Italian Honor Killing....

This 21 year-old Pakistani women was savagely murdered by her father and uncle in a barbaric ritual called honor killings.



Her crime was that she wanted to integrate into Italian society, worked at a bar and had a relationship with an Italian man.

Italian police were searching yesterday for a man suspected of involvement in the killing of a Pakistani woman after her father and uncle were charged with slitting her throat because she dated an Italian man and refused to conform to an Islamic lifestyle.

Investigators believe the third suspect helped the father and uncle kill Hina Saleem, 21. The woman's body was found buried in the family's garden in Sarezzo on Saturday. Her father and uncle were taken into custody on Monday.

The UN estimates that around 5,000 girls and woman are murdered every year from this barbaric practice. Remember, that honor killings are where family members feel compelled to kill their female children, sisters or nieces.

So some argue that honor killings such as these are either due to brittle and unbending Muslim society or an uneducated people's tradition from rural backwards areas.

So, these people, since they cannot control their [female] adult or near-adult children, choose to kill them. What kind of cold-hearted parents are these? Arguably, the killing of children is not limited to certain ethnic or religious groups since it happens in other places, particularly to the young and those unable to defend themselves. However, the killing of precious children is considered to be taboo and typically caused by severely mentally disturbed people. However, honor killings are limited to older female children and males are rarely held accountable to similar 'crimes' whereas the mentally disturbed kill children of both sexes.

However, honor killings as those we see in Middle-Eastern and other Muslim dominated regions are sometimes excused by apologists using bizarre logic...

Sharif Kanaana, professor of anthropology at Birzeit University states that honor 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 honor killing is not a means to control sexual power or behavior. What's behind it is the issue of fertility, or reproductive power.

An Amnesty International statement adds:

The mere perception that a woman has contravened the code of sexual behavior damages honor. The regime of honor is unforgiving: women on whom suspicion has fallen are not given an opportunity to defend themselves, and family members have no socially acceptable alternative but to remove the stain on their honor by attacking the woman.

The typical honor killing has little to do about honor but is all about power as the above twisted logic indicates. Its like rape is not about love but violence.

Weak egos of Arab and Muslim males cannot tolerate females since they hold the key to reproduction. They are taught in their culture to disrespect women, are purposefully kept separate from them and rarely get to know them at a young age and cannot mesh that with the fact that woman are indispensable to the well-being of the society. So they retain the right to kill them if they think that they have been dethroned in their absolute right to control and dictate behavior no matter how arbitrary. It is the exercise of power that drives honor killing, it is a bizarre method to insure that children are scared into obeying their parents.

For me, it is very disturbing to see how people can rationalize the slitting of one's own child's throat and watching them die for such petty and self serving reasoning. How can the honor of one's family not be destroyed when the patriarch is murdering their own children? I do not see the honor killing as a complex issue but as a brutal medieval practice that Islam has failed to address over centuries. Islam is proving yet again to incapable of addressing the needs of their own societies and does not protect people but allows them to continue to inflict death arbitrarily.

But we in Western societies have used a similar argument built on the rights of women to kill unborn children by abortion. Its ok to terminate the unborn using the logic of 'right' but it still remains unacceptable for parents to terminate their children after a certain term or actual birth. But this is a topic for another time.