Slog News & Arts

Line Out

Music & Nightlife

« Today The Stranger Suggests | Let the Schedule Plotting Begi... »

Sunday, May 11, 2008

Without Honor

posted by on May 11 at 11:25 AM

These would be the same Iraqi police that we’ve spent hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars training, right?

For Abdel-Qader Ali there is only one regret: that he did not kill his daughter at birth. ‘If I had realised then what she would become, I would have killed her the instant her mother delivered her,’ he said with no trace of remorse.

Two weeks after The Observer revealed the shocking story of Rand Abdel-Qader, 17, murdered because of her infatuation with a British solider in Basra, southern Iraq, her father is defiant. Sitting in the front garden of his well-kept home in the city’s Al-Fursi district, he remains a free man, despite having stamped on, suffocated and then stabbed his student daughter to death.

Abdel-Qader, 46, a government employee, was initially arrested but released after two hours. Astonishingly, he said, police congratulated him on what he had done. ‘They are men and know what honour is,’ he said.

RSS icon Comments

1

Seriously, calling these people scum would be an insult to the single-celled organisms of the world. Tell me again why we care whether these asswipes live or die? Oh, yeah. Oil. Right.

Posted by Fifty-Two-Eighty | May 11, 2008 11:39 AM
2

its great that so many americans supported that war from the beginning because they believed the neocon's lies about cheap gas and a dictator (that we aided and abetted). all the people who were not actively protesting this from the start should have news stories like this one tattooed on their faces and lose their right to vote.

Posted by great job bush | May 11, 2008 11:44 AM
3

Stories like this make me hope there is an afterlife, so that the daughter can spend a good thousand years or so kicking her asshole of a father in the nuts, while he gets sodomized by something large and spikey, and is forced to suckle on the breast of an "unclean woman" who secretes urine.

All while his friends watch, of course. Because it's all about the honor.

Posted by Hellholes begat assholes | May 11, 2008 11:56 AM
4

@2
u r not making sense.

whether or not we would have invaded, there would be horrible honor killings in this retrograde, backwards asswipe society. Probably just as many if we hadn't invaded. Blaming this particular one on us because a westerner is involved is very dumb....if not this one there would be other honor killings when chicks

--look at guys

--refuse to marry the guy their daddy picks out

--refuse to be treated like cattle, etc.

FYI we didn't import the notion of so called honor killings with our invasion it was already there.

Oh btw -- glad you agree with us that our western norms of human rights and individualism and equality are correct, and some of those cultural thingys out there in the Middle East -- putting the family above individuals, men above women, and treating women like they are cattle owned by the men -- are just .....rotten and wrong.

Posted by PC | May 11, 2008 11:57 AM
5

I wouldn't want my daughter to marry a brit either... but this goes WAY too far.

Posted by gunther | May 11, 2008 12:10 PM
6

yes, unpc@ 5 you are right, but the point i would like to make is that the more attacked they are and economically pressed they become, the more tenaciously they cling to their medieval ways. this would be true of any culture, imo, not just muslim. that might be what 2 was trying to get at, though never made clear...?

Posted by ellarosa | May 11, 2008 12:30 PM
7

I guess torture isn't always wrong after all.

Posted by Ivan | May 11, 2008 12:38 PM
8

Wasn't honor killing illegal under Saddam?

Posted by Sirkowski | May 11, 2008 12:38 PM
9

Why do you people hate Isslam? Isslam is a religion of peace. This harlot was making war on Isslam, so Isslam removed her, which ended her war on Isslam. Is that not peaceable? Is that not glorified in the eyes of Allah? I know that it is, because I saw a BBC documentary that told me that "Isslam love every people." This documentary also taught me the correct way to pronounce Isslam. The documentary sanctified me. I wish I had a Muslim daughter so that I could wage peace on her for Allah.

Posted by croydonfacelift | May 11, 2008 12:51 PM
10

Jesus Christ!

Posted by Michigan Matt (soon to be Balt-o-matt) | May 11, 2008 12:54 PM
11

@4,

Iraq was one of the best Arab countries for women. This sort of shit was unacceptable under Saddam's regime as #8 points out. Whatever Saddam's other crimes, we've completely fucked over Iraqi women. They'll be lucky if they don't wind up with a Taliban-esque clusterfuck.

Posted by keshmeshi | May 11, 2008 1:03 PM
12

Disgusting. Inexcusable. Somebody should make this "father" do the truck pull with whatever testicles he has.

"Honor killing?" Right. So let's honor the daughter and hunt this babboon down.

Posted by Wolf | May 11, 2008 1:12 PM
13

Sorry, baboon. I'm a little liberal with the B's today.

Posted by Wolf | May 11, 2008 1:13 PM
14

And of course, such a thing would NEVER occur in this country.

Oh, wait. Maybe THAT'S why Dan continues to post those "Every Child Deserves A Mother And Father" stories...

Posted by COMTE | May 11, 2008 1:57 PM
15

this is flat out none of our fucking business.

Posted by calvin | May 11, 2008 2:05 PM
16

I recall a similar thing happening in India. A guy and gal from separate villages fell in love and were swiftly and horribly killed by their village elders. Backward societies and strong backward thinking religious leaders are to blame for misleading the common citizen.

Posted by Sargon Bighorn | May 11, 2008 2:12 PM
17
whether or not we would have invaded, there would be horrible honor killings in this retrograde, backwards asswipe society. Probably just as many if we hadn't invaded.

By most accounts, honor killings have increased since the invasion. Tyrant though Saddam may have been, Iraqi society under him was far more secularized than it is now.

