Well I guess the biggest news is the Sadaam verdict. Honestly, I have to say it makes me feel a little sick to my stomach to watch people cheering over a death sentence. Especially when it is a bunch of people at a republican rally listening to our president proclaim another man’s eventual death as a victory. I discussed it a bit with my good friend here. She asked me what my reaction was and I told her honestly that regardless of his guilt or innocence I am against a death penalty. In any case. I just don’t believe that killing makes anything more right than life imprisonment. Her opinion was that a death sentence should only come from god. And she also thought that if we were going to get picky about world leaders killing people, sadaam’s numbers weren’t anything close to say, Bush’s or Israel’s or even the US dropping nuclear weapons over Japan. It isn’t so much that she was against a guilty verdict, it was just that she thought that there were plenty of other war criminals in the world and that those governments who ousted sadaam in the first place were packed full of them. And where were their trials and deaths by hanging? I’m not saying she wanted people dead, she wanted sadaam to receive life in prison and she wants other world leaders whose numbers of people killed (directly or indirectly) are in the tens or even hundreds of thousands to be held equally accountable. There are also people here who feel that the whole thing is a travesty. No matter what the network news says about people in the middle east celebrating about the verdict or sadaam’s removal from power, it is a highly divisive issue here. understandable. Yeah, he was a dictator, but he wasn’t killing hundreds of his people per week as the current violence is doing. When I last did operation smile, one of the fathers heard on the day that he was to return to iraq that his childhood friend had been killed accidentally by the American military. That was really hard to see. And people here see things like that on the news every day. I don’t really know where I am going with this. I guess I am just saying that when measuring the pros and cons of this whole iraq mess it is impossible for me to see how anyone can support it. but I guess you all probably knew, or hoped that I felt that way. So that is my initial exposure to the local reaction about the verdict.

In the newspaper today I read about an honor killing in Amman. A 17 year old girl got married a month ago. Apparently her husband “asked her to engage in abnormal sexual activities with him and offered her to one of his friends.” She ran away. She was found and given to her family. When she told her father what had happened he and her brother beat her with a stick. Then the father “asked his son to tie [her] with an electric cord and connect it to an electric socket; they electrocuted her until they made sure she was dead.” I usually try to stay positive when I write here. And even now I hesitate to write about something so negative. I don’t want to give the impression that this sort of thing happens all the time or that people here condone it. It goes directly against Islam. And honestly, there are more than enough negative ideas about the middle east and Arabs. But still, it is the 16th honor killing in Jordan this year. Sometimes I can easily forget that this society has the potential to be so oppressive. And then something like this catches my attention. But please don’t misunderstand my motives for including it. I just write about my life and the things on my mind. What was so surprising was that it got such a small write up in the paper. It took up 500 words or less.

And again, I am at a loss to follow those subjects with anything light hearted. Just seems lame. Next time.