Remember this story when you see all the talk about listening to Ahmadinejad

In Iran, they're still stoning people to death for adultery.

A MAN convicted of adultery has escaped death by stoning in Iran after dragging himself out of the pit he had been buried in for the punishment – an act that means he is free under Islamic law.
Two other male adulterers were killed by the barbaric method in the same incident, which took place in the north-eastern city of Mashhad last month.

The stonings were confirmed yesterday by a spokesman for the judiciary, which says it is trying to have the widely condemned punishment abolished. Ali Reza Jamshidi said: "Given that the third person managed to pull himself out of the hole, the verdict was not carried out."

The stonings were in defiance of repeated calls from the international community for the Islamic Republic to abolish the practice.

....Under Iranian law the stones must be neither too big nor too small, so that death is neither mercifully quick nor endlessly prolonged. Some stoning victims are said to have taken 20 minutes to die.

Stoning sentences – usually imposed for adultery, which is sometimes penalised by flogging – were widely carried out in the early years after Iran's 1979 Islamic Revolution, but have been very rare in recent years.

A moratorium on stoning was issued by Ayatollah Mahmoud Shahroudi, head of the judiciary, in 2002. The European Union had made that measure and other human rights reforms a condition for opening negotiations with Iran.

Despite the moratorium, a man convicted of adultery was stoned last year, provoking international outrage. It was the first stoning confirmed by Iran's judiciary in five years, although rights activists said a man and woman were also stoned to death in 2006.

A group of Iranian lawyers, including Shadi Sadr, a prominent women's rights activist, has been campaigning for years to have stoning as a penalty removed from Iranian law.

But eight women and two men are said to be on death row facing stoning sentences. They are mostly illiterate and from underprivileged backgrounds, and were condemned in the absence of a good defence, rights activists said.

The majority of those stoned are women, who suffer disproportionately from such punishment, human rights groups say. "One reason is that they are not treated equally before the law and the courts, in clear violation of international fair trial standard."

Also, men stoned to death are buried to the waist, while women are buried deeper, to stop the stones from hitting their breasts. This apparent regard for a woman's modesty actually has a negative impact for women. If a prisoner manages to pull free during a stoning, he or she is acquitted or jailed, but is not executed. It is easier for a man to drag himself free because he is not buried so deeply.

Any day now, we'll see those mass protests in the streets against this humanity, won't we? It's much easier to mount protests against the United States' supposed inhumanity than to rouse international outrage over what Iran or Hamas is up to.