Mullahs for Islamic Values

Michael laden, writing in National Review Online, suggests the Iranian mullahs are guilty of torture, including rape, and murder:

Two summers ago, a middle-aged Iranian-Canadian journalist named Zahra Kazemi was arrested in Tehran while taking photographs of regime hoodlums beating up young people who were demonstrating for freedom. A few days later she turned up dead in a local military hospital. The regime...insisted that she had fallen in her prison cell and died of injuries to her head, denied that anyone had beaten her, and hastily buried her without any proper autopsy.

...Dr. Shahram Azam, a medical doctor who has just been granted asylum in Canada, has presented a firsthand account of the terrible death of Zara Kazemi. He says he examined Kazemi in a military hospital in Tehran on June 26, 2003. He says he found horrific injuries to her entire body that demonstrated torture and rape. By the time he examined her- an examination limited by the Islamic republic's sexist restrictions that made it illegal for a male doctor to look at her genital area- Kazemi was unconscious and her body was covered with bruises. According to Dr. Azam, she had a skull fracture, two broken fingers, missing fingernails, a crushed big toe, a smashed nose, deep scratches on her neck, and evidence of flogging...

"I could see this was caused by torture," Azam told Canadian journalists. He added that the nurse who examined Kazemi's genitals told him of "brutal damage."

Must have been quite a fall. Rape, tho seems out of character for Islamic fundamentalists. Or is it? I just don't know anymore. The more I read, the less I believe that someone trying to be a reasonably informed layman can tell the truth from propaganda, especially when propaganda is embellished truth.

In this case, Ladeen's column segues into stories of Iranian women in the international sexual slavery trade- something which may have nothing to do with the mullahs, and which I suspect is actively opposed by them. So, how to evaluate his information on Zahra Kazemi? She is dead, and the mullahs won't allow independent accounting for her death. A refugee claims torture and murder. Was rape hyperbola? Perhaps. Would that make her death much easier or the mullahs less culpable? Probably not.