In Iran, if you’re a member of the Basiji Force, an Islamic militia close to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and boasts Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as a former member, you can kill people for being “morally corrupt” without reprieve.  Six members of this state-sponsored militia were exonerated for doing just that.

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

Iran’s Islamic penal code, which is a parallel system to its civic code, says murder charges can be dropped if the accused can prove the killing was carried out because the victim was morally corrupt.

This is true even if the killer identified the victim mistakenly as corrupt. In that case, the law requires “blood money” to be paid to the family. Every year in Iran, a senior cleric determines the amount of blood money required in such cases. This year it is $40,000 if the victim is a Muslim man, and half that for a Muslim woman or a non-Muslim.

Quite interesting that the life of a woman or a non-Muslim is worth half that of a Muslim male, and yet feminists in the United States seem to prefer the Iranian regime to that of the United States.  Yay, feminism.

“The roots of the problems are in our laws,” said Mohammad Seifzadeh, a lawyer and a member of the Association for Defenders of Human Rights in Tehran. “Such cases happen as long as we have laws that allow the killer to decide whether the victim is corrupt or not. Ironically, such laws show that the establishment is not capable of bringing justice, and so it leaves it to ordinary people to do it.”

The ruling stems from a case in 2002 in Kerman that began after the accused watched a tape by a senior cleric who ruled that Muslims could kill a morally corrupt person if the law failed to confront that person.

Some 17 people were killed in gruesome ways after that viewing, but only five deaths were linked to this group. The six accused, all in their early 20s, explained to the court that they had taken their victims outside the city after they had identified them. Then they stoned them to death or drowned them in a pond by sitting on their chests.

It would seem to me that though this is the law in Iran, the number of cases that use this law are relatively low.  We would have heard more about it before this, seeing as how it originated in 2002.

Even so, it is rather disturbing in the greater sense that the Iranian government believes all citizens of so-called Western nations are morally corrupt.  Using this guideline it would be permissable to simply kill all citizens of said nations under Iranian law, but also morally correct to do so because this law was handed down by a cleric.  I needn’t remind anyone, but Iran is building a nuclear program.