"Cruel and Sanguinary Laws"

Roger L. Simon reprints an article about a 16 year-old girl recently hanged in Iran:

On Sunday August 15, 2004, a 16 year old girl by the name of Atefe Rajabi, daughter of Ghassem Rajabi, was executed in the town of Neka, located in the province of Mazandaran, for "engaging in acts incompatible with chastity". The execution was carried out by the order of Neka's "judicial administrator" and was approved by both the Supreme Court of the Islamic Republic and the chief of the nation's "judiciary branch."

He includes this comment from Iranian doctor Ramin Etabar:

The murderous mullahs of Iran have executed another minor. The interviews of locals in the city of Neka conducted by Radio Farda revealed that this child was either mentally retarded or was suffering from a psychiatric illness. As a physician and human right's activist I can not express my outrage enough. The terrorist regime in Iran has been killing children for the past twenty five years. The virgin girls are raped by these Islamic hooligans the night before their execution in order to "prevent them from going to heaven".

Jihadwatch.org adds: "[T]his girl's reference to the fact that punishment should be meted out to the perpetrators, not the victims, makes it likely that she was a victim of rape."

Americans unfamiliar with their own history are sometimes shocked to learn that Thomas Jefferson's revised criminal code for the state of Virgina stipulated castration as the punishment for rape. Although Jefferson was in fact ameliorating the inherited English criminal law, under which rape was a capital offense, his revision may still seem gruesome to modern sensibilities. Even the most sensitive or ignorant, however, would instantly understand that the punishment--whatever it might be--was to be applied to the rapist, and not his victim.

If Islam is to free itself from Islamism, it must retrieve those ennobling elements that still exist--however tenuously--in its own heritage. Another entry in Jefferson's code provides a starting point: "Pardon and Privilege of clergy shall henceforth be abolished."