...came into the limelight in just the past few days, including one in Italy, where Moroccan immigrant El Ketaoui Dafani fatally stabbed daughter Sanaa in the throat while she was sitting in a car with her boyfriend Massimo De Biasio. De Biasio is not a Muslim. This fact enraged Sanaa's pious father and, in his warped-by-religion mind, gave him license to slaughter the girl.
These cases are the ones we know of. It's chilling to think how many times the victims just disappear, never to be heard from again (Amnesty International notes that "the majority of so-called honor killings go unreported"). Sometimes we belatedly learn of the women's fate when their graves are discovered.
For instance, in Turkey, earlier this year, police found
...Medine Memi's body in a sitting position with her hands tied, in a two-metre deep hole in a chicken pen outside her house in Kahta town, Adiyaman province, 40 days after she went missing. ... A subsequent post mortem revealed that she had a significant amount of soil in her lungs and stomach. ... "According to our findings, the girl, who had no bruises on her body and no sign of narcotics or poison in her blood, was alive and fully conscious when she was buried," one anonymous expert said.
She was buried alive by her own father and grandfather because they were "concerned" that she had befriended boys. The betrayal and panic and the horrible agony felt by Medine as her lungs filled with earth and chicken dung are just unimaginable. Words fail.
But who are we to judge, right? Allah willed it, the faithful say:
The Jordanian Islamic Action Front (IAF) issued a fatwa that declared honor-killings are seen as favorable by Islam; male relatives should punish their female relatives and not leave this duty to the state. Ibrahim Zayd al-Kaylani, head of the IAF's Ifta' committee, said that a man who restrains himself from committing an honor killing, leaving this unpleasant burden to the government, "negates the values of virility advocated by Islam."
And under orthodox interpretations of Islamic law, these killings are allowed, at least if they are carried out by the parents:
A manual of Islamic law certified as a reliable guide to Sunni orthodoxy by Al-Azhar University, the most respected authority in Sunni Islam, says that "retaliation is obligatory against anyone who kills a human being purely intentionally and without right." However, "not subject to retaliation" is "a father or mother (or their fathers or mothers) for killing their offspring, or offspring's offspring." ('Umdat al-Salik o1.1-2).
Here are my previous (intemperate) thoughts on the absolute fucking shits who perpetrate this evil.
You really shouldn't trust a word from places like "jihadwatch." The people at places like that are ideologically the same as the terrorists - the terrorists deliberately look for the worst possible interpretation of scripture, quoting out of context and frequently ignoring massive amounts of counter-examples, in order to justify their violence. The guys at places like jihadwatch do exactly the same thing in order to justify hating muslims. Neither is indicative of the regular people - it would be like judging the USA by how the KKK interpret the bible.
Honor killings aren't about being muslim - just google "Nirupama Pathak" for a recent high-profile case or look up "bride burning" to see how such crimes aren't rooted in a particular religion, they are rooted in poverty and poor education.
Posted by: Ethel Scarburg | Friday, August 06, 2010 at 06:37 PM
Here is a specific rebuttal of jihadwatch's selective quoting regarding honor killings. Note how what jihadwatch quoted is mostly about accidental death of a child by the parent - many would argue that living with such a death is punishment enough - and that when the death is deliberate murder the parent should be punished with death too.
http://www.altmuslimah.com/a/b/print/3240/
Posted by: Ethel Scarburg | Friday, August 06, 2010 at 06:58 PM