Just another ho-hum beheading or two. Move along, nothing to see here.

by SixofNine 14 Replies latest social current

• 

  SixofNine

  Somehow this didn't make a very big an impact with people around here. Odd that. Human nature isn't pretty to watch sometimes, and I'm not refering to radical muslim human nature.

  Heads of 2 Sayyaf hostages displayed in market
  MINDANAO: AUG. 23: Why? Why them? What wrong have they done?
  
  No one could provide answers to 73-year-old Connie Kaadlawon's questions after she learned that the Abu Sayyaf had beheaded her 21-year-old nephew, Lemuel Mantulo, and his companion, Lionel Mantic.
  
  
  Army Brigade commander Brigadier General Romeo Tolentino, based in the Muslim populated province of Sulu, reported Thursday that the heads of Mantulo and Mantic had been found on fruit stalls at the Alat public market in the provincial capital Jolo.
  
  Two Abu Sayyaf gunmen on Tuesday seized Mantulo (earlier identified as Bantolo), Mantic and four women in Patikul town, a few kilometers outside Jolo. All six are members of the Christian group Jehovah's Witnesses.
  
  Mantulo's head was found at 6 a.m. Thursday in a black garbage bag with a note that read, "It's a war against infidel and non-believers of Islam."
  
  Mantic's head, covered in a black cloth bag, was recovered about 100 meters away eight hours earlier.
  
  "Savagely done," Tolentino said of Mantulo's beheading. "His neck was cut three times."
  He said the note justified the beheadings as part of jihad, or holy war.
  
  Officials said the bandits were still holding hostage Mantic's 23-year-old widow Emily; Mantulo's sister Florida, 40; his sister-in-law Cleofe, 46; and Nori Bendijo, 41.
  
  Relatives said the members of the Jehovah's Witnesses were not spreading their faith in the predominantly Muslim area but selling Avon cosmetic products, herbal tea and medical supplies.
  
  "They didn't even have religious leaflets," Nori Bendijo's husband Tirso said. "They were just trying to supplement their income."
  
  Junie Cleofe said he allowed his wife to join the group as they were having a hard time in making ends meet.
  
  "We don't preach there. We just want to earn a living. We never expected this thing to happen," he said. The Cleofes have two sons, ages 9 and 11.
  
  A spokesperson for the Jehovah's Witnesses main office in Quezon City, in Metro Manila, said the congregation did not deploy the group in Sulu to recruit new members.
  
  "We have not sent anyone for a religious mission in Sulu," said Jean Jacek, an American.
  
  Even so, Jacek said the congregation was giving financial and spiritual assistance to the victims' families.
  
  The Mantulos are from Malangas town in Zamboanga del Sur province. They moved to Zamboanga City in 1994 and have since lived in an apartment near Kingdom Hall of the Jehovah's Witnesses in the city's Pasonanca section. The Mantics are from Lapuyan town in Zamboanga del Norte province.
  
  Mantulo's sister, Yvonne, said the government was returning her brother's head to her family. "I hope they'll free the remaining (hostages), allow them to come home alive," she said. "We're so saddened."
  
  Police said two gunmen stopped a jeep carrying the Jehovah's Witnesses and forced them out. The driver was left behind and alerted authorities. A Muslim couple, who served as guides, were also not taken.
  
  The Philippine and US governments denounced the beheadings as "terrorist acts" and demanded the unconditional release of the four remaining hostages.
  
  "President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo is very concerned about the safety of the hostages and just like any other decent Filipino, we condemn the atrocities by this group," Press Secretary Ignacio Bunye said.
• 

  simplesally

  This never made big headlines I guess because it was in Manilla, not Iraq. Not headline news. Not Americans. Tragic all the same.

  ---------------------------------

  Saudi Arabia - the beheading capital of the modern world. Saudi Arabia uses public beheading as the punishment for murder, rape, drug trafficking, sodomy and armed robbery, apostasy and certain other offences. 45 men and 2 women were beheaded in 2002 and a further 52 men and 1 woman in 2003.
  The condemned of both sexes are given tranquillisers and then taken by police van to a public square or a car park after midday prayers. Their eyes are covered and they are blindfolded. The police clear the square of traffic and a sheet of blue plastic sheet about 16 feet square is laid out on the ground.
  Dressed in their own clothes, barefoot, with shackled feet and hands cuffed behind their back, the prisoner is led by a police officer to the centre of the sheet where they are made to kneel facing Mecca. An Interior Ministry official reads out the prisoner's name and crime to the crowd of witnesses.
  A policeman hands the sword to the executioner who raises the gleaming scimitar and often swings it two or three times before approaches the prisoner from behind and jabbing him in the back with the tip of the sword causing the person to raise their head. ( see photo )
  Normally it takes just one swing of the sword to sever the head, often sending it flying some two or three feet. Paramedics bring the head to a doctor, who uses a gloved hand to stop the fountain of blood spurting from the neck. The doctor sews the head back on, and the body is wrapped in the blue plastic sheet and taken away in an ambulance. The body is then buried in an unmarked grave in the prison cemetery.
  Beheadings of women did not start until the early 1990s, previously they were shot. 33 women have been publicly beheaded up to the end of 2003.
  Most executions are carried out in the three major cities of Riyadh, Jeddah and Dahran.
  Saudi executioners take great pride in their work and the post tends to be handed down from one generation to the next
• 

