Politics

Islamic Honor Killings Come to The United States

August 2008

Another sign of the times in our increasingly islamified world

By Andrew Peterson
For CoverUps.com

As Americans are taught with ever more thoroughness the dogmas of multi-culturalism – that all cultures are the same, all cultures are equally valid, and no culture is to be judged for any reason – we keep running into the same dilemma: how to explain away those beliefs and practices of the Anointed Others that we find terrible and repugnant.

In the increasingly globalized, interconnected world we live in, this isn't a problem that's going away any time soon.

Americans are outraged by things like the latino culture's love of cockfighting and by the prevalence of animal sacrifice in the Santeria religion.

But the issue takes on a whole new dimension when human beings are involved, whether you're talking about female genital mutilation in Africa, or, for the purposes of this article, Islamic honor killings.

Columnist Jeff Jacoby, writing for Jewish World Review, supplies the disturbing details:

Islamic religious tradition does not sanction honor killing, but it has long been accepted in many Muslim societies nonetheless. Perpetrators are typically punished lightly, if at all. In 2003, Jordan's parliament overwhelmingly defeated a proposal to impose harsher penalties for honor killings; Islamists objected on the grounds that more severe punishment would violate religious traditions and damage Jordanian society. It is appalling that such lethally barbaric attitudes persist anywhere — all the more so now that the shame of honor killing has made its way here.

No-one knows the true extent of honor killing, even in those parts of the world where it is a generally accepted practice.

The cases that do come to light are ghastly. "Women and young girls are set ablaze, strangled, shot at, clubbed, stabbed, tortured, axed, or stoned to death," a United Nations report noted in 2004. "Their bodies are found mutilated with their throat slit, or they are chopped into pieces and thrown in a ditch."

Of particular concern to us here, now, is the fact that honor killing has come to the United States.

In the Atlanta suburb of Jonesboro last month, a Pakistani immigrant allegedly strangled his 25-year-old daughter with a bungee cord because she was determined to end her arranged marriage and had gotten involved with a new man. According to the Atlanta Journal Constitution, Sandeela Kanwal's father, Chaudhry Rashid, "told police he is Muslim and that extramarital affairs and divorce are against his religion [and] that's why he killed her." In court last week, a detective quoted Rashid: "G-d will protect me. G-d is watching me. I strangled my daughter."

Honor killings span all political and geographical sections of the country, from Texas to New York to Michigan.

On New Year's Day in Irving, Texas, the bullet-riddled bodies of the Said sisters — Sarah, 17, and Amina, 18 — were found in an abandoned taxi. Police issued an arrest warrant for their father, an Egyptian immigrant named Yaser Abdel Said, who had reportedly threatened to kill them upon learning that they had boyfriends. According to the Dallas Morning News, Yaser Said was given to "gun-waving rants about how Western culture was corrupting the chastity of his daughters."

In Upstate New York a few weeks earlier, Waheed Allah Mohammad, an immigrant from Afghanistan, was charged with attempted murder after repeatedly stabbing his 19-year-old sister. The Rochester Democrat and Chronicle reported that Mohammad was "infuriated because his younger sister was going to clubs, wearing immodest clothing, and planning to leave her family for a new life in New York City" — she was a "bad Muslim girl," he told sheriff's investigators.

Our Take

It will be interesting to see how well multi-culti dogma holds up as all the world's peoples get to know each other better because of mass transportation, the internet, and the global media.

Our guess is that no amount of liberal pabulum could make honor killing culturally acceptable here. We don't think we're going out on a limb with that.

It will take many years and many cultural skirmishes to stop multi-culturalism in this country, but we think it will come to an end some day, like a great ship smashed on the rocks of its own foolishness and falsehood.

Link to article.