The idiocy of Indonesian justice allows Abu Bakar Bashir to live yet plans to execute two stupid young Australian citizens.

 

Abu Bakar Bashir is the jailed spiritual leader of the south-east Asian terror network responsible for the Bali bombings that killed 88 Australians. He is currently serving a jail term on unrelated terror matters and is expected to be released in the near future to continue his wicked work.

He recently gave his support to the ISIS in front of members of the terrorist group, Jama’ah Anshorut Tauhid (JAT) who came to visit him and they quickly spread his hallowed word to Indonesian extremist groups via social media.

Yet two stupid Australians are due to face the firing squad over drug offences.

I guess I have a foot in both Left and Right camps because I find State sanctioned murder as equally abhorrent as abortion. Capital punishment is so final, so irretrievable, it assumes an infallible justice system when US executions have too often been proved, using DNA evidence, to have been carried out on innocents. Yet there are no pangs of guilt.

When Victorian Premier Henry Bolte joyously pulled the lever that sent Ronald Ryan to his death, to Sir Henry’s dismay the practice of capital punishment in Australia died with him.

I recall at the time the Press was angrily against Bolte. “The Age”, “The Herald” and “The Sun” all ran campaigns against executing Ryan. Bolte had privately pressured “The Age” to soften its editorials but those were the days when “The Age” was a vibrant, responsible journal with influence and managing director Ranald McDonald and editor Graham Perkin steadfastly resisted the pressure.

But Sir Frank Packer folded and he pulped an entire issue of the Bulletin because of an anti-hanging cartoon by the brilliant Les Tanner.

Capital punishment is rooted in religion and belongs with stone-age Islamic Shariah Law and Biblical Mosaic Law which specifies 36 various “offences” that carry the death penalty with provisions for execution by stoning, burning, decapitation and strangulation.

The hangman is masked, one member of every firing squad shoots a blank, lethal injections are automated, levers, time clocks and switches disguise human involvement... and yet we are not ashamed? Like hell we are not!

Pope John Paul II before his death approved changes to the Catholic Catechism in 1997 stating that: “Assuming that the guilty party's identity and responsibility have been fully determined, the traditional teaching of the Church does not exclude recourse to the death penalty, if this is the only possible way of effectively defending human lives against the unjust aggressor.”

As Opposition Leader, Tony Abbott said, “It is not our place to intervene publicly when the Indonesians or even when the Americans decide to execute their own.” Whether it’s “their own” or “ours”, it’s philosophically either right or wrong and Abbott betrays any conviction he might have had with two bob each way.

Of thousands we have executed just how many were innocent we will never know and how many dismembered embryos in bloody buckets were future astronauts, artists, inventors or heart surgeons we will also never know.

Surely we have evolved past the death penalty and the macabre edicts of both Moses and Mohammed?  

Pickering Post