The Iranian courts execute many people every year, too many. Many of them are probably drug dealers and drug runners from across the border, but there are many others strung up every year. Too many: when it comes to official state murder that is called capital punishment, even one is too many. Iran probably comes after China and before Saudi Arabia, but that is an issue of population size. Nobody knows about North Korea but I suspect they execute more people than Texas would like to. Hopefully they kill them faster than Oklahoma did last time they tried it with that botched injection that tortured the man for a long time.
Knee-jerk reaction in the West about judicial executions in Iran is expected, it is normal. It is reciprocated by similar knee-jerk reaction from the Iranian mullahs who never tire of gleefully noting the extremely high U.S. rate and share of world incarceration. These executions are routinely condemned by the U.S. government, and maybe by one or two other European countries and maybe by the petroleum government of Mr. Harper in Canada. They are well-publicized in Western media, more than any other executions elsewhere in the world. More than the large number of men and women who are beheaded and crucified in Saudi Arabia. The latter are probably never officially condemned in Washington or Paris.
This weekend the Qatari, Saudi, and Emirati media joined the ISIS cutthroats and other Wahhabis in condemning the execution of the Iranian woman. Imagine, funny regimes that behead and crucify and stone are criticizing a hanging in Iran (FYI: as I noted they have too many hangings in Iran each year). Wahhabi polygamous ‘activists’, who justify sex slavery and taking and selling captive female concubines in Syria and Iraq condemn the execution of a woman in Iran. Some of the most sectarian bunch on the face of the planet are now claiming it was a sectarian execution.
Wherever it survives, capital punishment should be eradicated. Something should also be done about those many millions who are in prison in China and the United States, many of them convicted for committing non-violent crimes and for simply not affording good lawyers.
Cheers
Mohammed Haider Ghuloum