I knew I shouldn’t have and I almost didn’t, but I watched the video of that poor Kurdish girl being stoned to death. It’s a low quality cell phone clip, but nonetheless, entirely sickening. That poor little girl–seventeen years old–is lying there on the ground, bloody and too weak to do more than roll over, and people are just standing there in a tight circle around her, trying to get a good angle with their cameraphones. Well, except those that are kicking her, that is. Her pants have been torn off, and one person (just one) flipped the edge of what appeared to be a coat over her to cover her underwear. The person who kicked her next made her roll over and it fell off.

Regardless of religion and ethnicity, and even of “shame cultures”, how could those who would watch this (much less actually do it) still call themselves human? I know that cultures are different in the Middle East, but still…stoning her to death for converting to another religion in order to marry someone she loved? No one helped her, no one even tried. Seventeen years old, guilty of nothing more than wanting to marry a young man she loved…and brutally kicked, beaten and stoned for half an hour until she finally died, at the hands of a mob including members of her own family. There cannot be a god; if there were, nothing like this would ever happen, at least not without a few lightning bolts from the sky getting involved. Sickening.