  SixofNine

  It made the headlines well enough here on JWD. We all saw it, if we were around Aug, 2002.
• 

  rem

  Yeah, I remember that. It was disgusting and sickened me.
  
  rem
• 

  SixofNine

  .
• 

  Brummie

  Yep I remember reading it, it should have made international headlines, its only in times such as these that i can support the rights of JWs. Poor souls.

  Human nature isn't pretty to watch sometimes

  Agreed.
• 

  obiwan

  Human nature isn't pretty to watch sometimes

  I don't consider it human nature. I consider it disgusting human atrocities.
• 

  frankiespeakin

  In the world today there are over 6 billion people. I'd say the odds that someone somewhere will do a terribly bad thing every hour more less. It is only reasonable that only a very very small portion of those supper bad things will get any mention in the news.

  New agencies are a business,,it cost money to report the news,,therefore economics plays a very important role in what gets on the news,,because news is big business.
• 

  Big Tex

  I remember this, it stayed with me for some time.

  "You are capable of such beautiful dreams, and such horrible nightmares." -- Carl Sagan, "Contact"
• 

  lauralisa

  Hey Sixy... check this out:
  
  
  http://www.city-journal.org/html/14_2_when_islam.html
  
  From the Manhattan Institute
  (excerpt follows)
  
  ...But his model left Islam with two intractable problems. One was political. Muhammad unfortunately bequeathed no institutional arrangements by which his successors in the role of omnicompetent ruler could be chosen (and, of course, a schism occurred immediately after the Prophet?s death, with some?today?s Sunnites?following his father-in-law, and some?today?s Shi?ites?his son-in-law). Compounding this difficulty, the legitimacy of temporal power could always be challenged by those who, citing Muhammad?s spiritual role, claimed greater religious purity or authority; the fanatic in Islam is always at a moral advantage vis-à-vis the moderate. Moreover, Islam?in which the mosque is a meetinghouse, not an institutional church?has no established, anointed ecclesiastical hierarchy to decide such claims authoritatively. With political power constantly liable to challenge from the pious, or the allegedly pious, tyranny becomes the only guarantor of stability, and assassination the only means of reform. Hence the Saudi time bomb: sooner or later, religious revolt will depose a dynasty founded upon its supposed piety but long since corrupted by the ways of the world.
  
  The second problem is intellectual. In the West, the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Enlightenment, acting upon the space that had always existed, at least potentially, in Christianity between church and state, liberated individual men to think for themselves, and thus set in motion an unprecedented and still unstoppable material advancement. Islam, with no separate, secular sphere where inquiry could flourish free from the claims of religion, if only for technical purposes, was hopelessly left behind: as, several centuries later, it still is.
  
  The indivisibility of any aspect of life from any other in Islam is a source of strength, but also of fragility and weakness, for individuals as well as for polities. Where all conduct, all custom, has a religious sanction and justification, any change is a threat to the whole system of belief. Certainty that their way of life is the right one thus coexists with fear that the whole edifice?intellectual and political?will come tumbling down if it is tampered with in any way. Intransigence is a defense against doubt and makes living on terms of true equality with others who do not share the creed impossible.
  
  Not coincidentally, the punishment for apostasy in Islam is death: apostates are regarded as far worse than infidels, and punished far more rigorously. In every Islamic society, and indeed among Britain?s Muslim immigrants, there are people who take this idea quite literally, as their rage against Salman Rushdie testified.
  
  The Islamic doctrine of apostasy is hardly favorable to free inquiry or frank discussion, to say the least, and surely it explains why no Muslim, or former Muslim, in an Islamic society would dare to suggest that the Qu?ran was not divinely dictated through the mouth of the Prophet but rather was a compilation of a charismatic man?s words made many years after his death, and incorporating, with no very great originality, Judaic, Christian, and Zoroastrian elements. In my experience, devout Muslims expect and demand a freedom to criticize, often with perspicacity, the doctrines and customs of others, while demanding an exaggerated degree of respect and freedom from criticism for their own doctrines and customs. I recall, for example, staying with a Pakistani Muslim in East Africa, a very decent and devout man, who nevertheless spent several evenings with me deriding the absurdities of Christianity: the paradoxes of the Trinity, the impossibility of Resurrection, and so forth. Though no Christian myself, had I replied in kind, alluding to the (Truncated by lauralisa)