In the Gnus

For those of you - all four of you - who religiously read the often inarticulate sputterings from my previous incarnation, you'll know that one of my bêtes noirs is the all-too rampant human rights abuses in Iran, perhaps no more evident than in the country's zeal to execute its own citizens.

Now when my tenure on this planet ended as a Rabat cat and I was about to be reborn as a Madrid cat (the reader can decide for him/herself if I went up or down the karmic ladder), I made a conscious decision to check my soapbox at the Easyjet Karmic Departures Gate in the Heavens. I freely admit that, here and there, a few snarky comments have slipped past security. This was confirmed by an e-mail I received from a visitor to my site - the tone of which leaves me suspecting that she won't become a regular reader - that I have a tendency to go on and on and (apparently) on about my experiences in Morocco. I thought that I've been rather restrained. Go figure.

But I did raise my eyebrows (yes, cats do have eyebrows) when I saw one of today's headlines on Yahoo Canada, "Iran hangs three men in public for raping 12 women." This of course is a tragedy - as were the brutal rapes of these young women, most of whom were university students. The report adds that these 12 executions bring the number of reported executions in Iran up to 207, an impressive 15% increase from 2006. Way to go! And there are still 3 months to go! I just know you can beat China, the World's Current Number One Executioner!

What the report doesn't say is that September has been a pretty busy month for Iran's hangmen. Or crane operators. Hangings - or more accurately 'hoistings' or 'cranings' -are commonly carried out with a crane, a slow and painful death as the condemned is hoisted (not dropped from a height) so that his or her neck doesn't break, or a low platform (again ensuring an agonisingly slow death). But I digress.

To date:

September 27th: 3 hanged (hoisted/craned). Happy Ramadan!!!
September 14th: 3 hanged (hoisted/craned).
September 12th: 7 hanged (hoisted/craned). On the same day four men each had a hand amputated for theft, but I suppose that that doesn't really count. I included that purely for effect. I chose, however, not to mention the visit of Louise Arbour, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights on September 17th who called for the immediate cessation of child executions. That would have been over the top and I'm glad that I didn't mention it).
September 11th: 2 hanged (hoisted/craned).
September 7th: 2 hanged (hoisted/craned).
September 5th: 21 hanged (hoisted/craned). Somehow that didn't warrant a headline on Yahoo News)
September 2nd: 1 hanged (hoisted/craned). A slow day.

... for a grand total of 36. Again, a notable & laudable increase from August's embarrassingly paltry 30 executions.

There you have it. I would add, rather à propos I think, that during this week's visit to Columbia University, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad - the evil pinhead man who thinks that only drug traffickers and not political dissidents or any of the country's nonexistent homosexuals are being executed - said that most executions were not carried out in public. It seems that 29 of the above-noted hangings (hoistings/cranings) were carried out in public (today's venue was a sports complex) but they just must have slipped under the evil pinhead's his radar. Well, he is a busy man what with convincing the world that he's not a psychopathic dictator. So between today's headline and the evil pinhead's President Ahmadinejad's recent babblings in Newspeak, the Islamic Republic of Iran has been at the fore of my pea-sized brain. Anyway, not an apology, just an explanation. Possibly not even an explanation.

Addendum: to the right are teenage boys Mahmoud Asgari and Ayaz Marhoni shortly before their executions; they were both found guilty of 'raping' younger boys. It is widely believed that they were in fact hanged (hoisted/craned) for engaging in consensual homosexual acts. So perhaps evil pinhead President Ahmadinejad is right after all. There are no more homosexuals in Iran.