Death sentences for juveniles, real estate brokers and pigs: just another week in the Middle East

Shifting gears after the emotions of Israel Independence week and a sanity-draining trip down the rabbit hole, it's time to get back to business with some news items from around the Middle East.

Yesterday, Iran executed a woman named Delara Darabi for a murder that she allegedly committed when she was 17. From the article:

Amnesty International said it was "outraged" at the execution, drawing particular attention to the fact that her lawyer was not informed about it, despite the legal requirement that he should receive 48 hours' notice.

"This appears to have been a cynical move on the part of the authorities to avoid domestic and international protests which might have saved Delara Darabi's life," said Hassiba Hadj Sahraoui, Deputy Director of the Middle East and North Africa Program. Darabi was executed despite her having been given a two-month stay of execution by the Head of the Judiciary on April. 19, which Sahraoui said indicates "that even decisions by the Head of the Judiciary carry no weight and are disregarded in the provinces."

Darabi was convicted of murdering a relative in 2003 when she was 17. She initially confessed to the murder, believing she could save her boyfriend from the gallows, but later retracted her confession. She was being detained at Rasht Prison in northern Iran since her arrest in 2003.

RIP Delara Darabi 1986-2009

So...the "authorities" told her on April 19th that she was off the hook for at least two months and on May 1st she was swinging from the noose with NO WARNING and NO OPPORTUNITY for her lawyer to do anything. What a lovely system of "justice" they have in the Islamic "Republic" of Iran. This is nothing new though as Iran executes juvenile offenders like Americans eat donuts...



What caught my attention was the fact that Amnesty International is "outraged" by this act, as if this kind of barbaric behavior is something new in the Middle East. Maybe if they stopped wasting all their time being obsessed with condemning Israel for acts of self defense they would have time to pay attention to what's actually going on in the world around them.

Blatantly silent however, is Amnesty International on this story about a Palestinian who had the audacity to conduct a real estate transaction...with a Jew. From the British Broadcasting Corporation:

A Palestinian military court has condemned a man to death by hanging for treason for selling land to Israelis. Anwar Breghit, 59, was convicted by a court in the West Bank town of Hebron. He sold property near his village "that he did not own", prosecutors said.

You know on second thought, maybe executing shady real estate salesmen in the US and A isn't such a bad idea...the article continues:

Only two people have had death sentences against them carried out, although others have been summarily executed over suspicions that they sold land to Israelis.

Paging Amnesty International...come in Amnesty International...

Not to be outdone however, the amazingly impartial BBC writer wraps up the story with a brief history lesson:

Israel occupied the West Bank and other Arab territory in the 1967 war. It has settled more than 400,000 of its own citizens in the West Bank and East Jerusalem - illegally in the eyes of international law, although Israel disputes this. The continued presence and expansion of Jewish settlements in the West Bank is one of the main points of contention in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Friction between settlements and the more than two million Palestinians in the West Bank frequently leads to violence and bloodshed.

They also throw in this picture and caption, just in case you naively believed they were blaming anyone other than Israel for this:


Israel has settled hundreds of thousands of its citizens on occupied land

Whaaaat?! In an article about a businessman being sentenced to DEATH for the crime of selling land to Jews, 4 out 10 paragraphs as well as the picture and caption (almost half of the entire article!) were devoted to reminding you that Jews don't belong in Judea and Samaria at all! Where are the worldwide condemnations from human rights groups? Where is Hilary Clinton? Barack Obama? The EU? The UN? Is there any leadership in the West at all? Where is the reaction from moderate Palestinians who condemn this insanity? Oh that's right there aren't any...because the people doing the sentencing here, Fatah, ARE the moderates.

We don't hear anything from the wise leadership of Obama or the UN because these are the people they want Israel to negotiate with in exchange for their support against Iran! We don't hear anything from human rights groups on this (but we do hear about Darabi) because as we have already explored previously - deep down they don't back Israel at all. Hence also why the BBC writer feels the need to put a context around this. You need to know that this event would not take place if Israel was not "occupying" the West Bank so that you can be sure to understand that all these people want you believe that in the end...this too is the fault of the Jews.

And just in case you thought that this wholesale barbarism that surrounds the only real democracy in the Middle East is limited to intelligent human beings who should know the difference between right and wrong, we shift our focus now to the Arab "Republic" of Egypt panicked "leadership's" response to the swine flu hysteria.


An Egyptian butcher carries a pig in Cairo, Egypt, Thursday, April 30, 2009. Egypt began slaughtering the roughly 300,000 pigs in the country Wednesday as a precaution against swine flu even though no cases have been reported here, infuriating farmers who blocked streets and stoned vehicles of Health Ministry workers who came to carry out the government's order. (AP Photo/Nasser Nouri)

Nevermind of course that swine flu isn't actually being spread by pigs at this point or that by all accounts the forecasted "global pandemic" is (as usual) turning out to be a bust. Nor is this the first time Egypt has instituted an unnecessary mass-slaughter of defenseless animals either. From the Associated Press article:

Egypt, which has no swine flu cases, is the only country in the world to order a mass pig slaughter in response to the disease. The move mirrored Egypt's battle with bird flu, in which the government killed 25 million birds within weeks in 2006.

Am I the only one who's blown away by these numbers? I mean, I'm no vegetarian or anything but isn't there something fundamentally unnecessary about ending the lives of 25 MILLION birds or 300 THOUSAND pigs? Put aside the fact that these tactics have proven entirely ineffective in the past...these animals are living beings after all. But you won't hear anything about it from PETA who's too busy campaigning against kosher food to care about what's going on in the Middle East.

Having human rights groups AND animals rights groups so unbelievably biased against you might seem strange somewhere else, but not in Israel.

Over there, it's just another week in the Middle East...