Posted by tsm | May 11, 2008 2:19 PM
18

No one in America ever killed their daughter and got away with it. Nope.

Posted by Eric | May 11, 2008 2:20 PM
19

@18, when a random guy kills his daughter in East Bumfuck, Iowa, he doesn't act with the overt approval of authorities and the society around him. There's no comparison.

Posted by youknowitstrue | May 11, 2008 2:26 PM
20

It's only in the last century and a half that we have become "civilised" yet men are killing women here all the time because they want a divorce or don't want to date them anymore or whatever. "A woman was just shot by her boyfriend" we hear on the news every week. It's a very primitive reaction men have but almost universal around the world. There's nothing about Iraq that makes it unique in this regard. Cruelty is common. Compassion hard to find.

Posted by Vince | May 11, 2008 2:45 PM
21

the more you learn about other cultures, the less cultural relativism makes any sense.

you can believe it: both martin luther & the enlightenment were good things.

Posted by maxsolomon@home | May 11, 2008 3:47 PM
22
There's nothing about Iraq that makes it unique in this regard. Cruelty is common. Compassion hard to find.

I would think that the difference is that in this country, the rest of your family wouldn't join in the killing.

Posted by wench | May 11, 2008 3:51 PM
23

The way Islam in that area of the world teaches people that women are good only for fucking and cooking and only then just for their husbands, this is sadly unsurprising.

Posted by The CHZA | May 11, 2008 7:46 PM
24

Under Saddam, things were much more secular. Including the brutality and the killings.

I'm not saying this as a pro-war thingie. Just agreeing, yep, he put a damper on the medieval kookiness, and knew he had to make an effort to keep a lid on it. And all it took was a bunch of brutal repression of a different type!

Folks don't play nice there. And places like Iraq or Haiti, where politics is winner-take-all, life and death, don't play nice when a tyrant falls, and don't turn the place into an orderly Swiss democracy. Top spot on pyramid = payback time.

And they don't need us to train them to fight. They know how to fight just fine.

BTW, much as we chafe and grumble about the rrrracist MF'ers in our own society who keep getting in the way of progress, stories like this are a reminder as to how racist/tribal much of the world is. Oh, and sexist, too. Of course.

I sure hope he didn't suffocate her with a plastic grocery sack. Then we'd all be at it for days here.

Posted by CP | May 11, 2008 9:24 PM
25

You know, if we just left, it wouldn't matter what was happening.

Ask Rwanda. Or Mozambique. Or any other nation we no longer report news "about".

Posted by Will in Seattle | May 11, 2008 10:57 PM
26

I don't think anyone's reading this thread anymore, but FYI:

Before the invasion, about 1/3 of all Iraqi marriages were mixed along ethnic or sectarian lines. True, that doesn't necessarily include Brits, but it is really important to note how socially damaging the invasion has been: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/03/AR2007030300647_pf.html

Posted by NB | May 12, 2008 3:24 AM
27

other people have made similar points but I have to say it too:

1- Iraq was one of the most educated, cultured, deeply infrastructured countries in the middle east before we destroyed everything. And that was despite, not because of, their dictator. When everyone who has the means (money, education, power, foreign ties) leaves a country to chaos and militias, you have to figure it will get pretty bad. This is a pattern we should recognize by now: Palestine, Lebanon, Afghanistan... I would not want to live in South Carolina if there was a civil war on. Hell, I don't want to live there now.

2- Honor killings are terrible. terrible terrible terrible. They happen all over the place though. In some of our best friend middle eastern countries (Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt) and other good friend countries too (India, both hindu and muslim!). In Jordan they are illegal. Supposedly punishable as a normal murder. But since often the family doesn't report the death and her friends are afraid to ask too many questions, not much happens. Of course, as one person posted, this isn't really our place to police. With time, the people will sort this out for themselves, and even though it is awful to hear about meanwhile, its the only way.

3- It was not very long ago here that a couple couldn't marry if they were of two different races or religions. Even my mother remembers the uproar from her family because she, a southern protestant, wanted to marry a northern catholic. When I got engaged to my husband, an Arab, I had people look me in the face and say in all seriousness, how do you know he doesn't want to just come over here to blow something up?
It takes time and stability for people to ease off their stubborn clinging to religion and race.

Posted by nicole | May 12, 2008 5:59 AM
28

It seems to me that these men's honor must be very flimsy stuff if it can be so threatened by the perceived behavior of something so insignificant as a "lowly woman." A man with real honor within himself is not dishonored by the behavior of other people and can stand up to the ridicule of idiots who have no real honor of their own.

Posted by lc | May 12, 2008 6:56 AM
29

Kill em all. Dan was correct at the beginning of this whole show. Right on.
"War may be bad for children and other living things, but there are times when peace is worse for children and other living things, and this is one of those times. Saying no to war in Iraq means saying yes to the continued oppression of the Iraqi people. It amazes me when I hear lefties argue that we should assassinate Saddam in order to avoid war. If Saddam is assassinated, he will be replaced by another Baathist dictator--and what then for the people of Iraq? More "peace"--i.e., more oppression, more executions, more gassings, more terror, more fear."

Posted by bigtoe | May 12, 2008 7:31 AM
30

And the moral high ground we have to fall back on as example there is Blackwater.

AND we're the ones who put Saddam in power in Iraq in the first place.

Posted by monkey | May 12, 2008 7:53 AM

Comments Closed

In order to combat spam, we are no longer accepting comments on this post (or any post more than 14 days old).