Honor > Life

When Freedom Gets the Death Sentence:

On Feb. 7, 23-year-old Hatin Sürücü was gunned down at the aforementioned bus stop. She died on the spot. Shortly afterwards, three of her brothers -- who reportedly had long been threatening her -- were arrested. Investigators suspect it was a so-called "honor killing," given the fact that Sürücü's ultra-conservative Turkish-Kurdish family strongly disapproved of her modern and "un-Islamic" life.

Note that 3 of her brothers are the suspects. That's the shocking part. This seemed to be planned by the family. Not one person, within the family, recoiled from the horror and tried to save Hatin.

At the juvenile prison in the Berlin suburb Plötzensee, six of the current 529 inmates are serving time of six years and more for manslaughter in so-called "honor crimes." All come from the Muslim world. Aged between 18 and 22, one of them, an Afghan national, was 16 when he helped relatives kill a widowed aunt who had refused to marry her brother-in-law.

I bet that most perpetrators of honor crimes don't get caught. At least that's true in the non-Western world. These killings are carefully planned. Often times, the killing appears to be a suicide. On many occasions the authorities can be simply bribed to not look further into the matter. Case closed, honor restored. The low regard for women makes the idea of killing them not so hard. Honor and respect trump the life of one's daughter/sister/female cousin in the Muslim world.

"They don't feel any regret for what they did though some even kill their favorite sister. Instead, they're honored and feel like martyrs for having been chosen to carry out the crime."

Athena wrote about honor killings last November: "It's just our culture". The naked horror that exists in the Muslim world is now migrating to the West.

Link via LFG.

Update: From the desert version of Mordor: "Happens all the time".