Dishonorable Killings

The dishonorable practice of honor killing gets quite a write-up at the Islam blog Eteraz. Particularly chilling in the lengthy and insightful account was this:

A Middle Eastern Journal reports cases in numerous other places, and the confessions of the killers are chilling:

• A Jordanian murdered his sister who was raped by another brother. The family tried initially to save its honor by marrying the victim to an old man, but this new husband turned her into a prostitute and she escaped from him. The murderer confessed that if he had to go through it all again he would not kill her, but rather would kill his father, mother, uncles, and all the relatives that pressured him to murder and led him to jail. Instead of killing his sister and going to jail, he said he should have “tied her with a rope like a goat and let her spend her life like that until she dies.”
  
  
• An Egyptian who strangled his unmarried pregnant daughter to death and then cut her corpse in eight pieces and threw them in the toilet: “Shame kept following me wherever I went [before the murder]. The village’s people had no mercy on me. They were making jokes and mocking me. I couldn’t bear it and decided to put an end to this shame.”

The writer, who is anonymous for apparent reasons, wades through this awful stuff and looks with shame at his religion:

So, I ask, either the societies aren’t Islamic, or Islam is no longer an adequate protection for the lives of women. In fact, Islam has become a scourge. Which is it? Since there are many who will ‘protect’ Islam from this ‘merely cultural’ evil (”let’s not mix culture and Islam” they will say), I will say that every Muslim, practicing or not, who in any way stays silent in the face of this evil, is complicit. Therefore, I myself am guilty and I don’t know how to atone.

Frankly, I have no idea how I’ve managed to write even this far. I am disgusted and saddened and I want right now to have nothing to do with Muslims. Why should I agitate with my friends on helping a Jordanian or Pakistani gain asylum to this country when so many of them are bringing these kind of views to us? In this post I have no answers.

I am going away for a few days and I will be taking my sadness with me.

Seventy-one comments follow the post -- apologists, Muslim-haters, advocates of lashing over killing -- quite a menagerie. Fascinating.