By DR. MARY ELLEN WEIR
December 3, 2006

Recently found guilty of the mass murder of his fellow Iraqis, Saddam Hussein has been sentenced to death. His sentence immediately goes into appeal in the Iraqi court system, which could take several months. If the appeal is unsuccessful, Saddam will be hanged.

Justice has been served through the guilty verdict and Saddam’s monstrous crimes have been acknowledged. He must be held accountable. However, instead of a death sentence, I believe his punishment should be spending the rest of his life in prison, with no possibility whatsoever of release. This, I believe, is the human and moral way to deal with Saddam Hussein.

Conversely, I believe the inhuman and immoral way to deal with Saddam is to execute him. Executing Saddam would be a crime against humanity, just as Saddam’s murders were crimes against humanity.

A “crime against humanity,” in my view, is any intentional, premeditated act of violence one human inflicts on another. The killing of Saddam will do nothing to break the cycle of such crimes, will do nothing to change humanity’s thinking that violence is an acceptable, legitimized method of doing justice, of settling conflict, of exerting power.

I believe denouncing the death sentence of Saddam Hussein is the moral duty of us humans who say we believe in the sanctity of life. Two of my heroes, Jesus Christ and Mohandas Gandhi, are what Martin Luther King, Jr. calls “extremists for love.” Jesus preached that we “love one another,” that we “love our enemies.” Gandhi declared that “nonviolence is the law of the human race,” and that “evil [is] only sustained by violence.” Too often these powerful exhortations and declarations and the profound effect they could have are rationalized to the point of absolute inefficacy, becoming easy, pious clichés. The force of what Jesus, Gandhi, and King -- himself an “extremist for love”-- call us to is all too often dissolved and dismissed into erroneous assumptions that “loving one’s enemies” means the non-assertion of self or the relinquishing of power to a threatening other.

Rather, the definition and potency of loving one’s enemies are manifested in the Gospels of Jesus, the Indians’ struggle to free themselves from British rule, and the American Civil Rights movement. Jesus, Gandhi, and King call us humans to change the way we think and act. I say we take their call seriously.

By denouncing the death sentence of Saddam Hussein, let us break the cycle of violence and really stand for the claim that all life is sacred. Let humans move beyond the barbarity that we condemn in our religions, the barbarity that we humans in our history have so achingly suffered. Let us denounce the use of a barbaric method to punish a barbaric crime, and by this symbolic action let us further the work of Jesus, Gandhi, and King. Let us, with them, announce the power of love to change the world.