I Didn't Know ...

I didn't know Muslims had ritual butt washings. But apparently they do. Note the captions on a couple of the pictures posted on Michelle Malkin's site:

Masked Muslim moral police force a man wearing clothes deemed un-Islamic to suck on a plastic container Iranians use to wash their bottoms.

The Iranian morality police arrest the infidel after forcing him to drink from the toilet watering cans hanging around his neck.

Note that the Iranian "police" are enforcing their "morality" on people who are not conceivably subject to Islamic law, much less their extremist interpretation.

Here's a simple, less egregious example:

Whipped for wearing a soccer shirt.

This picture, like the others posted by several "new media" folks, are official pictures formally released by FARS and ISNA, the Iranian "news" agencies. I also note that, in these and other pictures, the "police" are all masked — which says to me these people know what they are doing is very wrong and, at some level, they are ashamed of what they are doing. Just like criminals the world over. And yet, from the pictures, they seem proud to be abusing innocent people. So why are they hiding behind masks?

More on this at Gateway Pundit, Captains Quarters, and Ali Eteraz. Ali Eteraz says this is all part of the Iranian government's intimidation and misdirection efforts designed to keep Iranians from protesting the fact that Iran's economy has been so mismanaged, that it is in so deep a hole, that this oil-rich nation must ration gasoline to its population.