Sunday, December 31, 2006

It is not my Eid... so says the judge

Saddam Hussein was executed on Saturday, December 30, 2006 in the early Baghdad hours (6:10 am). The sentence came about quite swiftly, at least according to the American sense of justice. It is an entirelly different manner in the middle east. Saturday was, by most accounts, the day of Eid of Sacrifice- the time when the Hajj pilgrims, are required, by whom we do not know, to slaughter a sheep, a goat, a cow, a camal- in the name of the holy sacrifice. More than two million of them each year. The day is also a time of reflection for most ordinary moslims, but for the Middle Eastern dictators- and there are many- it is also a time to be jolly and release as many non-essential or accidental prisoners.

When Hussein was taken, one last time, to meet the judge on Saturday, his lawyer asked the judge why was he being hangged on the day of Eid. The judge replied that indeed he was not, and the Eid was on Sunday. The judge was a shiite. When it comes to such matters, another one is the start of the month of Ramadan, the shiites and the sunnis are separate by one day. This Shiite-Sunni thing has not gone missing from inspection: one sunni website has warned as to the danger of "the new enemy from the east". Iran, we think.

The other irony is that Hussein was tried, convicted and executed for only ONE crime- the mass killing of more than one hundred persons in 1982- in the aftermath of the start of the Iran-Iraq, in the Shiite town of Dujail. He was not tried or convicted for suppression of the Kurds- gassing in Halabjeh comes to mind. He was killed for killing the Shiites. This should not go missing on the kurds and their sense of justice.

It is not any wonder that the one foreign government most vocal and supportive of Hussein's execution was the Iranian government. The mullahs' television called Hussein the “enforcer of the most horrendous crimes against humanity.” More than 100,000 people who have perished, by torture, by burning alive, by stoning to death, and by execution, in the hands of the mullahs' henchmen, should by their definition, count the mullahs as the "most most horrenhous criminals in history."

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