And we hear nothing from them against the punishments meted out for this same offence by the backward, misogynistic, Jew-hating, anti-Christian despots who wish their American satrapy to nuke an emerging democracy with a high culture, with more women than men at university, and with reserved parliamentary representation for Jews, Armenians and Assyrians.
Indeed. The impulse to help, if that's what it is, is laudable, but the idea seems unlikely to accomplish anything.
ReplyDeleteI wonder to what degree Western civilization is unwittingly propping up the theocracies -- the more sink into the mire of relativism and there-is-no-truth, the more we allow abortion and move on to euthanasia and ... from there, what next? ... don't we just make it easier for the theocratic nations to present themselves as a viable alternative?
Where is the support from all these D-list celebrities for the poor Christian Woman, Asia Bibi, who is in danger of being hanged in Pakisatn for simply being a Christian?!
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