Western Values Considered Perversion in Asian States

A judge from the city of Lahor, Pakistan, brought down an unusual sentence against two brothers. They will have their ears and noses cut off for doing the same to their female cousin, who refused to marry one of the men.

Photo: Western Values Considered Perversion in Asian States

The sentence is based on the retaliation law introduced in the country in 1979. According to the law, a perpetrator’s punishment shall be identical to the crime that he or she committed, unless a perpetrator is forgiven by victim and victim’s family.

Pakistan is not the only country that preserves medieval traditions in the court system. Thieves, for example, can be deprived of either hand or whole arm in a number of countries. Sophisticated types of death penalty can be used very often too. A perpetrator can be stoned to death or shoved over a cliff in six countries of Asia and Africa. Such brutal punishment can be applied for adultery, prostitution and sex crimes.

Criminals can be decapitated for committing grave crimes in Yemen, Qatar and Saudi Arabia. For example, six people were beheaded in 2005 in Saudi Arabia for hijacking a car.

The punishment for sex crimes can be especially severe in many Asian countries. Two homosexual men were buried alive in an Afghan town in 1998.

International human rights activists constantly accuse the Iranian government for the use of death penalty against homosexual individuals. The UN Human Rights Committee passed a resolution in 1998 urging the government of Iran to legally ban such types of punishment as mutilation and stoning.

Rajab Satarov, an expert on Iran, said in an interview with Pravda.Ru that some laws, which Iran follows, may seem too severe to residents of Europe.

“Such laws touch upon those individuals who pose a direct threat to the society and the state. They can be stoned; thieves can lose their hands. Civilized people will find this crazy. There is a good side to it too: people are terribly scared to commit crimes.

“As for the Western criticism of Iran – there is nothing surprising about it. No morality at all is considered normal in the West. This can never work in Iran – any displays of alien ideology will be suppressed in this country.

“One should not approach such measures as something barbarous. The results are obvious: the number of divorces in Iran is extremely low. I’d like to remind you that the Iranians toppled their Padishah in 1979 because he was propagating Western values in the society. The Iranians could not stand the Western perversion and attempts to replace traditional family values with commitment-free relationships.

“One should also pay attention to the fact that the West criticizes presumably Iran for the use of “medieval laws,” although the laws of Saudi Arabia are a lot more brutal in some aspects. For example, women are not allowed to work there or drive a car. There are no democratic liberties in Saudi Arabia at all – this is a country with medieval laws. In Iran, a woman can be a boss to a group of men,” the expert said.

Sergey Balmasov
Pravda.Ru

Read the original in Russian