In my column in the Sunday Mirror today — as well as a little bit of politics, as Ben Elton used to say — I write about the case of Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani. She is the unfortunate woman who has been convicted of adultery and condemned to death by stoning by the Iranian state.
She has already received 99 lashes of the whip from a regime that delights in cruelty, human rights abuses and wilful provocation — President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad disqualified himself from being taken seriously as a world leader after he said in 2005 that Israel was a “disgraceful blot” and should be “wiped off the face of the earth”. Since then, he has done all he can to live down to expectations.
There has been international outrage at the treatment by the Iranian state of Ms Ashtiani, and it looked at one point as if she would be offered asylum in Brazil. But Ahmadinejad, like Robert Mugabe, likes nothing more than to defy reasonable expectation, and now, in a disturbing twist in events, Ms Ashtiania has allegedly confessed on national television to murdering her husband as well. This is months after she expressed her innocence of all charges.
The whole thing has the sinister feel of an old-style Soviet show trial. Only China executes more people each year than Iran. Unless something can be done for her, it looks as if the tragic Ms Ashtiani will still be executed. Her death would be yet another symbol of the powerlessness and mistreatment of women in Islamic theocracies.
What is it these fanatics fear about their women? Their superiority, perhaps?
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