The Iranian government uses the same principles as Cho

Judith Klinghoffer has an interesting post up comparing Cho's expressed opinion that he could take people's lives because he judged them to be morally inferior to the Iranian Court's recent ruling supporting the principle that people can kill other people if they think they're being immoral. What a slippery slope that is. And she's right, once we say that some people have the moral authority to be prosecutor, judge, jury, and executioner over other people, we open the door to the sort of atrocities we saw at Virginia Tech.

Iran is demonstrating that they are accepting a vigilante forces that is the equivalent of Cho, except that they aren't motivated by a hateful evil to other people, but a hateful, evil religious sense of superiority that allows them to judge others' actions worthy of murder.

According to the Supreme Court’s earlier decision, the killers, who are members of the Basiji Force, volunteer vigilantes favored by the country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, considered their victims morally corrupt and, according to Islamic teachings and Iran’s Islamic penal code, their blood could therefore be shed.

The last victims, for example, were a young couple engaged to be married who the killers claimed were walking together in public.

They killed their victims by stoning or drowning them.

Now that a court has approved the actions of a vigilante force directed by leaders like Khamenei and Ahmadinejad, they have created an entire country into a Virginia Tech where Cho-like murderers can roam at will and select their victims and even not have to kill themselves afterward, but perhaps even receive the support and thanks of the nation's leaders. And, as Klinghoffer points out, this is a country that is seeking nuclear weapons and has already stated that Israel is not a country worthy of existing.

Imagine Cho with a nuclear weapon and that will be Iran.