horrific stoning in iraq:
[important to remind the bigots that stoning is not wedded to "islam"]
Cellphone videos have appeared on the Internet showing an Iraqi mob stoning and kicking to death a 17-year-old girl after she offended her minority community by eloping with a Muslim man.
(...) "They brutally killed a young Yazidi girl in pursuit of out-of-date tribal rites," said Tahsin Saeed Ali, Emir of the Yazidis in
Iraq and the world and head of the Supreme Yazidi Spiritual Council, in a statement.
(...) Last week the United Nations' quarterly report on human rights in Iraq expressed serious concern over a rapid rise in so-called "honour killings" of women deemed to have betrayed their families in Kurdish Iraq.
(...) Yazidis -- who number some 500,000, mainly in northern Iraq -- speak a dialect of Kurdish but follow a pre-Islamic religion and have their own cultural traditions. They believe in God the creator and respect the Biblical and Koranic prophets, especially Abraham, but their main focus of worship is Malak Taus, the chief of the archangels, often represented by a peacock. Followers of other religions know this angel as Lucifer or Satan, leading to popular prejudice that the secretive Yazidis are devil-worshippers.
(...) Nevertheless, the community has survived for centuries alongside its Muslim and Christian neighbours. Now, however, with sectarian war gripping much of Iraq, Sunni Muslim extremists have begun to threaten them.