The question of death penalty and the most proper ways to carry it out is not confined to Iran or Saudi Arabia, nor does it reflect a lack of compassion among passersby who stand to watch. While the image of a swaying women who died before a satisfied crowed in Iran can easily force us to shiver, one also ought to remember the pain and death that many Iranians endured as a result of drug use, which despite all efforts, continues to plague Iran. Celebrating the cruel end of the drug traffickers in Iran might reflect a greater degree of anger at those who torment the youth of thousands of Iranian boys and girls for financial gain through selling drugs. It is equally an insufficient conclusion for any of us to claim that the British people are brutal just by watching a British soccer crowd beating fans from the opposing team to death with clubs and chains. At least in the Iranian case, drug trafficking is an offensive matter that cannot be equated to the vice of losing a soccer match.
Cruelty often is a response to greater brutality.
Killing Timothy McVeigh on a small circuit TV might sound cruel, but killing hundreds of innocent people by McVeigh's wretched act drove many, if not most, Americans to say that his execution is a well deserved fate. With the same token, the extra-judicial killing of dozens of Palestinians, the arrests and torture of hundreds, the bombing of Palestinian targets in the last eight weeks would have been almost impossible without the help of collaborators, a matter of which Palestinians are fully aware. The execution of collaborators, which have been repeatedly pointed out by Israel and its patrons in the Western media, is anything but a strange matter to any nation around the world under similar circumstances. Even French prostitutes where put to death in those days, not for promiscuous sexual acts, but for sleeping with the enemy. While no one can justify the American and British people's silence toward their governments' genocide in Iraq, one has to understand that silence in third world countries don't necessary reflect apathy, but oppression.