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Animal “Honor”
May 4th, 2007Amazing how parallelism works in real life. I spent the morning doing research on a novel that, in part, covers the Crusades and “modern” Jihad. While flipping through all forms of information concerning Islam and family law, I ran across recitations on “honor” killings.
Later in the day came a news story on an “honor” killing of a young girl in Iraq.
“Honor” killings are part of Arabic and Asian family traditions, going back before Mohammad diddled his first goat. Though not part of Islam specifically, and debatable under Sharia law, the practice is not exactly frowned upon by “modern” Muslim clerics and other people of suspicious intellect (like Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and the Flying Spaghetti Monster Monks).
Which brings us to the sad tale of Du’a Khalil Aswad, who was stoned to death (and I don’t mean the fun variety of “stoned” either) for the crime of not coming home one night, and allegedly having a love affair with a Sunni Muslim boy (if you like, draw your own parallel between a Kurd objecting to his daughter dating a Sunni and a Klansman objecting to his daughter a black — the common denominator is stupidity).
“Honor” killings are a sex-linked sport. Women are the primary targets, as certain sins of flesh or faith weigh more heavily upon women in various cultures (middle-eastern) and religions (Islam). Men-folk have license to kill their wives and daughters for allegedly bring dishonor upon the family, an act civilized people would find to be dishonorable itself. For poor Aswad, her exit from this life took about 30 minutes, a slow death under the best of circumstances, and a might painful when being pelted with slag. I can only conclude that such a steady supply of rocks came from the skulls of her male family members.
What are the citizens of relatively civilized nations to think when people — in proximity to jihadist theory and practice — commit filicide that was otherwise abandoned more than a thousand years ago? It has been argued that certain sects of Islam, most notably those wahabist wankers, are reviving medieval social structures, and creating a conflict of cultures between sanity and Saladinism. But as Aswad’s swan song demonstrates, it does not take a Sunni jihadist to enjoy ancient bloodletting rituals. Wahhabism and tribal law meet at the crossroads of insanity, and in the age of the Internet create a repugnant force.
If you wonder why terrorist do what they do, and why so many in the middle east hate the west, you don’t have to look far beyond family ties. Cultures in which snuffing your own daughter for romancing a boy of the “wrong” faith is considered honorable have little regard for life in general, and western life in particular. This divide between western civilization and regressive barbarism is what World War III is all about.
