We know that in Texas, and in particular in the ‘Bushy’ parts, and in Florida, governed by a lesser Bush, the death penalty is alive and kicking. Actually, the kicking takes place just before life ends.
Hanging is a grotesque way of ending a human life. In fact, it is not the desired way of terminating any animal. Were you to hang a dog or pig, two of the most unclean animals in Islam, you would be harshly punished in either state for animal cruelty.
Furthermore, even if you were killing the animals for food, the meat would be neither Kosher nor Halal and therefore defiled.
To my knowledge, hanging is not an approved means of execution in any American state; the two accepted methods are the lethal injection and the electric chair. Even the latter is being eliminated because of the ‘shocking’ revelation that the condemned do feel some prolonged pain. While in the former, only a little needle prick is felt.
Texas and Florida are parts of the southern US where the institution of hanging has had a ‘coloured’ history. Thousands of innocent black slaves and ex-slaves were put to the rope, tethered, often without a trial, for nothing more than a furtive glance of a daring stare.
The common practice of ‘lynching’ is said to have taken its name from a Jamaican, slave-owner, Willie Lynch, who introduced it to the Americans in the south as a means of controlling their ‘n*****s.’
Texas was a particularly hard state for African- Americans so not surprisingly, it was the last place in the US where slavery was abolished. In fact, it took more than another two years after Abraham Lincoln made the emancipation proclamation on New Year’s Day 1863 for black Texans to be free.
Even so, it happened only after General Gordon Granger rode into Galveston with his army and declared the 250,000 African descendants free. Since then June 19 is celebrated as ‘Juneteenth,’ marking slavery’s effective end.
In the British isles there was not much hanging of blacks. However, it was commonplace in the Antilles. Some famous executions include those of Jamaicans, Sam Sharpe in 1831 and George William Gordon and Paul Bogle in 1865.
Nonetheless, inasmuch as the black-dominated nation states in the Caribbean have maintained hanging on their statutes, it is something that their former lords and masters strongly object to.
After all, her majesty’s lords and parliament have outlawed executions on their soil. Taking a human life is not ‘civilised’ and is ‘downwhite’ wrong.
Furthermore, the European Union (EU) of caucasian Christian countries does not kill its citizens legally and the British Privy Council has virtually prevented the Caribbean Community countries from carrying out the death penalty.
Isn’t it sheer hypocrisy for a British-partnered invasion of a country to lead to the handing over of its former dictator, an ex-NATO ally, to the ‘natives’ to be taunted and hanged like a tormented dog?
True, Saddam was a monster and was convicted - though hastily and not too transparently - in the courts. His crime was the 1982 murder of 148 Shiites in the city of Dujail, as retaliation for a failed attempt on his life.
By the way, Saddam had himself made an unsuccessful attempt on the life of George Bush senior. Nonetheless, there might not be a connection.
Heinous indeed is the slaughter of Iraqi citizens. However, to even begin to compare the atrocities of Saddam with the African holocaust during and after slavery, one needs a deeper pile of Shiites.
Just 199 years ago on Tuesday last week, one Captain Homans of the ship Brillante chained more than 600 Africans he was transporting illegally and dumped them overboard like inanimate contraband.
This, he did while attempting to escape arrest because the slave trade was abolished a year earlier. Even the US, which released its slaves 27 years after the British, had outlawed the importation of Africans the day before.
Though apprehended, Homans was never convicted. This is one single event; can you imagine how many others there were?
I am hanging around for Tony Blair’s comments.
Published: 10 January 2007
Issue: 1251
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment