The problem is the execution
by digby
Following up on Tom's post from this morning, I notice that the right wing is having a full blown hissy fit over the beheading murder in Oklahoma by a Muslim convert. I can't tell if they think that this is an ISIS conspiracy or if they think the government should immediately jail all American Muslims just in case (maybe both) but they are very exercised.
The story is this: an African American man with a prison record converted last year to Islam. He was fired from his job on Thursday (no idea why) and immediately attacked two women who worked there, decapitating one and stabbing the other. The COO shot him and stopped the attack. It's a horrible story. Now, this man may be completely sane and driven by a desire to commit jihad. But it appears on the face of it that he's actually a disgruntled employee seeking revenge --- a sadly common story in America. The mode of death is likely tie to his conversion to Islam but his motive appears to be the same as many other other workplace killings --- anger at being dismissed.
It's also important to recognize that it's not only sicko terrorists who decapitate their victims (although, as I said, this one was very likely to have been inspired by the ISIS murders, although the motive appears to be much more banal.) Here's an absolutely sickening one, committed by an insane person. And heinous criminal drug gangs have been employing this method for a while. Check out this story from 2012:
In September 2006, gunmen opened the doors of the Sol y Sombra discotheque in Uruapan, in the western Mexican state of Michoacan, and threw five human heads onto the dance floor.
As frightened partygoers looked on, the gang left a scrawled message at the scene, announcing the arrival of a new, breakaway drug cartel called La Familia Michoacana, and walked out as coolly as they had entered.
For many, it represented a shocking new degree of brutality by the country's drug traffickers. It made headlines around the world.
Francisco Castellanos is the correspondent for the respected Mexican magazine, Proceso, in Michoacan.
He sees the 2006 beheadings as a game-changing moment in the conflict:
"The five were local drug dealers in Uruapan", he says in an email from the embattled Pacific state, adding that the hastily-written threat left at the crime scene spoke of "divine justice".
"It generated great fear and terror."
[...]
Such a violent form of execution is generally associated with the sort of radical Islamist groups who killed US journalist Daniel Pearl in Pakistan, or British civil engineer Kenneth Bigley in Iraq.
Cult of death
But the Mexican context is very different, says Mr Gonzalez Ruiz. He argues the practice comes from Guatemala:
"In 2000, the Zetas began to extend their reach into Central America, and they incorporated into their ranks members of the elite jungle squad, the Kaibiles."
A statue of "Saint Death" is seen in Mexico City March 7, 2012.
The cult of La Santa Muerte is on the rise and some see a link to the extreme violence
"The Kaibiles had been trained in using decapitation to threaten the local population since the times of the country's dirty war (1960-1996)."
Others see links to a religious cult popular with the drug gangs called La Santa Muerte, or Holy Death.
Some commentators have even drawn comparisons to pre-Columbian human sacrifices by the Aztec and the Mayan civilisations.
Wherever it stems from, the gruesome practice is now a staple in the lexicon of violence of the drug cartels in Mexico.
This month has been perhaps the worst in terms of decapitations.
In the past 10 days alone, there have been an unprecedented 81 beheaded bodies discovered in the country.
In early May, 14 decapitated bodies were found in Nuevo Laredo, just over the border from Texas.
Last week, 18 bodies and severed heads were left in two mini-vans near Lake Chapala, an area popular with tourists in western Mexico.
Finally, in one of the most shocking incidents of its kind since the current drug war began, 49 headless and mutilated bodies were left in plastic bags on a road outside the industrial city of Monterrey.
I only bring this up because it's important to remember that this form of execution is not specific to Islam. Obviously, some radical Muslims are using the method for much the same reason as the criminal drug gangs and ... the Saudi government, which uses beheading for the same reason: to scare the hell out of people. And it works.
It wasn't always that way. The list of historical beheadings is very, very long. Virtually every nation did it although the English and the French really made a fetish out of it, particularly applying it to the nobility because it was considered a humane form of execution. (Just goes to show you how things change...) It's horrible to us in the modern world for good reason. It's brutal and primitive. But the truth is that executing people by any method is brutal and primitive ... even the supposedly humane lethal injection.
So let's just call it what it is: cold-blooded murder. And murder, whether at the hands of a terrorist, a criminal, an insane person or the state is immoral and wrong.
Update: Oh boy
Hamid Karzai’s last major act as president of Afghanistan may well be ordering the execution of five men who were convicted of rape after a trial that the United Nations’ top human rights official has denounced as unfair.
The convictions were based entirely on the defendants’ confessions, which all five men testified during the appeals process were obtained by torture at the hands of the police. One of the five men said he was beaten so badly that he would have confessed to incest with his mother.
The United Nations high commissioner for human rights, Zeid Ra’ad Zeid al-Hussein, called on Mr. Karzai and his successor, Ashraf Ghani, who will be inaugurated on Monday, not to carry out the death penalty “and to refer the case back to courts given the due process concerns,” according to a statement issued by his spokeswoman, Ravina Shamdasani.
Mr. Zeid’s appeal may well come too late, because there were indications that the executions would be carried out speedily. Mr. Karzai has already promised to see the men executed once the Supreme Court upholds their convictions, which it now has done.
It seems to me that the method employed to execute these men -- or anyone --- is beside the point. It's about the killing.
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