Your Mileage Will Vary

The next level of moral equivalence. Stoning is more than acceptable under Iranian human rights because that's how they interpret it.

A top Iranian official Sunday defended the use of execution by stoning after a sentence was carried out on an adulterer, saying the punishment was legal and in line with Iran's rights commitments.

Mohammad Javad Larijani, the head of the Iranian judiciary's human rights committee, said the judiciary supported the principle of stoning after confirmation last week of the stoning sparked international condemnation.

"Stoning is based on Islamic Sharia law and it is not contrary to any of our international obligations," Larijani was quoted as saying by state television's Web site.

"We have signed four important treaties on human rights. None of them has any opposition to stoning.

"But since Westerners have their own interpretations of the articles and the contents of these documents, they oppose stoning," said Larijani, the brother of Iran's top nuclear negotiator Ali Larijani.

The stoning to death of Jafar Kiani in a village in the northwestern province of Qazvin was the first time Iran had confirmed such an execution in five years, and came despite a 2002 directive to suspend the practice.

By that reasoning, expect the Iranians to claim that a clampdown on free speech and the press is acceptable because they say it doesn't violate international law and Sharia makes it so.

Iran is laughing in the face of the West and shows that all those treaties and international laws that claim to prevent human rights abuse are so much nonsense because they can be violated at the drop of a hat.

Iran will continue doing its own thing, stoning and carrying out gross violations of human rights until they are stopped. Sanctions are not likely to work, and Iran knows this all too well. The West is too fractured to truly bring power to bear on Iran because of the ongoing Iraq campaign and the resultant fallout from that endeavor.

Iran's mullahs are using their crackdown to cement their hold on power, but one has to wonder whether the more they tighten their grip, the more people slip through and realize the mullah's folly in seeking a massive confrontation with the West that might lead to a regional war of epic proportions.