By Andrew Longman
Shaking with fury, indignation, and sadness, I wept at the viewing of The Stoning of Soraya M, a movie that surprised me when I thought I could not be surprised.
The film is set in the Iran of the Ayatollahs, based on a true story, a million miles from the beaches of Los Angeles, where the Porches cruise and the plastic is visible at twenty paces in faces of awkward pixies. That's where I am now, reeling.
But where I expected Iran, and Mullahs, and sharia and injustice, I did not expect how utterly familiar this movie was. I expected foreign film; it starts with a French reporter, perfect. I thought to have never seen anything of the like, and to be outraged at the alien nature of the evil. I wasn't. I stared in familiar shock at intimate hoodlums. And I couldn't believe that I believe I'd seen it - sharp, slap, repetition.
In the passion of Terri Schiavo I remember a husband, brute like an unthinking slug, a cretin. I remember he was an abuser of women, a piker, a sloth. I remember that Terri's x-rays showed her many broken bones - the times she'd buttoned up her blouse and pressed on.
And then there was the mayor and the mullah, the tin-pots. In Florida, it was the wicked judge and the craven lawyer who kept answering that no, Terri has to die. Do you recall what was the feel when that wicked fool in robes believed he had the authority, on Easter Sunday, to issue an order from the bench, barring a devout Christian woman from Holy Communion, so that she was sure to die of the court ordered dehydration? Did you know that after that order was broken, the only drink Terri received was a drop of The Wine on a cracked lip, and a she was sustained for twelve days?
Straight up.
In The Stoning of Soraya M, I watched with eerie and painful tears as Jesus Christ bled and died on screen. Soraya, with her blood matted hair, pummeled into extinction by a lecherous husband who wanted to murder his inconvenient covenant, had her face removed by gashes. I could no longer see her visage. I saw only her curly dark hair covering the blood; she was transfigured; I see the Lord!
But this viscerally reconnected me to Schiavo. Was there any separation between these three? Was Terri visible in Jesus, and was not Jesus' face where Soraya's had been? I remember the friends - who went into Terri's room to dress her in a pretty dress and do up her hair, despite the death sentence which lay constantly suspended, a sword of Damocles, above the head. I can hear the nurse telling me outside the hospice how they used to soak a cloth in juice, and Terry would giggle and wiggle as she drank it down. And here was Soraya M, with her devoted Aunt trying to cheer her, with attention to her beautiful dress, trying to break the black wave of hate, curling from lusting men bent on removing the obstacle. I can see Jeb Bush, windbreaker on, running out, refusing to act, bitter as gall, pretending to be interested in helping lobbyists save her - Pontius Pilate washing his hooks. And I recall a painted woman in a sequined Stetson hat - a Florida Senator - piously praying the invocation in the diet, moments after condemning friends begging clemency for Schiavo's life. Right on schedule at Soraya's death sentence, clowns and carnival array leapt from their colored van with pounding drums! Weird:
and while the king was looking down,
The jester stole his thorny crown.
How many parallels can we count? The scheming George Greer and the scheming Mullah. The abusive Michael Schiavo and his new live-in mistress. The court condemning an innocent woman to die for the crime of not being pretty... The attempt by the evil companion to turn the kids against Soraya, against Terri, against Jesus - the lamb of innocence.
And then my mind popped with echo: Soraya's husband leaned over the beaten and bloody bride and roared with indignation, "The bitch lives!" A famous screech of Michael Schiavo's, a memory of darkness, when Terri wouldn't leave, "Isn't that bitch dead yet!?" And, as if it were proof these two men were animated by the claw, both then burst into a frenzy of attack on the defenseless and beaten woman, ritual with violence, whipping themselves like dervish to finish her off. The secular did condemn; the religious did approve; the mob did participate.
And then they died. The sky darkened and earth shook.
I expected to encounter these evils of a jihad-injustice as I watched Soraya M, but I reeled at the simple replay of our American secular priesthood, a liberal's interpretation of the same Shia deathwatch. Is George Greer and George Felos any better for Terri's starving than the Mullah and the husband were who put Soraya out to stoning? It was like watching some classic opera remade with modern actors; the scenes changed, but all the lines, all the blocking, were the same. Judas Iscariot hits his points. Eerie typology knew the opening, the climax, the dénouement... Minor differences - Soraya was dead in savage hours; advanced dehydration took a dozen nights.
Will we stand around the foot of the cross, and call out among the scoffers? Rifqa Bary's pursuers in Ohio are lusting for her blood, a pretty young woman who wishes to worship a God of Love. Will you, who are without sin, be the first to cast a stone? To twist and turn away? Will the vulnerable women in our society, and in the Islamist world, be put to death within our hearing, at whim of husbands that first abuse and then reject them, all for the conceit of lust? Or will Christian America, the bastion of Covenanters and Puritans, turn and say, "Let us go up to Jerusalem, that we may die with him?" Will the warrior American Revolutionaries say again, "Live Free or Die"?
If you have not seen The Stoning of Soraya M, there is no need. Just look on the bloodied face of Jesus, or read the record of what they did to Theresa Schindler Schiavo. And then remember that if we want to rescue our country we have wickedness within our borders, as well as at our gates.
Good night, Soraya, and may flights of angels sing thee sweetly to thy rest; Happy Resurrection Day.
