Honor Killing: The Evil Continues!
Honor Killing
In Texas
by Robert Spencer
January 8th, 2008
HUMANEVENTS.COM
Amina Said, 18,
and her sister Sarah, 17,
smile happily in one widely
circulating photo, and
Amina is wearing what looks
like a sweatshirt bearing the
name “AMERICAN.”
But their fate may have
been the herald of a new,
disquieting feature of the
American landscape:
honor killing.
Amina and Sarah were
shot dead in Irving, Texas,
on New Year’s Day.
Police are searching
for their father,
Yaser Abdel Said,
on a warrant for
capital murder.
The girls’ great aunt,
Gail Gartrell, told reporters,
“This was an honor killing.”
She explained that
Yaser Said had long
abused the girls,
and after discovering that
they had boyfriends,
had threatened to kill them –
whereupon their
mother fled with them.
“She ran with them,”
said Gartrell,
“because she knew he
would carry out the threat.”
But Said found them,
and apparently did
carry it out.
.
Honor killing,
the practice of murdering a female
family member who is believed to
have sullied the family honor,
enjoys widespread acceptance in
some areas of the Islamic world.
However, Islam Said,
the brother of Amina and Sarah,
has denied that the murders had
anything to do with Islam at all.
“It’s not religion,”
he insisted.
“It’s something else.
Religion has nothing to do with it.”
And to be sure, the Qur’an
or Islamic tradition does not
sanction honor killing.
Muslim spokesmen have hastened,
after the recent killing in Canada of
another teenage Muslim girl,
Aqsa Parvez, by her father to tell
the public that honor killing has
nothing to do with Islam,
but is merely a feature of
Islamic culture in some areas.
Aqsa Parvez was sixteen years old;
her father, Muhammad Parvez,
has been charged with strangling
her to death because she refused
to wear the hijab.
Shahina Siddiqui, president of the
Islamic Social Services Association,
declared:
“The strangulation death of Ms. Parvez
was the result of domestic violence,
a problem that cuts across Canadian
society and is blind to colour or creed.”
Sheikh Alaa El-Sayyed,
imam of the Islamic Society of North
America in Mississauga, Ontario, agreed:
“The bottom line is,
it’s a domestic violence issue.”
But these dismissals are too easy,
principally because they fail to take
into account important evidence.
In some areas, honor killing is
assumed to be an Islamic practice.
There is evidence that Islamic culture
inculcates attitudes that could lead
directly to the murders of these
two girls in Texas.
.
In 2003, the Jordanian Parliament
voted down on Islamic grounds
a provision designed to stiffen
penalties for honor killings. In a
sadly typical consequence of this
early last year,
a Jordanian man who murdered his
sister because he thought she had a
lover was given a three-month sentence,
which was suspended for time served,
allowing him to walk free.
The Yemen Times just last week
published an article insisting that
violence against women is necessary
for the stability of the family and
the society,
and invoking Islam to support this view.
Since Islam is used as the
justification for such barbarities,
it becomes incumbent upon Muslim
spokesmen to confront this directly,
and to work for positive change,
rather than simply to consign
it all to culture,
as if that absolves Islam
from all responsibility.
For this is the culture that apparently
gave Yaser Said and Muhammad Parvez
the idea that they had to
kill their daughters.
It is a culture suffused
with its religion,
thoroughly dominated by it –
such that a clear distinction
between the two is not so
easy to find.
The killings of Amina and Sarah Said
raises uncomfortable questions for
the Islamic community in the
United States,
questions about the culture and
mindset that people like Yaser Said
bring to this country.
Now that honor killing has come
to Texas, Muslim spokesmen in
the U.S. have an all the more
urgent responsibility to end their
denial and confront these cultural
attitudes.
If they don’t,
and instead continue to glibly
insist that religion has nothing
to do with what happened to
these poor girls,
the murders of the Said sisters
will only be the beginning of a
new American phenomenon.
.
.
.
STOP HONORCIDE link!
.
.
