News on Oppression of Women (Jean Kim)

BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) has reported that one man and eight women have been sentenced to death by Stoning. It turned out that they were all convicted of adultery, the crime in which the traditional Islam law commands a death sentence by stoning. The article further blames the fact that uneducated women are becoming a major target for such brutal death sentence, compared to the males who commit the same adultery.

From the article's disapproving voice against such irrational application of laws, it can be inferred that the purpose of the article is to inform the public of the reality in Iran where women are getting oppressed. By emphasizing the fact that the women in Iran cannot even properly present their cases to the court just beacuse of their sex, the article also plays a role of convincing the public and other human-rights organizations (such as Amnesty Inernational) to take action.

The article may be biased in a way, since it only presents the Brisitsh point of view, when the Iran-Britain relations is quite hostile from the "concern that Tehran might be developing nuclear weapons" (BBC). Moreover, as BBC only wants to depict the Western perspectives on the Islams and other non-democratic nations, the article deliberately left out the Iranian/Muslim view on the subject of women's rights. Although Britain and many of the democratic Western nations criticize the Islam's discrimination over females, a number of Islam women in fact "do not think they are conditioned to accept second-class status or view themselves as oppressed" (NY Times 2006).


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Bibliography)

"BBC NEWS Middle East Nine face stoning death in Iran." BBC NEWS News Front Page. 30 Aug. 2008 http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7516238.stm.

"BBC NEWS Middle East Timeline: UK-Iran relations." BBC NEWS News Front Page. 30 Aug. 2008 http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/3077540.stm.

"Muslim Women Don't See Themselves as Oppressed, Survey Finds - New York Times." The New York Times - Breaking News, World News & Multimedia. 30 Aug. 2008 .