Look, I've never had the slightest problem with jimmyt, but I think we need to consider something he wrote:

"if you find yourself trying to defend the people and if necessary, the culture that performed this heinous act, may God forgive you for your insensitivity."

The very assumption that a "culture" committed this crime is exactly the attitude that had earlier set Carol off, and I don't blame her. If many of us are automatically assuming that such an assertion makes any sense at all, we need to stop and think about ourselves and our unconscious assumptions and prejudices.

After all, the primary victim here, as well as the boy who died trying to defend her, the other bystanders who were injured and killed, and all the horified citizens who were forced to watch ~ they were very probably all Muslims, too. Right?

Actually, there probably is some reason to find fault with the culture of certain areas of the globe ~ more justifiably than blaming the Muslim religion.

The murderously misogynist bent of some tribal/national groups is ancient and deeply ingrained, and certainly predates the birth of Mohammed; if the history of Islam includes a tolerance for stonings and other such abominations, it's because the people who founded Islam, and those who were among its first adherents, were already throroughly conditioned to accept such acts and attitudes as a matter of course.

It was individuals who carried out this horrendous act; members of a gang or ruling clique, not representatives of an entire religion or nationality. If anyone needs to assign blame to a group or class of people, blame it on "power-hungry bloodthirsty warlords," not on "Muslims" or "Africans" or "Somalis."

If anyone is offended that I've been moved to discuss the secondary issue into which this discussion has devolved, and not limited myself to commiserating with the victim, please don't dismiss my thoughts as irrelvant just because you judge me as somehow not as sensitive as you are. Of course, I'm horrified and I condemn this brutal murder; I just find it more interesting and more necessary to weigh in on this other issue.