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Politics : WAR on Terror. Will it engulf the Entire Middle East? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: American Spirit who wrote (19465)	1/16/2007 6:31:09 PM
From: Solon	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 32591

Oh, I see. Bush is to blame for the fact that Iran is a world leader in the abuse of human rights. Perhaps you should write Wikpedia and haver them update their information. Human rights violations in Islamic Republic of Iran can be said to derive from two elements; Firstly, traditional Islam and the Sharia law: The historical petrification of Sharia law by some cultures/regimes has allowed for significant gender inequality, homosexual persecution, as well as other internationally criticised practices such as stoning as a method of execution. Furthermore, in Iran, a mentality of fatalism established through the practice of Shia Islam also helps less educated elements of the public disregard violations by attributing them to fate.[1][2] Secondly, the Iranian government itself, in its continual drive to secure its own political power base, as well as to maintain centralised control over a fragmented multi-ethnic society, disregards human rights where it sees it as politically useful. This usually takes place when dealing with minorities, or with protests that are critical of the government. History Cyrus CylinderIran is home to the first charter of human rights [3] - the Persian Empire established unprecedented principles of human rights in the 6th century BC, under the reign of Cyrus the Great. After his conquest of Babylon in 539 BC, the King issued the Cyrus Cylinder, discovered in 1879 and recognised by many today as the first document defining a person's human rights. The cylinder declared that citizens of the Empire would be allowed to practice their religious beliefs freely and abolished slavery. This means that all the palaces of the Kings of Persia were built by paid workers, in an era where slaves typically did such work. These two reforms were reflected in the biblical books of Chronicles and Ezra, which state that Cyrus released the followers of Judaism from slavery and allowed them to migrate back to their land. Following Persia's defeat at the hands of Alexander the Great, the concept of human rights was abandoned. In 1906 the Iranian Constitutional Revolution resulted in a constitutional monarchy. For the first time in over 2000 years, since Cyrus the Great, Iran was relying on a code of law to govern the interactions of its citizens and define their minimum freedoms. With the arrival of Reza Shah Pahlavi in 1925, the constitutional monarchy was for all practical reasons abolished. His son, Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi continued in his fathers footsteps. It was under his reign that the Iranian human rights movement drastically picked up once again and ultimately climaxed in the 1979 Iranian Revolution. Following the revolution, the subsequent Islamic Government of Iran continued to flagrantly disregard human rights and in many cases has made the situation worse. The volume, Crimes Against Humanity: Indict Iran's Ruling Mullahs for Massacre of 30,000 Political Prisoners, was pubished by the National Council of Resistance of Iran Foreign Affairs Committee in 2001. The report contains a statement by Eric Avebury, Member of the House of Lords, Vice-chairman of the British Parliamentary Human Rights Group, written in 2001. Lord Avebury describes a major massacre in 1988, (according to Ayatollah Hossein-Ali Montazeri): "in the first few days of the...massacre...thousands were killed, and at a conservative estimate. the final death toll was in the region of 30,000.". It is worth noting that the National Council of Resistance of Iran is an umbrella organisation for the MKO, a recognised terrorist organisation. Following the rise of the reform movement within Iran and the election of moderate Iranian president Mohammad Khatami in 1997 numerous moves were made to modify the Iranian civil and penal codes in order to improve the human rights situation. The predominantly reformist parliament drafted several bills allowing increased freedom of speech, the banning of torture, and gender equality. These were all dismissed or significantly watered down by the Guardian Council and leading conservative figures in the Iranian government at the time That ubiquitous Bush again, AS. He snuck right into the Guardian Council! LOL!