May 29, 2008
'My daughter deserved to die for falling in love'
Reading this made me nauseous. Afif Sarhan and Caroline Davies in The Observer:
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 soldier 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.
Rand, who was studying English at Basra University, was deemed to have brought shame on her family after becoming infatuated with a British soldier, 22, known only as Paul.
She died a virgin, according to her closest friend Zeinab. Indeed, her 'relationship' with Paul, which began when she worked as a volunteer helping displaced families and he was distributing water, appears to have consisted of snatched conversations over less than four months.
More here. [Thanks to Akbi Khan.]
Posted by Abbas Raza at 06:11 AM | Permalink
Comments
"He said his daughter's 'bad genes were passed on from her mother'."
Yeh, right. This really struck me - to see such medieval, bizarre, fanatic ideology justified with reference to a term from modern science. "Bad seed" they used to say. What, like there's a gene for, uh, talking to the opposite sex?
Posted by: Frank | May 29, 2008 10:49:50 AM
The only way to describe this man is by calling him a monster. That's what he is. Inhuman, without compassion, without love, without remorse. That he should be treated with the very qualities that he lacks is as much a crime as the murder of his child - HIS CHILD - in cold blood. Gaddis was right. In this world, there is no justice, there is only the law. And the law he lives under says that what he did was justified, and that is that. This story, (no, it's not a story, to call it that is to remove it, distance it, to somehow endow it with the possibility of being fiction, of being not true) has greatly upset me, which should go without saying, but I have to say it, if only to assure myself that I am not possessed of language strong enough to describe the revulsion I feel upon hearing that a father has killed his daughter because his daughter had feelings for another man. I have a daughter, and the thought of murdering my daughter, the love of my life, with my bare hands, with my feet, with a knife, is so beyond the pale of human behavior, at least to me, but then, no, this kind of thing happens day and night. Believe in God? Believe in a higher power? Believe that there is a plan, and within that plan all of us are accounted for? No thank you. I detect not one ounce of God in this poor young girl's life, a life as common as the rest of the lives that are currently being led on this planet, and therefore, I detect God in nothing. There is no God. I reject God.
Posted by: Chris | May 29, 2008 2:01:42 PM
I don't think we should focus on the ethnicity of the man, or the claimed offense of the female he killed, because that obscures the real question: why do men kill women?
The answer has nothing to do with ethnicity, or even a blood relationship. It is simply that men believe that women are inferior, like animals, they are owned by men, if they are not owned (i.e. a single woman) then all men are free to beat, rape, or kill them, that women must be obedient and must not be defiant, or must not talk back, must never show that they know more than the man, and if they do, they will be attacked and possibly killed.
I've thought about beginning a blog devoted only to this issue, without commentary, but just listing each day's Dead Women's stories. The cop in Chicago whose most recent wife has "disappeared" (he says she ran off with a boyfriend, that slut), and whose prior wife died mysteriously but without much police investigation, now exhumed and determined to have been killed. She was killed but nobody bothered to even look at the body to figure that out.
Or the woman who disappeared maybe a year ago, and her husband said she went on a business trip and never returned, except the police eventually found her dismembered body stored in the garage of their home. Apparently this guy did not like having his wife work, or at least didn't like the fact that she had a good job.
And the pregnant woman in Ohio whose married boyfriend killed her, wrapped her body in a rug, dumped her in the wilds.
The man who killed his daughter just went slightly further than men do all over the world attacking, demeaning, naming, branding, scaring and scarring their own daughters, selling them as prostitutes or slaves, condemning and damning them at birth simply because they are female.
I have a modest proposal: why not have an international law that says no man may ever touch a woman in anger; no hitting, slapping, kicking, punching, raping, killing. It's just illegal. And any man who does it, regardless of the absurd rationalizations he may claim, will be put into prison for a minimum of one year per offense: one slap, one year; one punch, one year; one kick, one year. Let's just stop this brutality, mutilation and genocide against women. Let's go after the most common form of terrorism in the world, that perpetrated by men on women.
Posted by: NABNYC | May 29, 2008 3:51:22 PM
This goes much deeper than male violence agaist women. This man who killed his daughter for "honor" would very likely also send his son out to be a suicide bomber or to join a hazardous jihad and he would be proud when his son got killed. The problem is not that this man is a monster, but that he comes from a society with monstrous values. Are we so different when we accept as "collateral damage" the millions of civilians killed by American bombs in places like Vietnam, Cambodia, Iraq? It is easy to see the faults in other cultures, very hard to see our own.
Posted by: Jared | May 29, 2008 4:44:45 PM
The richest and most distinguished members of society will flock to the Opera house to watch Carmen being stabbed by her lover. As NABNYC said, attacks on and killings of women occur in every society. The difference in the case of 'Honor Killings' is that they are sanctioned and justified by the norms of those societies. Those 'Honor Killings' are the tip of an iceberg: For every girl who is murdered by her brother/son/father/husband there are hundreds of thousands of other women who live their lives in permenant fear keeping their eyes to the ground or to the laundry, lest a stray glance be misread and lead to the final sanction.
