Monday, December 23, 2013

Honor Killings in the West and the God of Poetic Justice


On December 18th, the FBI offered a new reward of twenty thousand dollars for information leading to the capture of alleged honor/horror killing Egyptian-born father, Yaser Said. Two filmmakers, Xoel Pamus and Nenna Nejad, who are working on a documentary about the 2008 honor killing of Sarah and Amina Said in a suburb of Dallas, Texas, uncovered compelling evidence which they turned over to the authorities.

The West has been forced to take honor killings seriously. Earlier this month, the seventh honor killer involved in British-Kurdish Banaz Mahmud's 2006 murder was finally caught and jailed in Great Britain. (Honor killings are not like domestic violence in that an entire family of origin conspires to kill a young daughter for real or imagined disobedience.) Also in December, Sarbit Kaur Athwal, who testified against her British-Sikh honor killing family, won a prize for her bravery - "The Ultimate Woman Warrior award."

This month was also a milestone of sorts for me in this same area. One does not often get to experience redemptive justice on as grand a scale as I just have but this December that is precisely what happened. [more...]

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