Latest Updates: honor killing RSS

  • johnpi 12:44 am on December 2, 2009 | 0 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: honor killing, , , , ,

    On Monday, USA Today published a feature article on ‘honor killings.’ I won’t bother to excerpt the article here, but it will suffice to know what the tone of the article was by naming the writer’s three major sources of expertise on the subject: Robert Spencer, Phyllis Chesler and M Zudhi Jasser.

    For those who are new to the debate and aren’t familiar with these names, Robert Spencer was identified as one of the most prominent Islam-bashers in the US according to the website smearcasting.com; Phyllis Chesler has made a series of bizarre comments about Islam and Muslims (see here and here); and M Zudhi Jasser showed he was preposterously ignorant and misinformed about ‘honor killings’ when he told Fox News that slain Bridges TV cofounder Aasiya Hassan was a victim of one.

     

  • johnpi 11:49 am on November 11, 2009 | 0 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , honor killing, , , ,

    Ottawa Muslim community leader and city council candidate gets a year in jail for ‘honour’-related harassment.

    Daughter says leaving marriage, refusing to wear the hijab, were the reasons. Father says, “listening to expert evidence on honour crimes was like hearing about a ‘different world’ — he’d never, he said, lived in that world or held those beliefs.”

    (More …)

     

  • johnpi 8:15 am on November 3, 2009 | 22 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , , , honor killing, , , , , , , , , , , , ,

    Chechen leader champions ‘tradition,’ makes Sufi Islamism the state religion to counter influence of Salafi Islamism.

    Kadyrov, 33, was once a separatist but switched sides, recasting himself as an Islamic leader who is also loyal to Moscow.

    At first, his injection of national pride along with lots of money from the central government in Moscow soothed war-weary Chechens.

    And at first, the process of Islamization was voluntary. Any female student who wore a headscarf initially earned a prize of $1,000. Now all females, regardless of their religious convictions, must cover their heads in schools and government offices.

    Kadyrov has banned the sale of European-style wedding dresses in the republic’s bridal salons. Polygamy is increasing. Members of the team around Kadyrov openly have several wives. Kadyrov has also supported honor killings.

    Lipkhan Bazaeva, who runs a nongovernmental organization promoting women’s rights, says Chechnya is going back to the Middle Ages.

    “Yes, we are a traditional, conservative society, with our own values, but the government has gone overboard, declaring unacceptable limits on women — that they should sit at home, they should obey their husbands,” she says. “As an individual, she has no rights even if her husband beats her, despite Russian laws to the contrary.”

     

  • johnpi 6:48 pm on November 2, 2009 | 8 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , honor killing, , , ,

    Prosecutor cites “cultural aspect” of honor killing inside and outside of the family in asking for high bail at Arizona father’s hearing.

    The prosecutor called Noor Almaleki’s attempted (now completed – she died today) slaying an ‘honor killing,’ and expressed concern in court about the community of supporters behind her father, Faleh Hassan Almaleki, who helped in his attempted escape. The Almalekis are from Iraq.

    At the link above, you can watch the father’s first appearance in court where he is read the charges and the prosecutor makes the case for not allowing him bail, or setting his bail very high.

    Here’s my transcript of part of what the prosecutor says the state believes about his attempt to escape:

    We can’t be naive and not admit that there is a cultural aspect to this, and there may be people that would support him – including his family – but also others who share his beliefs. This was an attempt at an honor killing.

    The defendant tries to hide behind his moral convictions, and yet he also fled. The state has serious concerns that this defendant would attempt to flee if he were to be released and that he does have the resources and others that would be willing to help him, as they obviously did.

    If the prosecutor keeps talking about culture and the “cultural aspect” to the case this could get sensationalized into headlines like “Culture of honor killing goes on trial in Arizona” or some such thing.

    Noor Almaleki’s friends and other who knew her have been communicating at this thread here at Talk Islam.

     

  • mirelle 6:48 pm on November 2, 2009 | 1 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: honor killing,

    Noor Almaleki, aged 20, died today of her injuries, which she received when she was run down in a Peoria (suburb of Phoenix) parking lot on Oct. 20. Her father, Faleh Hassan Almaleki, is alleged to have done this. Faleh Almaleki escaped through Mexico and attempted to enter the UK, but was caught and deported back to Atlanta, and has since been extradited to Arizona.

