Jesu- #231

I have laborede sore and suffered deth,

And now I rest and draw my breth.

But I schall come and call right sone

Hevene and erth and hell to doom;

And thane schall know both devil and man

What I was and what I am.

Sunday, March 14, 2010

The Stoning of Soraya M.


It seems I have immersed myself in all things Islamic this last two weeks. I have been reading my Koran, reading Is Fanatic Islam a Global Threat by Victor Mordecai, going to lectures on the subject, and watching films dealing with the general agenda of Islam- one specifically set to tell the human drama, the other to tell the bloody and troubling realities Sharia Law. The Stoning of Soraya M. is the true story of a beautiful Iranian woman stoned to death on the testimony of two men. That is all it takes. It doesn't matter who the men are; the fact that they are men is sufficient justification for any allegation they make. It's good to be a man, if you are a Muslim!
This story- and I hate to call it a story for it is certainly not fiction- takes place about twenty years ago, about 10 years after the Shah of Iran was ousted from power and the Ayatollah Khomeini's regime had forced its way into power. For Islam government and religion are the same thing, and the cards are stacked overwhelmingly in favor of the male members of society who have the authority to tell the masses what their religion demands, which is justice in its purist and most barbaric form.
Why was Soraya stoned? She was caught in the sin of adultery. Yeah, right. She was married to a sack of pig excrement who had eyes for a fourteen year-old hottie, the daughter of a man who was in Mr. Excrement's care in the local jail. Mr. Excrement was to delay the man's execution in exchange for a young piece of you-know-what. Obviously Mr. Excrement needed to get rid of his wife. Like many Western men who want to trade in a used woman for a new model, he didn't like the idea of using his money to prop up his ex and their two daughters (they had four kids, two boys,two girls). So the best solution for the muslim in a fix was to call AC/DC and have their "Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap" man give Soraya a jingle. No. Better than that, he calls on the local clergy to assist in his time of need. Brother Ne'er-do-well sees a way to help Mr. Exrement out of his tight spot. He must simply catch his wife in a compromising situation with another male. That is vague enough, right? Well, that is all it takes, and we aren't talking about Western male-female interactions here, either. All it takes for Soraya is a simple touch of the hand, a little pressure on the man whose hand she touched and viola, one Soraya M. is guilty of adultery.
I watched in a sickened frozen stupor as the kids of her village tapped rocks together in rhythm while her procession made its way to the designated place of her state and Allah sanctioned murder. She was led, wearing what appeared to be her pure white and intricately beautiful wedding gown down into a pit that had been dug especially for this holy occasion, placed on her knees, and buried up to her waist-- no need in leaving any room for error. With dramatic diliberation, each man who, were his god not the sword, should have known that this whole event was a sham, threw baseball sized (plus or minus) rocks at the beautiful, wronged, and holy Soraya.
Having caught an elbow or two about the face while playing basketball as a youth, I should not have been shocked by the amount of blood that issued forth from her blameless forehead. I was though. You can imagine what this girl, whose dress bespoke of blessed union and now, as blood both running and splattered down upon it, told of the satanic, neurotic need to control, even to death the one thing in society that should be cherished as the creative evidence of God on earth, looked like as the spark of life had nearly been completely extinguished from her eyes. With one more triumphant barrage of stones the unholy work was finished.
The story of Soraya's murder was taken by a brave French-Iranian journalist Freidoune Sahebjam, played in the film by Jim Caviezel. He wrote a book that chronicled Soraya's ordeal. and it was published in 1995.
I was initially mad at myself for not knowing about this movie, let alone the book until about three months ago. I do not want to deminish the significance of this film in its role of letting the world know about the kind of atrocities that are going on in the name of Allah in Islamic countries, but I feel that the lesson for those of us in the West is that Sharia law is not as far away as we would like to believe. Cultural Jihad is and has been underway in Western Civilization for 1400 years now. There has been an ebb and flow over time as power has shifted east to west and west to east. However, an incredible amount of wealth has flowed to the East during the last 80 years. Politicians have been telling us for years that we are running out of oil. That may or may not be true now, but the Islamists who have the money and the power to control the market for oil have an enormous advantage over the whole globe, the globe they want to see ruled under the flag of Sharia law. One decision to stop the oil flow or raise the price precipitously and the world's economy falters. Who has the real power now? We can bow to their wishes, wage war, or try to ride it out. In any case we will pay a tremendous price in terms of quality of life, lives lost in warfare, and the wealth of our nations. Jihad is upon us. The only question is whether or not it will be the sword or the law that cuts our feet out from under us.