The death of all humanity

Saw this video about a girl being barbarically flogged by the Taliban. Her crime - she came out of the house with a man who was not her husband. The punishment meted out to her - she was pinned to the ground face down, with two men holding her arms and legs and a third guy who lashed her 34 times. What's more - as a symbolic gesture, one of the guys who were holding her arms and legs was her brother!! This is the Taliban justice at its best: a rapt crowd, a female victim crying out in pain, and a world stunned into silence.

It was all carried out in the Swat Valley in Pakistan where Pakistan's North West Frontier Province government ceded authority to the Taliban under a peace deal, giving them almost a free hand to impose their puritan Islamic rule on the around 600,000 people of Swat and its seven neighboring districts. I am shocked at the ability of the Taliban to carry out such public punishments with impunity. During a time when even mass murderers like Saddam Hussain are given a fair trial, it is really gross to punish such a petty crime (if it was a crime at all in the first place) in such an inhumane way.

This is not just a one-off incident. Almost daily we can hear about some terror attack or learn about a heinous crime in Pakistan. The saddest part is that they do this in the name of Islam. They seem to think that the more visibly different from the epithets of modernity that the Taliban can be, the more automatically Islamic it becomes. How people survive in a society with enshrouding of women and forcible bearding of men is beyond me. How lucky I am to have been born in India!

Having born and brought up in a peace loving society, I cannot imagine myself witnessing such an event ever. But I feel really strongly against atrocities on women. All the rapists and all the people showing their manhood by beating up helpless women should be publicly castrated. You guys might say - this means that there is no difference between my thinking and that of Taliban, but I think that beating up an unarmed, helpless women is one of the worst crimes in the world.