NOT ABOUT TERRI SCHIAVO

Last Saturday I posted an excerpt from a New York Times story about students in Iraq who were beaten at a picnic by Islamist militiamen -- apparently for the "crime" of wearing Western-style clothes and jeans. Well, according to The Times of London, it appears that two of the students were beaten to death:

"There were dozens of them, armed with guns, and they poured into the park," Ali al-Azawi, 21, the engineering student who had organised the gathering in Basra, said.

"They started shouting at us that we were immoral, that we were meeting boys and girls together and playing music and that this was against Islam.

"They began shooting in the air and people screamed. Then, with one order, they began beating us with their sticks and rifle butts." Two students were said to have been killed.

But everyone knows Iraq is determined not to become a theocracy. Surely the authorities will see to it that justice is done.

Right?

Police were guarding the picnic in the park, as is customary at any large public gathering, but allowed the armed men in without any resistance....

After escaping with two students, Ali reached a police station and asked for help. "What do you expect me to do about it?" a uniformed officer asked....

When the students tried to organise demonstrations, they were broken up by the Mehdi Army. Later the university was surrounded by militiamen, who distributed leaflets threatening to mortar the campus if they did not call off the protests....

Colonel Kareem al-Zeidy, Basra’s police chief, pleaded helplessness. "What can I do? There is no government, no one to give us authority,” he said. “The political parties are the most powerful force in Basra right now."

And here's an aspect of the story that seems straight out of The Handmaid's Tale:

One [armed man] brought a video camera to record the sinful spectacle of the picnic, footage of which was later released to the public as a warning to others.

It showed images of one girl struggling as a gunman ripped her blouse off, leaving her half-naked. "We will send these pictures to your parents so they can see how you were dancing naked with men," a gunman told her.... Fellow students say that the girl later committed suicide.

Good Lord.

Will Iraq become an Islamist state? It seems that, right now, part of it already is one.

(Via This Is Rumor Control and the American Street.)