    The local press is calling it an honor killing. Charges (currently two counts of attempted manslaughter) are expected to be upgraded to murder.

    Perhaps we could talk about how the Muslim community should respond to events like this.

     

  • johnpi 5:47 am on October 13, 2009 | 0 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , honor killing, ,

    Long jail term for Jordanian ‘honor’ killer.

    A 21-year-old Jordanian man has been sentenced to 15 years in jail for killing his married sister over an alleged affair, court officials said.

    He was charged with premeditated murder for stabbing his 18-year-old sister 26 times with a kitchen knife last year. He claimed he wanted to restore his family’s honour.
    ….

    Jordan has been criticised in the past for giving lenient sentences in so-called honour killing cases.

    But this time, the court refused to reduce the sentence despite pleas for leniency from the man’s family.

    “The court did not find any reason to commute or reduce the sentence, especially as the convict had previous knowledge of the affair and decided to plan the murder,” a court official was quoted as saying by AFP.

     

  • johnpi 3:33 pm on September 16, 2009 | 0 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , honor killing, , ,

    Rod Dreher tells the story about when he discovered one of his relatives – a “kindly old man” – had helped kill someone in the name of “honor.”

    On his deathbed not too many years ago, a relative of mine confessed to having been part of a white lynch mob in the 1930s, which strung up a black man after he was caught having sex with a white woman. She accused him of rape. The sheriff led the lynch mob. There was no need for a trial; what a black man did to a white woman was considered so horrifying that nobody could wait for a trial and a verdict. After the black man was murdered, the guilt-stricken white woman confessed that the man had been her lover, and she called him a rapist to protect her honor.

    None of us ever knew this about my kinsman, until in his dying days, he admitted it because it tortured him. It had been on his heart all his life. I pray that his repentance in the face of eternity helped him find mercy. It unnerved me, though, to think that that kindly old man had once fallen under the sway of race hatred to that degree, a race hatred that was part of the society into which he was born and raised. It still does, because that world seems like a thousand years ago. But it only seems so far away because many people worked too hard — and some even gave their lives — to drive those demons out.

    Seems like a lot of people will go into the fire on Judgement Day in the name of “honor.”

     

  • johnpi 11:00 am on September 16, 2009 | 0 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: honor killing,

    A story that is appearing here and there in the foreign media (I’m in the US) about an “honour killing” in northern Italy.

    From Adnkronos:

    A Moroccan man is facing murder charges after allegedly stabbing his 18-year-old daughter to death for falling in love with an older man in a small northern Italian town. Sanaa Dafani was stabbed in the throat while she was sitting in a car with her 31-year-old boyfriend in Montereale Valcellina, northwest of Trieste, late Tuesday.
    ….

    There is also widespread speculation that El Ketawi Dafani, believed to be a Muslim, objected to religious differences between his daughter and her boyfriend and their plans to live together.

    And then from this South African publication, a report of an Italian government minister describing it as an act of “absurd religious war,” and calling to kick out immigrants who don’t integrate.

    “Terrible events as this one invite us to continue to integrate immigrants according to the Italian model, where each person is free to practice their own faith but where they can only stay in the country if they accept the laws, including respect of human rights, including those of women,” she said.

    The second story notes that the prosecutor “refused to confirm whether the murder had religious motives.”

     

  • johnpi 9:53 pm on August 16, 2009 | 0 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , , , honor killing, , ,

    A full nearly seven minute video of a frightened, tearful Fathima Rifqa Bary has been posted to youtube by Pamela Gellar. Bary is the 17-year-old Sri Lankan teenager who ran away from her Muslim family in Ohio to live with a Christian preacher in Florida, claiming her family might commit an “honor killing” because they found out she converted to Christianity. Such a killing would be required for her family “to show love for Allah,” she explains to reporters.

