74 Lashes for Insulting Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

Iranian student activist Payman Aref wrote a letter to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad after the last election in Iran. That must have been some letter. He was sentenced to a year in prison and 74 lashes (One wonders how they came up with that particular number of strikes with a whip -- was it based on word count?).

Today, he was whipped by a representative of the Iranian regime as per the judge's sentence.

This echoes the punishment meted out to Somayeh Tohidlou. She was whipped 50 times while her hands and feet were chained together, as punishment for taking part in post-election demonstrations.

When Iran's Islamist state and justice system is described as medieval, this is no exaggeration.