Iranian woman will be hanged today

An Iranian woman originally sentenced to be stoned to death for adultery will instead be hanged today, officials in Tehran have announced.

That’s more than a little ironic: Iran, along with that other pillar of feminism, Saudi Arabia, is about to be elected to a new UN super-agency devoted to — yes — women’s rights.

The two Muslim nations are unopposed in next week’s elections for membership in the group, which consolidates four entities devoted to women’s issues into a single agency and elevates it politically within the world body.

As a protest letter from 214 local dissidents notes, women in Iran “lack the ability to choose their husbands, have no independent right to education after marriage, no right to divorce, no right to child custody, no protection from violent treatment in public spaces . . . and are arrested, beaten and imprisoned for peacefully seeking to change such laws.”

In Saudi Arabia, according to Human Rights Watch, the government “recognizes filial disobedience as a crime and denies an adult woman the right to live on her own and marry of her own free will” — among many other religiously based abuses.

Not that any of this should surprise: The United Nations, after all, is the same place that has tasked Libya with investigating human-rights abuses.

A cesspool of hypocrisy, in other words, that serves no useful purpose.

And whose presence within America’s borders remains an affront to those who are genuinely concerned with protesting human rights and ensuring global peace and security.  (Source)