IRNA -- The unprecedented persecution and killings of Iraqi Shiites during the barbarous and inhuman rule of Saddam and his henchmen clearly demonstrates the monstrous nature of the Baathist regime, condemned `Iran News' in its editorial on Tuesday.
| All the non-Shiites slaughtered or maimed were a bad thing, too, I'd say... |
Iraqi intelligence ministry Estekhbarat [Mukhabarat] records recently made public after the downfall of Saddam Hussein's regime revealed that 182 Shiite dissident clerics were murdered by the former Baath regime during a 19 year period. Apparently, these religious figures were either kidnapped or arrested without any prior warning and never heard from again, it wrote. This tragic news clearly indicates the true wickedness and monstrous nature of Saddam's brutal tyranny, the extent of which may never be fully comprehended it said.
| Pretty simple: he killed anyone who disagreed with him, and some who did. What's so hard to comprehend about that? It's not like it's a new idea... |
The wild celebrations by the Iraqi people after the fall of Saddam's statue in Baghdad showed how rigged the former Iraqi dictator's foreordained elections really were. He usually got a perfect 100 percent of all votes cast, it noted. The images of Saddam's terrifying prisons and the ledger of his unspeakable crimes documented by the Estekhbarat as well as other levers of his state terror apparatus make Saddam and his Tikrit clan of killers and torturers, if not unique, at least rare in the annals of human history as far as savagery and brutality. The intense persecution of a religious minority to the extent of the Iraqi Shiites during Saddam's barbarous rule is unprecedented since the Middle Ages in Europe, it said.
| Well, actually there are worse parallels. Like in Europe. In the 1930s and 40s. But those were Jews and Gypsies and Slavs and other infidels and worthless folk, weren't they? |
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