Thursday, January 18, 2007
Another boy dies copying Saddam Hussein's hanging
The boy decided to copy the former Iraq leader's execution while playing with his younger sister at their home in Khemisset, 80 kilometers (50 miles) east of the capital of Rabat, newspaper Al Ahdat al-Maghrebia reported.
"The girl then went to school and left her brother playing his deadly game," it said, adding that local officials had opened an inquiry into the death...
...Since then, several stories have emerged of children dying or being injured after being captivated by the manner of Hussein's death or by family conversations about the execution.
One 12-year-old Saudi boy died after using a chair and a metal wire to hang himself from a door frame, while another in Algeria was found hanging from a tree, papers reported.
Two boys in different regions of Azerbaijan hanged themselves at the weekend and may have been influenced by Hussein's execution, a security source in the country said.
The death of a 15-year-old boy last week in the Moroccan coastal city of Casablanca was also suspected of being the result of another re-enactment...
..."It is a characteristic of the Muslim world that we have an over-politicized society. Everyone's into politics, discussing events in Palestine and Iraq and hooked on Al-Jazeera."...
We're often told that the Middle Eastern TV shows much more of the "bloody reality" of the region than do Western news sources. I don't think we're suffering for the difference.
