Yet another instance of the conditions women live under in the Middle East:
WARNIING: THE VIDEO IS SO HORRIBLE I WILL NOT DIRECTLY LINK TO IT. I could not bear watching it.
Have You Ever Seen A Woman Stoned To Death? Publius Pundit has the video.
Gateway Pundit has the story,
On or around April 7, 2007… Du’a Khalil Aswad, a 17 year old Kurdish girl was murdered by public stoning after running away from home for a so-called honour crime. Du’a was a member of Iraq’s Yezidi religious minority from the village of Bahzan in northern Iraq. She was killed by a group of men and in the presence of a large noisy crowd in the town of Bashika, near the city of Mosul. Some of her relatives may have participated in her stoning.
Amnesty International reported that Du’a Khalil Aswad’s murder is said to have been committed by relatives and other Yezidi men because she had engaged in a relationship with a Sunni Muslim boy and had been absent from her home for one night. Some reports suggested that she had converted to Islam, but others deny this. Initially, she was reportedly given shelter in the house of a Yezidi tribal leader in Bashika, but her killers stormed the house, took her outside and stoned her to death. Her death by stoning, lasted for some 30 minutes.
Today in Erbil… Capital of the Kurdish region of Iraq, women and men came together to protest the murder of Du’a Khalil Aswad. The demonstration was organised by 90 NGOs and attracted protestors from across the whole Kurdish region.
Gateway Pundit has a post on the protests following this horrible crime.
According to Wikipedia, the Yezidi are not Muslim, and they are ethnic Kurds. The crowd did yell Allah Akbar.
In Yazidism, there’s the underlying misogyny:
One of the key creationism beliefs of Yazidism is that all Yazidis are descendants of Adam rather than Eve
May that poor girl’s soul rest in peace.
Horror.
There is no other word to describe the evil and dysfunction that permeates those societies.
None.
dysfunction that permeates
The “descendants of Adam, not Eve” says a lot, doesn’t it?
SC&A has it right, the horror of “honor” killings is a blight on the world and a damning indictment of those that think all cultures are are of equal value. I watched the video a Publius and though it was a poorly done video, the absolute monstrosity of it came through loud an clear. I’ll not ever make that mistake again.
My take on this event is somewhat different. The distance between stoning and any other form of capital punishment is one of degree.
A crowd of ordinary people casting stones is not very different from more clinical methods of execution. That execution is more easily understood as what it really is: society turning on one of its own for the protection of some greater purpose, whatever they imagine that purpose to be. We are a generation of meat-lovers but most people, except for hunters and fishermen, recoil at the idea of slaughtering even a chicken for dinner. As a recent link shows there are plenty among us who seem to have little problem with killing other people and celebrating what they have done, but those people are acting in the line of duty, don’t you know. We have improved civilized behavior to the point that we have trained executioners instead of doing the job personally. Likewise, we develop trained warriors to kill designated enemies.
Spare me the indignation about stoning. The practice predates the New Testament. That does not mean I approve. Forms differ in the level of cruelty, but result is the same: society kills one of its own. We who are peaceful and loving have more civilized ways of expressing that love, don’t we?
Support Kurdish progressives in opposing honour crime
Yes, we have trained executioners that execute criminals who have committed only grievous acts against mankind.
This poor girl did nothing but fall in love with a man outside of her religion. If this is considered to be a grievous act worthy of a brutal death, than the basis of this religion is suspect.
Do NOT try and explain this as an act by a civil, sane society protecting their existence by cleansing out those who have dishonoured their family.
Yes, we have trained executioners that execute criminals who have committed only grievous acts against mankind.
This poor girl did nothing but fall in love with a man outside of her religion. If this is considered to be a grievous act worthy of a brutal death, than the basis of this religion is suspect.
Do NOT try and explain this as an act by a civil, sane society protecting their existence by cleansing out those who have dishonoured their family.
Hoots — Poor argument. As angcorsair explained, there is no comparison because in our society, capital punishment is applied only in the most heinous of cases. And, we have developed capital punishment to the point where it is as humane as possible. A lethal injection is nowhere near as bad as being stoned. And getting a lethal injection for serial killing is actually more like a thousand leagues apart from being stoned to death for falling in love.
I understand, of course. I’m not that obtuse. I made a comment, not an argument.
I oppose capital punishment (along with a respectable number of countries, by the way) for a number of reasons, but mainly because of what it does to me as a citizen. If anything I said indicated otherwise I need to clarify.
The point is that in a clinical, “civil” manner we have learned to officially, legally dispatch criminals with a minimum of suffering, but one only has to listen to talk radio or read a few news articles to know that there are many among us who would advocate punishments every bit as savage as stoning for certain perpetrators.
I noted no less a figure than Eugene Volokh advocating such methods a couple years ago, although he changed his mind before it was all over. I live in the South among people only two or three generations away from lynchings and worse, either as victims or perpetrators. The distance between “us” and “them” may not be as far as we like to imagine.
(As an aside, I’m honored to have been repremanded by Robert Mayer. Publius Pundit is one of the finest blogs of them all. Absolutely top-drawer. His coverage of the Cedar and Orange Revolutions has been without peer.)
These people are barbaric, if it is their culture, it is barbaric and inferior…
absurd thought –
God of the Universe says
fathers may kill their daughters
if they feel dishonored
like when she dates the wrong boy
.