Religion of Peace Update: Man Kills His Apostate Family

"He became increasingly radicalized with orthodox Islamic beliefs, ultimately demanding compliance to fundamentalist Islam by his wife and family. He killed his wife because she would not wear Muslim attire, and would not follow his beliefs."

Oh, he killed his kids too (plus two underage nieces for good measure) — I suppose become the damn rug rats weren't sufficiently interested in becoming prayer-rug rats.

Not Islamabad, by the way. Not Riyadh. Not Khartoum. Chicago.

Comments

[Eyewitness]

Sounds more like a schizophrenic than religiously insane.

[S]

Yeah this is obviously mental illness. I don't think you can blame the religion here.

[Howlin' Hobbit]

S -- Yes, you can.

[Tom Karnofsky]

The first link is to a site that seems unreliable and extreme, and even assuming the truth of the detectives remarks, I have to agree with the first two comments. There are plenty of legitimate arguments for bashing religions, but the horrific crime of a particular low level member doesn't seem to be one of them.

[Rogier]

Tom: It's amazing to me that you and others do not take these murderers AT THEIR OWN WORDS. They say they kill in the name of Islam, and polite, kind lefty Westerners like yourself go out of your way to insist there simply must be another cause or motive.

I would like you to google "honor killings" and see appr. how many are carried out by Muslims and how many are perpetrated by, let's say, Baptists or Buddhists. That ought to tell you something.

Saying that the Chicago Muslim who wiped out his family was not driven by Islam is akin to saying that the Catholic Church has nothing to do with the thousands of priests who love to diddle little boys and girls.

Here's an enlightening jumping-off point for more reading: http://www.islam-watch.org/SyedKamranMirza/honor_killing.htm

[Tom Karnofsky]

I read the linked article on honor killing, and the comments, many of which were critical of it. The stories are horrifying, of course. Thanks. I'm certainly not interested in defending Islam. There are so many horrors, though, and it seems that the NEIN site has an agenda of encouraging fear and hatred of Islam, which I don't think is helpful.

After reading both links in the original post I was left with the distinct impression that the killer was schizophrenic, and that his words shouldn't be given much weight. Maybe I'm just a knee jerk lefty but when US soldiers say that they are fighting for a Christian U.S., I do take them at their word, but when a fundamentalist Christian mother burns her 4 year old to death in a oven (Bangor, ME, in the 80's) and says that God told her to do it because her daughter was possessed by the devil, I think she is insane, not that her religion is evil.

I do think christianity is "evil", though, likewise islam, and judaism, and all belief systems, insofar as they encourage hate and conflict and certainty and the kind of extreme emotions around concepts like honor and sin and belief that lead people to commit violent acts. My take on Douglas Hagmann is that he is promoting hate and conflict at his website and that he is delusional in his conspiracy mongering. I don't think the sad, sad story of this family's murder should be exploited to promote hatred.

It seems that you put a lot of weight on an anonymous source as relayed through an unreliable extremist (example, Hagmann believes that islamists were behind the OK city bombing, which I think is a more extreme position than thinking that 911 was a false flag operation), to support your contention that this was traditional Islamic honor killing, while discounting the mainstream media story which portrays the murderer as clearly insane (hearing voices, being friends with angels).

[Rogier]

Tom:

That's a fairly reasonable take, thanks for the explanation.

I have one remaining key quibble. It is that even if we say that Islam did not order or sanction the Chicagoland killings, the Religion of Peace sure makes it a lot easier for possible schizophrenics and sundry sociopaths to resort to extreme violence, seeing as the Koran has many passages in which the faithful are encouraged to "smite the unbelievers by their necks" and so on. (The Bible also has its share of violent imagery and insane exhortations, but almost no Christians take them literally anymore -- as in acting on them. Islam needs a reformation/Enlightenment period. That did wonders for Christianity in terms of learning to tolerate alternate viewpoints without resorting to crusades and witch hunts.)

Again, we know which religious group carries out the VAST majority of so-called honor killings. Why not apportion blame where it clearly belongs? The Chicago shooter may have been a schizophrenic whose mental imbalance was "merely" exacerbated by his religious beliefs. But those beliefs were still, by his own adamant statements, the trigger for the bloodbath.

It would be easier to persuade me that Islam has nothing to do with this if it wasn't for the other 10,000 or so Muslim perps who last year murdered their wives and daughters and sisters for allegedly shaming the family. It is a fucked-up religion indeed that too often considers wearing lipstick or holding hands with a boy a capital offense, but that considers the coldblooded murder of such women a virtuous, "honorable" deed.

[hermesten]

Rogier and Tom both make valid points, but I think this strikes at the heart of the matter in the more general terms of the discussion:

"It is a fucked-up religion indeed that too often considers wearing lipstick or holding hands with a boy a capital offense, but that considers the coldblooded murder of such women a virtuous, "honorable" deed."

The reason there aren't 10,000 Christian perps who murdered their wives and daughters last year (or some other variant on a similar theme) is that our secular society doesn't countenance such behavior --not because Christians are inherently less evil than Muslims.

If we had the truly "Christian" nation so many of the religionists pine for things would be quite different. In a particular case like the one cited here the perp may indeed be insane, but religion is a fertile breeding ground for insanity --as is dogma of all types.