Posted by: aguy109 | May 29, 2008 6:08:18 PM
It has been the subject of scholarly observation that men and boys who are the most avid policemen of their daughters/sisters/wives are men and boys who are in every other arena of life significantly without power. Lording it over a woman, killing her even, if she does not conform to a life that flatters your sense of controlling her, when there is so little else you do control, is one of the natural results of not being otherwise equipped to make an impact. You might not make a living, but you WILL enforce your daughter's chastity -- so you count.
We might all be better off taking a longer view of atrocious crimes against women, and at the societal pressures that sanction them. Outrage, and moving swiftly to "other" the murderer won't save any lives. It's too easy to blame men and religion, for all over the world there are religious men who refrain from trampling and stabbing their daughters to death for offenses fancied and real.
Does the family live with the stresses of poverty? Are they living with a sense of hope about their future? Are they moving towards what they hope for? Has education been offered them? These are the important questions when assessing the potential for violence to women. Just as it is important to ask whether women and girls are educated as a way of predicting the course of any family from poverty to relative prosperity. Crimes against women are part of a dreadful picture that cannot be made right by making those crimes illegal -- which does need to be done, of course. But few criminals, including the father in this article, do their crimes because they can get away with it and for no other reason.
Posted by: Elatia Harris | May 29, 2008 7:42:48 PM
Of course this is indefensible, but what is the purpose of posting such an article? Only to depict Iraqis and Muslims in general as monsters! Propaganda alert!
30 cases since January? While these are 30 too many, I wish her friend Paul, and his fellow British and US invaders had caused such a low death-toll!
Posted by: Friedrich | May 29, 2008 8:21:52 PM
If Elatia is correct, we should also consider the humiliation of occupation.
Posted by: Sagredo | May 29, 2008 8:37:40 PM
Elatia, to suggest the cause of this sort of dispicable act rests anywhere but squarely at the feet of religion is pure obfuscation. You say it's all too easy to lay blame with religion and indeed, it is. Just look at how many times the guy mentions god, honour, pride, religion etc in direct quotation marks. This sort of thing is the direct and unequivocal result of poisoned teaching, allowing a sanctioned conduit for the release of perhaps natural frustration or aggression where a more civilised society would NEVER condone it. Yes, the man may have been, poor, yes he may have been illiterate (though I doubt it in this case), yes he may have been frustrated with his social standing BUT, to be able to then turn around and think that it's ok to murder your daughter with your own bare hands!! - that requires religion. People need to stop hiding from that fact behind pleas of culture etc. The same sorts of excuses were given for the suicide bombers over there until it was discovered they were mostly well off and well educated.
I'm sorry, but this sort of thing makes me sick to the stomach and prone to violence towards the perpetrators myself if I was to be very honest. And it lies squarely within the domain of socially perpetuating untruths.
Posted by: MattInOz | May 29, 2008 9:39:12 PM
It's an interesting local variant on Islam, a religion that ordinarily forbids murdering one's children. Apparently this killing made the murderer something of a respected figure. It's not that he's a monster, but a monster with a police fan base.
Then again, Christianity theoretically doesn't allow aggressive wars, but the Crusades, you see....
Posted by: Bruce | May 29, 2008 11:08:47 PM
"30 cases since January? While these are 30 too many, I wish her friend Paul, and his fellow British and US invaders had caused such a low death-toll!"
Friedrich,
This is my point exactly. The social values that lead most people to actually applaud honor killings indicate a deep sickness within that society. Because we are outside of it, we see it clearly. We do not see our own society's sickness - the willingness to invade other countries, occupy their land, bomb their women and children. All this is swept under the rug as unfortunate "collateral damage". It is just as obscene as honor killings.
Posted by: Jared | May 30, 2008 11:09:24 AM
"We do not see our own society's sickness - the willingness to invade other countries, occupy their land, bomb their women and children. All this is swept under the rug as unfortunate 'collateral damage'. It is just as obscene as honor killings."
With the notable distinction that the war and occupation described was/is perpetrated *against* the will of many of said sick society's members who do, in fact, see it as very horribly wrong.
The man who murders his daughter (for reasons of ideology or not) has no such mitigating exemption. Drawing any parallel between the two cases is a bien-pensant lapse in reasoning. Further, spreading the responsibility for war crimes perpetrated by a Junta between hundreds of millions of people is going rather easy on the Junta, no? I'm sure I'm not the only one who refuses to be counted in that "our/we" formula.
Posted by: Steven Augustine | May 31, 2008 9:44:14 AM
Steven,
You are right that many Americans oppose the war mongering policies of Bush. Having said this, the fact remains that he was re-elected even after it was clear that he lied about WMD. He was re-elected the second term, even if you argue he was appointed the first time. So many Americans do support his policies and all the war crimes that have ensued. All those who voted for the Bush government have a moral responsiblity for these crimes. As far as honor killings go, I am sure that there are many Iraqis who are opposed to them. My point is not to mitigate or excuse honor killings. They are appalling. So is bombing civilians. So are all forms of violence.
Posted by: Jared | Jun 2, 2008 12:16:23 PM
Post a comment