Syrian girl stoned by father & ISIS (graphic video of 'honor killing')
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/...by-father-ISIS-graphic-video-of-honor-killing
By BvueDem
Wednesday Oct 22, 2014 2:49 PM ADT
Warning: the video shows a Syrian father repeatedly refusing his daughter's pleas for forgiveness, then joining what appears to be an Imam and others affiliated with ISIS in stoning his daughter to death, allegedly for 'adultery.' (This could just be 'dishonor', e.g. associating with a boy.) It is graphic, stomach-churning and horrifying.
What is most horrifying to me is not the ISIS fighters, who we can mentally categorize as fringe extremists, but her elderly father, dressed in normal farmer's attire, repeatedly saying "No" ("la" "لا" in Arabic) and wagging his finger no, as she quietly begs her "baba" for forgiveness.
Closing our eyes to such violence will not make it go away.
Meanwhile, ISIS fighters have enslaved thousands of Yazidi women, allegedly separated the virgins from others, forced the latter into forced 'marriages' which may last a very short time (as in an hour); older women report being gang-raped in brothels.
Most Muslims worldwide are of course shocked at such a sight. No-one says that all Muslims (let alone any of the 1.5% of the world's Muslims who reside in the West, nor those educated here) support this. That is a ridiculous straw-man. Anyone we think of as an educated, enlightened person (of any faith, Muslim, Christian, wiccan, Hindu, FSM, etc.) will be nauseated by this and by all honor killings.
But that's too low a bar. Murdering your own daughter? (For any reason -- let alone something so normal as associating with boys.) No sane adult of any religion should even entertain for a split-second rationalizing such a thought. If they do, then the beliefs they justify it with should be loudly, repeatedly, and publicly critiqued until such practices disappear. If liberals can't pull together enough spine to publicly decry this, no matter where in the world it occurs, then nothing else we say is worth spit.
If it were only a few insane individuals (or even <0.01%) who supported stoning your daughter for alleged adultery, we would ignore them as lunatics. But support for so-called "honor killings" is far higher in that part of the world, http://www.clarionproject.org/news/jordan-teens-think-honor-killings-justified-study-says, than most Kossacks are willing to acknowledge.
Arguably (and there is of course debate on this point), it is also more deeply tied into widely-held (i.e. conservative) interpretations of Islam in that part of the world than a liberal reality-based community would like to admit. That part of the world -- including Mecca/Medinah and Qom -- heavily influences Islam worldwide. The broader issue is not stoning, or even all 'honor-killings,' horrible as they are, which statistically are rare events. The issue is the fundamental treatment of women. But if you won't speak up against stoning women, then why trust you'll speak up on anything less egregious? 90% of honor killings today occur in Muslim countries (with some occurring within expat minority groups abroad), according to Kulczycki and Windle, "Honor killings in the Middle East and North Africa: A systematic review of the literature," Violence against Women, v.17, pp.1442–1464, 2011. Stoning (رجم or rajm in Arabic) is legal in: Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Qatar, UAE (though not practiced), Mauritania, Iran, Somalia, Sudan, Yemen, Northern Nigeria, Aceh in Indonesia, Brunei, and Pakistan. (Under the US-occupation it was banned in Afghanistan.) It has occurred extra-judicially in other countries in the region. It is not just a Sunni phenomenon: stoning is still an official punishment in Iran, although rare, it was most recently carried out in 2009.
Some cultural relativists bend over backwards to argue that it is not the religion per se (and of course it doesn't need to be -- myriad interpretations of any religion are possible, including Islam), but 'traditionalism' (authority, obedience, resistance to change, patriarchal entitlements, anti‐Western attitudes), or 'female chastity expectations, ('how wrong is it for a girl to go to cinema alone with a boy who is not a relative,' 'to be friends with a boy,' or 'to hold a boy's hand'), or 'parental harsh discipline', or low education. There are a number of problems with the cultural-relativist approach. First, they could reverse their analyses, hold these variables constant as dummy variables, and base their conclusion on the religion. (The first three variables are closely related; high colinearity.) Second, even Christian, Baha'i, Jewish, and other minority religious groups in that part of the world live in sharia-shaped legal and social structures. Support for 'honor killings' falls off sharply outside of countries with sharia law. (Sharia law governs about 80% of the world's Muslims, at least in personal/social issues. 98.5% of the world's Muslims live outside of the West, so nothing in this diary is about American, European, Aus-NZ Muslims, etc.) Third, their analysis seems driven by an agenda, perhaps to avoid insulting or inflaming Muslims. Fourth, Islam as interpreted by many believers incorporates into the Quran and sunnah/hadiths religious support for a number of the barbaric pre-Islamic traditions in the region, including flogging, punitive amputations, sex slavery ('that your right hand possess'), stoning, and beheading (even if these are rarely practiced and then only by those we call 'extremists'). By contrast, many other religious texts omit them, or their theologians acknowledge that the texts are not timeless but must be reinterpreted, or they outright condemn these practices. ("Let ye who is without sin cast the first stone" -- ring a bell?) Etc.
An example is a http://www.clarionproject.org/news/jordan-teens-think-honor-killings-justified-study-says of 856 ninth-grade students (age 14-15) from 14 schools in Amman, Jordan, which concludes that 38% of boys and 18% of girls believe that killing a daughter, sister, or wife who has 'dishonored the family' can be justified.
An outright majority of Muslims support honor killings in http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2013/05/02/what-the-muslim-world-believes-on-everything-from-alcohol-to-honor-killings-in-8-maps-and-4-charts/ (9 of 23 countries) surveyed by Pew in 2013.
Again, the video is deeply disturbing:
http://www.liveleak.com/...
[The full 5-minute video has been deleted from Vimeo and YouTube. It was here: http://vimeo.com/109527254. and here: http://www.youtube.com/... . I can find shorter versions, but it is really the lead-in to it that is most worth informative -- the elderly father wagging his finger repeatedly, the Imam invoking Allah, and telling the girl she will be better off dead, etc. Stonings you've seen or can imagine. The lead-in to this you cannot even imagine.]
You are still missing the point.
