I am writing this as an immediate response to a video I just watched on the Internet. It’s just one of those times when your curiosity piques and you hit play knowing how damn angry the video will make you, but you go ahead and watch it anyway. The video was of a stoning of a woman, recorded about three years ago. The scene was obviously Middle Eastern, though it did not say the exact country. It opens up with the woman’s face; she looks unafraid, almost indifferent to the dozen men that surround her, two of which are armed with assault rifles. The others are armed with visible malcontent. As the video plays on, that god-awful ominous music blares away (if you’ve seen any of these militant Islamic videos, you know the tune of which I speak). The camera scrolls down to a ditch in the ground, only a few feet deep, just big enough to bury a dog. One man says something in Arabic which I can only interpret as “the hole is too shallow,” and sure enough they dig a little deeper. When they were finished, the woman calmly climbed into the hole but the surface came up to her waist, still not seemingly deep enough for the task ahead. It seemed that time was of the essence, so one of the men with a rifle ordered her to kneel down, which she did without a word in reply. As she knelt down in the shallow grave, young boys and men quickly sealed her in, swiping the ground with their feet, kicking dust in or picking up clumps of earth to pour on top of her. With so many people working together, the space in the hole was quickly filled and the woman was buried up to her neck in sand and earth. During the filling, the woman did not flinch and her expression did not change even when the packing of dirt began to limit her movement, rendering her powerless for what was about to come. She just stayed quiet.

Once she was compact and completely unable to move, that was when the first of the rocks hit her, just above the eyebrow it looked like. The one who threw it was young, maybe fifteen but he wasn’t alone; everybody joined in, within seconds it was like a hailstorm, a swarm of cutting jagged rocks. Some stones missed their target, instead whizzing past the defenceless woman’s head but others found their mark; you could hear the hard stone colliding with soft flesh. If you’d like to experience the sound without watching the video, punch an overripe watermelon as hard as you can, over and over again. Her head could not move under the impact of the rocks due to the heavy fortification of earth choking her neck, which left her completely open to the assault. The launched stones kicked up dust like an angry bull, but you could still see the woman’s face change as the bones in her head broke under the force of the projectiles; as the osseous matter in her skull rearranged, she morphed into something not quite human, a beaten bloody shadow of her former self. Lumps of flesh were torn from her face by the sharp rocks splattered across the ground in front and behind her; by the time they were done it did not look like the same scene as it was just a few minutes ago. Dozens of rocks diffused across the sandy ground, some matted with blood or hair, and the woman from the start of the video was dead, bludgeoned to death by a crowd, a horde from her own village, maybe even her neighbours? Maybe her butcher? Possibly even relatives joined in the slaughter.

Warning: This video contains images of graphic violence. Please use caution. Trigger warnings: blood, death or dying, violence against women, gratuitous violence.

What truly unnerved me about the event wasn’t the heinous murder act itself, but rather the woman’s compliance. It was almost as if she agreed with the barbaric treatment. Not once did she speak out, cry or plead she simply and quietly cooperated with the murderous rabble. I later discovered by reading through the comments that her crime was adultery. She honestly believed that she deserved her fate. That is what religion does; it poisons minds, corrupts them, makes weak people feel guilty and gives strong people reason and will to dominate and discriminate, fitting the words to meet their expectations and desires. This is not the conduct of civilised people.

Some people say I am anti-Islamic; I’m not really, I have a damn good friend who is a Muslim actually. Moderate Muslims are no different than the rest of us. They may believe that a man flew a donkey up to the heavens, but despite their wacky beliefs, I’d say most Muslims would watch that video and wretch like the rest of us. I’m not anti-Islamic. I’m anti-Savage, and if you condone what those men did in that video, you are a savage as well—a caveman, and a filthy reminder of a crueller time where science and knowledge had no place. And one thing that worries me is that moderate Muslims listen to these monsters and become indoctrinated by that madness. It happens a lot. No one is born an Islamic extremist savage; it is something you learn over time through the whispers of evil madmen full of hate.

So many are quick to defend Islam, but the countries that we still see stoning occur are ALL Islamic-run countries that support Sharia; Afghanistan, Northern Nigeria, Saudi Arabia and of course Pakistan. This just goes to show that Sharia Law must never find its way here, and when I see Muslims speaking out against this evil, it always gives me hope. Working together, we can educate the barbarians that advocate such brutality.