Killing One's Own Children For "Family Honor"

This is a really ugly, sick psychotic Muslim practice, which keeps happening right here in America. Authorities seem at a loss as to how to deal with it. I have some ideas how to deal with families who kill their own, and probably my ideas who probably be labeled as cruel and unusual punishment. A father who could murder his own daughter for disobedience, believing that his act will somehow "restore" his family's honor, deserves cruel and unusual punishment. But a Muslim father's decision to take his own daughter's life in cold blood also implicates his own family and the religion of death, Islam.

The Leftists will no doubt mumble nonsense about "cultural relativism", if they comment at all.

Today I'm running two accounts of this outrage. The first account deals with the radical feminists's lack of response to the plight of these young women, and has to be dragged out into the light. The second account, by Robert Spenser, deals with the wider cultural climate in which these murders take place.

Feminists Truly Hate Women

July 10, 2008

-By Warner Todd Huston

Last Sunday in Jonesboro, Georgia, an immigrant Muslim father strangled his daughter to death in a so-called “honor killing” because she protested being forced by her family to marry a man she did not know. No feminist uttered a word about the murder of twenty-five-year-old Sandeela Kanwal. On the following Wednesday officials in the city government of Atlanta, Georgia bowed to the pressure from one feminist nut to stop posting “men at work” signs in the city because they are “sexist.”

The contrast is stark as well as revealing, if not entirely disgusting. It reveals an American feminism that is a hypocritical, unserious, sham that deserves nothing but derision. A movement that indulges in oblivious, frivolity while real pain surrounds them.

The western world is in the midst of a clash of cultures that is killing thousands of people every week. The west is seeing a religio-political system calling itself Islam perpetrating some of the most oppressive actions against women in modern history.

Women are daily and by the millions beaten, raped, mutilated, and oppressed in uncountable ways by adherents of a so-called religion. This is not only happening in far away lands, either. Imigrants are importing these barbarous, uncivilized ways into the west and right into our midst.

Girls of Muslim heritage throughout the west are being forced into marriages against their will, sold into sexual slavery, their genitals are being mangled in a faux religious ceremony and they are being treated as second class citizens by their parents and relatives, immigrants of Muslim background.

And as these very real crimes against women occur what do the feminists of Atlanta, Georgia get all exercised about? The elimination of signs that say “men at work.”

Feminists in America and other western nations have a possible crusade just aching for their care and development, yet these same feminists who pretend that women’s rights are their priority consistently ignore real oppression. These oppressed Muslim women suffer unimaginable horrors at the hands of their uncivilized religion and imported, backwards culture all the while western feminists sit on their hands and concerns themselves with pointless issues like city signage.

As Sandeela Kanwal was agonizing over her forced marriage in Jonesboro and later as her murdered body lay on the floor of her Father’s home, the last bit of precious life fading, a childish, foolhardy “feminist” named Cynthia Good was congratulating herself on somehow striking a blow against oppression by making Atlanta get rid of a few paper signs.

While millions of young girls cower and allow themselves into forced marriages all across the west, magazine editor Cynthia Good trumpeted her success and called for the rest of the country to join her earthshattering, important efforts. “We’re calling on the rest of the nation to follow suit and make a statement that we will not accept these subtle forms of discrimination,” chortled the facile Good to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

This is the result of liberal moral equivalence. The western liberal’s self-destructive insistence that each culture is just as good as the next, yet at the same time the assumption that our own is somehow worse for its “oppression” and “discrimination,” courses throughout the veins of pernicious feminism. The delusional insistence that we, the west, are the bane of civilization as poor young girls like Sandeela Kanwal lead pitiful existences often meeting a violent end right under the noses of these same “feminists” who claim moral superiority is an outrage. The belief that a paper sign alerting passersby that people are working in the area is worse than the murder of Sandeela Kanwal and others like her is a travesty.

Feminists are execrable yet are given the benefit of government money in our universities and places of high esteem. Today, feminists are as bad a holocaust deniers, as bad as Soviet apologists, for their willful ignorance of the oppression of women that goes on around them every day.

The Soviets used to call westerners who gave them cover for their crimes against humanity “useful idiots.” Muslims call westerners who turn a blind eye to their oppressions “dhimmis,” folks who have a lesser stance in Islam but follow along dutifully ignoring the crimes around them. Cynthia Good is a dhim idiot. She make fools of every person everywhere truly concerned with eliminating oppression.

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Honor Killing in Georgia

By Robert Spencer

FrontPageMagazine.com | Thursday, July 10, 2008

Last Sunday Chaudhry Rashid, a Pakistani immigrant living in Clayton County, Georgia, strangled his daughter to death. According to police, Rashid explained to them that he had killed his daughter, Sandeela Kanwal, in order to restore his family’s honor, which she had sullied by planning to divorce the husband to whom she had been given in an arranged marriage. Clayton County Police spokesman Tim Owens explained: “Apparently she and the father had argued over the marriage and the fact that it was arranged, and at some point during the altercation he did end up killing his daughter.”