    There is something really weird and distorted about this. She has apostasized, but there have been no assertions about issues arising from her apostate status. She and those around her have exclusively harped on the buzz word ‘honor killings,’ with her attorney declaring, “She could be killed in an honor killing. Unfortunately it happens every day in the U.S.”

    As Richard Bartholomew has pointed out, she has an odd description of ‘honor killing:’

    The girl gives a rather strange interpretation of what an “honour killing” is for; rather than being the remedy for a perceived dishonour suffered by a family, she tells the journalist that to kill her would be an especially ”great honour” because she is the first Christian in her family for “150 generations” and it would show her family’s love for Allah (Lorenz concurs with a “yes” at 5:03). This seems to me to be a garbled “Christianized” understanding of the phenomenon, making it into something like a human sacrifice. Her claim that Muslim converts to Christianity in Sri Lanka (where Muslims are a minority) are confined to a mental hospital is not one that I have seen reported anywhere else.

    Here’s a local news report that includes interviews with her family members.

    The parents attorney has issued a statement that included this:

    If this case is perceived as a clash of religions, it is because Mr. Lorenz [the preacher] recklessly and without authorization put someone else’s child in front of television cameras to publicly renounce her previous faith.

     

  • johnpi 8:29 pm on July 27, 2009 | 0 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , honor killing, , ,

    Krista at MMW begins a conversation about the recent killing of three sibling girls and their mother in Canada. I really appreciate her approach to this incident, relative to some other coverage there (Aqsa Parvez) which I felt was more purely a defensive response. Krista wants to challenge media coverage that dogwhistles anti-Muslim generalizations and prejudice while not sweeping aside the underlying issues within the Muslim community either.

    From an update:

    …my original goal for this post was actually to use this article as a starting point for trying to figure out how to have these conversations about violence within Muslim communities, in ways that address the violence properly and fully, without feeding into perceptions of Muslims as all uniquely violent/patriarchal/oppressive in ways that other religious and/or cultural communities aren’t. I wanted to come back to a question of how to engage with some of the more problematic media representations without ignoring the actual problems that are happening.

    She’s bringing up something that I think must be a central issue for other Muslim bloggers, and certainly something that I think about when I post here at TI.

    Particular to my own situation as a convert, I want to discuss, address and confront issues in the Muslim community that diminish my iman and tend to drive me away from Islam in order to recover myself to the religion and not get stuck, but I don’t want to feed the Jafis and the general prejudices of the society against Muslims in the process.

     

  • aziz 2:11 pm on March 26, 2009 | 1 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: honor killing, ,

    oh my god – 16yr old girl burned alive in India. She was able to identify her attackers before succumbing – and they are being brought to justice. I think the father should be executed too for his part.

     

  • Fatemeh 12:49 pm on November 29, 2008 | 0 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , honor killing, , , Natasha Bakht, , , The AccoLate

    This week on MMW, we praised Natasha Bakht’s new book, discussed media representation of domestic violence, bitched about Iran’s car “especially designed for women,” drooled over Saudi Arabia’s all-girl band, and rolled out the Friday Links.

     

  • Fatemeh 9:20 pm on November 23, 2008 | 0 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , beer, , honor killing, , , Sahar Ullah, , The Hijabi Monologues

    This week on MMW, we looked at a sexist Egyptian beer commercial, ripped Toronto Life magazine for its coverage of Aqsa Parvez, questioned Tarek Fatah on domestic violence and honor killing, and interviewed Sahar Ullah from The Hijabi Monologues. We also published a very special Friday links this week, along with a few announcements.

     

  • Fatemeh 6:50 pm on September 3, 2008 | 0 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: honor killing

    When honor killings aren’t honor killings.

     

  • muse 3:28 pm on July 8, 2008 | 1 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , honor killing,

    Speaking of honor killing, front page on CNN right now. Sigh.

     

  • aziz 4:19 pm on June 17, 2008 | 2 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: honor killing,

    Burned Alive was the shocking memoir of an Arab woman who survived a horrific “honor killing” attempt on her life. It garnered immense praise and plaudits, as an example of a truly courageous woman who spoke out against evil despite the risk.

    It also seems to have been a fake. http://tinyurl.com/6ctgsh

     

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