Stoning someone to death may be rare in the Toolbox of Inhumanity  in 2010.  That people on  this planet relentlessly exact a multitude of  cruelties on others in spite of our social progress cannot be wholly explained.  You might dismiss stoning if it were discovered in some rain forest among a remote tribe.
But Iran is regarded as the “cradle of civilization,” the heart of the Persian civilization and an ancient East-West crossroads where ideas could flourish over the millennia. How could stoning exist in 21st century Iran, but, then, how could the ovens of the Holocaust …