The family appears to have adhered to traditional Islamic mores. A neighbor noted: “I would see the young lady outside every once in a while dressed in the traditional Muslim gear.” Added another: “The father, he would pray at certain times of the mornings and evenings.” And indeed, honor killing most commonly occurs among Muslims. While there is no direct sanction given in the Qur’an or Islamic law for it, the practice is encouraged by the shame/honor culture that Islam has created. A transgression of the moral law is not seen only as a sin to be somehow expiated by the individual who committed it, but as a blot upon the honor and purity of the family of the victim – and that blot inheres in the sullied purity of the victim, not the perpetrator.

“Honor killings” are distressingly common throughout the Muslim world. Phyllis Chesler reports that “in 1997, in Cairo Egypt, twenty-five-year-old Nora Marzouk Ahmed’s honeymoon ended when her father chopped off her head and carried it down the street. ‘Now,’ he said, ‘the family has regained its honor.’ Nora’s crime? She had eloped.” And “in 2002, in Tehran, an Iranian man cut off his seven-year-old daughter’s head after suspecting she had been raped by her uncle. ‘The motive behind the killing was to defend my honor, fame, and dignity.’ Some people called for this man’s death under Islamic law, but ironically, only the father of the victim can demand the death sentence.”

Chesler recounts many such killings. “In 1999, in Lahore, Pakistan, Samia Imran was shot dead in her feminist lawyer’s office by a man whom her parents had hired to kill her. Her crime? Seeking a divorce….In 2001, in Gujar Khan, Pakistan, Zahida Perveen’s husband attacked her, gouged out both her eyes, her nose, and her ears. He wrongly suspected her of adultery. He was arrested, but male relatives shook his hand and men decided she ‘must have deserved it’ and that a ‘husband has to do what a man has to do.’…In 2005, in Gaza, five masked members of Hamas…shot Yusra Azzumi, a twenty-year-old Palestinian woman, to death, brutalized her corpse, and savagely beat both her brother, Rami, and her fiancé, Ziad Zaranda, whom she was to marry within days. This self-appointed Morality Squad wrongly suspected Yusra (herself a Hamas member) of “immoral behavior.”

Islamic clerics are partially responsible for the strong association of this practice with Islam. One notorious example of this association came in the relatively moderate Muslim country of Jordan in 2003, when the Jordanian Parliament voted down a provision designed to stiffen penalties for honor killings. Al-Jazeera reported with unintentional irony that increasing penalties for honor killings would destroy families: “Islamists and conservatives said the laws violated religious traditions and would destroy families and values.”

Ignoring the clear and close link between of honor killing and Islamic culture, however, the mainstream media searched for explanations elsewhere. CNN consulted Ajay Nair, associate dean of multicultural affairs at Columbia University, to see if honor killing was a “South Asian” problem. Certainly not, explained Nair: “My immediate reaction was that this is an anomaly in the South Asian community. This isn’t a rampant problem within South Asian communities. What is a problem, I think, is domestic violence, and that cuts across all communities.”

Also ignoring the incidence of honor killings in Jordan, Egypt, Iran, Gaza and elsewhere (including among Muslim immigrants in Germany, Britain, Canada, and Texas), the Chicago Tribune attributed it to the cultural rigidity of Pakistani and Indian immigrants, and even dragged in the crowned heads of Europe: “Such cultural unions serve as social contracts among South Asians and other communities, where a marriage agreement is more about families joining forces than about two people finding love—akin to the arranged marriages of European royalty…”

To this Warner Todd Huston of NewsBusters trenchantly responded: “Last I checked my history books common Europeans didn’t go around killing their daughters for marrying ‘wrong’ and neither did their ages old Monarchs.”

In line with the widespread acceptance of this practice in Islamic culture, when he appeared before a judge, Chaudhry Rashid insisted: “I have done nothing wrong.” Speaking to the judge, he demanded prison food prepared according to Islamic requirements, and declared that he would refuse pork in any form. It was a clear indication of the strength of his commitment to Islam, even as the mainstream media remained determined not to notice any such commitment.

The price of this politically correct refusal to confront the ugly realities of the Islamic link to honor killing will be, quite simply, more honor killings. No one will call upon Islamic groups to do something about this practice. No special scrutiny will be focused upon Muslims in the United States, or any studies undertaken about how honor killings can be prevented. No one will examine the question of unrestricted Muslim immigration in light of this problem. While learned analysts search for clues in South Asian cultural habits and the practices of European royalty, more young women will be murdered by their Muslim fathers, husbands, and brothers to cleanse their family’s honor. These young women are the ultimate victims of political correctness.

Robert Spencer is a scholar of Islamic history, theology, and law and the director of Jihad Watch. He is the author of seven books, eight monographs, and hundreds of articles about jihad and Islamic terrorism, including the New York Times Bestsellers The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades) and The Truth About Muhammad. His next book, Stealth Jihad: How Radical Islam is Subverting America without Guns or Bombs, is coming this November from Regnery Publishing.

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