They Are Not Like Us:

Stoning Death Sick Form Of Honor Killing
By John David Powell
May 14, 2007

The appearance on the Internet this week of a video showing the stoning to death of a teenage Kirdish girl in Iraq underscores this writer's long-held contention that "they are not like us."

Here's what happened as reported by London's Daily Mail. Hardline religous leaders and male family members of Du'a Khalil Aswad condemned the 17-year-old girl to death by stoning because of her relationship with a Sunni Muslim boy. Aswad's family belongs to Yezidi, a Kurdish religious group in Iraq. The religious leaders and family members claimed she dishonored the family by failing to return home one night. Other reports suggest the "honor killing" had a lot to do with her apparent conversion to Islam.

Regardless of the reason, on or about April 7 of this year, eight or nine men dragged the girl into the street and stoned her for half an hour until she died, as a large crowd stood around and watched in the predominately Kurdish town near Mosul.

More here ...

They are not like us? I submit that's pure baloney. They are just like us. The only difference is that their laws are governed by their fundamentalist religion while our laws are separated from our religion.

If we removed the separation of church and state, allowing laws generated by our religious fundamentalists to become the law of the land, we'd see doctors executed with impunity in family planning clinics. Jerry Falwell's ilk would gleefully stone gays to death.

Historically, there is certainly ample precedent demonstrating that our fundamentalists can be just as blood thirsty as their fundamentalists. Witch hunts of the Inquisition are only one example of just how blood thirsty our religious fundamentalists can be. The Spanish imposition of Catholicism on the native peoples by the sword in the Americas is another example.

Closer to home and to our time, some of our religious fundamentalists believe it's alright to kill "abortion" doctors, execution style and run afoul of the law as a result of that fervently held belief. In spite of laws to the contrary, they believe they are answerable to a higher authority, that the murders are justified, and that they are acting as an agent of God (how arrogant to imagine one is picked by God to take the life of a fellow human being!).

Honor killing on religious grounds is small thing when compared to the wholesale death meted out by other fundamentalists at other times.

They are just like us - only we have the shield of secular law to protect us from ourselves.

"Religion is an abomination. With or without it, good men will do good things and evil men will do bad things but, for good men to do the most evil things ... that takes religion!"

~Unknown