Greater love hath no father
Another one, from last July.
Police in Atlanta have been investigating the death of a 25-year-old Pakistani woman, who was allegedly murdered by her father in the name of family honor. She wanted out of an arranged marriage, but her father thought a divorce would bring shame to the family.
And he also thought that the ‘shame’ that Sandeela Kanwal would ‘bring’ to the family was more significant than her life was. He thought the ‘shame’ was so important that it justified murdering his own adult daughter. Instead of thinking of it as something regrettable and painful but as a speck of dust compared to the value of his daughter – he thought the opposite – he thought his daughter was worth much less than this comparatively trivial shame. That’s an incredibly ugly fact, which never seems to get enough attention in the coverage of these things. He thought a fundamentally social, neighbor-heeding feeling was more important than his own daughter was; he thought it was so important that it motivated him to strangle her to death with a bungee cord – all so that the neighbors wouldn’t snigger at him.
“He admitted to actually taking the life of his daughter,” says Sgt. Stefan Schindler, a 13-year veteran of the Clayton County Police Department. “And the reason he took his daughter’s life,” says Schindler, “by his own words was that she wasn’t being true to her religion or to her husband.”…Schindler says Rashid told him that killing his daughter was a right given to him by God — and that God would protect him.
So ‘God’ is someone who wants women to be killed for wanting to leave men they never chose for themselves in the first place. In other words, yes Virginia, God does hate women.
Shahid Malik is a local representative of Atlanta’s Pakistani population and one of the very few willing to speak about the Rashid case. “This thing hurt the Muslim community, Pakistani community,” he says. He says that the killing has nothing to do with Islam, but that Rashid has little education and comes from a small village in Pakistan where tribal traditions are strong…”Whatever this case is or not, this is not an honor killing,” he says. “It is not based on Pakistani law. Chaudry Rashid loved his daughter.”
No he didn’t. People need to stop saying that. People who love their daughters don’t murder them; people who murder their daughters don’t love them. You don’t get to do both. You don’t get to murder your daughter and still pretend you loved her.
Begner hopes the state doesn’t make this about Islam or ethnicity. This death could have happened, he says, in any culture, with any family.
Well anything could have happened, but is it likely? Is it customary ‘in any culture, with any family’ to murder an adult daughter because she wants to divorce a husband who was not her choice to begin with? I don’t think so.
Has any one got an explanation as to why this sort of behavior is aceptable in some cultures? I realy am at a loss to understand it.
You can learn a bit about honour cultures by studying the history of duelling and ‘honour’, but at least that pitched the man’s own life into the game, not innocent women – so much.
Its a fundamental part of our nature which makes honoour killings possible, and makes civilisation and liberalism worth exhalting over sycophantic Rousseauian romanticism about other cultures. Its motivated by status seeking – ‘keeping up with the Joneses’ in the perpetrator’s mind.
You can read this:
http://www.uwgb.edu/dutchs/PSEUDOSC/TOXICVAL.HTM
And leave Rousseau out of it.
Murder may be murder may be murder, Marie-Therese, but this is worse than murder. This is a form of patriarchal social control used to terrorise women. It is common, today, in many Muslim cultures, and it is being imported by them into the US and other countries.
Most murderers know their victims, but they do not thereby try to send messages to people they do not know. This ‘thing’ is worse than murder, and this is something we need to recognise about religious killing of any kind. This killing is about Islam, and probably about ethnicity, and this is something that the state needs to make very clear.
“This is a form of patriarchal social control used to terrorise women.”
Eric, I remember reading this before in note and comment. It is by: Sharif Kanaana, professor of anthropology at Birzeit University who states that honour killing is: “A complicated issue that cuts deep into the history of Arab society. What the men of the family, clan, or tribe seek control of in a patrilineal society is reproductive power. Women for the tribe were considered a factory for making men. The honour killing is not a means to control sexual power or behaviour. What’s behind it is the issue of fertility, or reproductive power.”
Honour killing in a nutshell, do you not agree?!
But of course controlling reproductive power entails controlling ‘sexual power or behaviour’ so that looks like a false dichotomy. It’s the one because it’s the other.
Dave, thanks for your link. I will leave Rousseau in, because as far as I can see he is useful to name the Western cult of non-judgement of other cultures. http://www.uwgb.edu/dutchs/PSEUDOSC/TOXICVAL.HTM – lots to learn from.
This is a form of patriarchal social control used to terrorise women.
Ding ding ding ding ding!
Terrorism. That is the appropriate word.
I thought so, Jenavir.
And yesterday an Australian father murdered his little daughter by throwing her off a bridge. Littel information yet but he was in the middle of an acrimonious divorce and their two other children were in the car at the time.
People who believe in their so called honour killing and god given right to kill their offsprings should be made to go back to their “tribal” country. They have no place in western society.
In future such type of people should be barred from the west as they can only fit into their original society and not that of the west.
They should not come to the west and turn it into their tribal land.