A review of the new movie, The Stoning of Soraya M, reminded me of a story I read in junior-high school. “The Lottery,” by Shirley Jackson, described an American small town in which one person was selected by lottery each year to be stoned to death. The victim in the story was a young boy, and what I still remember decades later is the mob bloodlust that transformed him from a child whom the townspeople had known all their lives into an inhuman, impersonal object of aggression. Soraya’s story doesn’t seem so different; the real Soraya was apparently killed because of village men fabricating charges, fueling the mob mentality, and using religion to legitimize their crimes. for more click here