A modern-day death by stoning (March 9)
By Chuck Doud
The Madera Tribune
The four photos are bloody and violent, so much so that we don’t want to print them here. The reason they caught my attention is that they won second place in the World Press photo contest. They were taken in Somalia, and showed a mob of people stoning a man to death.
The photos show a man lying on the ground, and a half circle of other men hurling chunks of white stone at him — chunks the size of cantaloupes. Some of the rocks are so big they have to be picked up with two hands.
The victim is being stoned to death by Islamic militants, carrying out a sentence imposed in a local Islamist court. The man being stoned had been convicted of adultery.
In the first photo, the victim is shown standing in a hole that will become his grave. In the next picture, he lies on the ground while the execution squad pummels him with the rocks. In the third, his bloody body is lowered into the grave hold, and in the next photo, more stones are hurled at his body in its grave until he is covered with them.
His killers seem to be enjoying what they are doing.
The photos reminded me of that admonition found in the Gospel of John, in which Jesus came upon a woman who had been accused of adultery, and was about to be stoned to death according to the law of Moses. Jesus said to her accusers, “Let those who have never sinned throw the first stones.” The accusers pondered those words, and then left. The woman was saved.
It makes me wonder whether the Somalis throwing the stones were themselves without sin, or whether they were just stupid young men with religion-fed bloodlust. If they were without sin before, they certainly were not after they executed this man.
Stoning is nothing new, as the Biblical references to it make clear, but it has long been abandoned, as has burning at the stake and other charming work of religious maniacs.
When someone mentions Somalia to you, remember they still stone people there.
