Dishonor Killings Continue

NBC News reports:

By NBC News’ Shahid Qazi and Carol Grisanti

In a tangle of bushes and trees outside a remote village in southwest Pakistan, six close male relatives of three teenage girls dug a 4-foot wide by 6-foot deep ditch, on a sweltering night in mid-July, and allegedly buried the girls alive.

The girls' crime: they dared to defy the will of their fathers and the customs of their tribe and choose their own husbands. The mother of one of the girls and the aunt of another were shot and killed while begging for the girls’ lives, according to local media reports. ...

"This action was carried out according to tribal traditions," said Israrullah Zehri, a senator representing Balochistan in the upper house of Pakistan’s parliament in the capital Islamabad. "These are centuries-old traditions and I will continue to defend them," he said.

These murders in the name of "tradition" are a sickening reminder of the widespread cultural barbarism altogether too prevalent in and surrounding the Middle East. Note that this is not merely vigilante injustice; it is sanctioned and endorsed by the "government."

When will we see the Muslim world rise up against such horrific crimes with a tenth, with a hundredth, of the intensity that it rises up for censorship of cartoons?

Nafisi Reads Lolita in Tehran

I've read most of Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi. It is a fascinating book with some important lessons.

The book makes vividly real the day-to-day fear and oppression of living under a theocratic totalitarian regime. I found this quote (pages 5-6) heartbreaking:

For nearly two years, almost every Thursday morning, rain or shine, they came to my house, and almost every time, I could not get over the shock of seeing them shed their mandatory veils and robes and burst into color. ... Gradually, each one gained an outline and a shape, becoming her own inimitable self.

These girls got to meet and read books. Not all women fared nearly as well. Nafisi offers a pretty good summary of life for women in the country (page 27):

[W]omen of her mother's generation could walk the streets freely, enjoy the company of the opposite sex, join the police force, become pilots, live under laws that were among the most progressive in the world regarding women... In the course of nearly two decades, the streets have been turned into a war zone, where young women who disobey the rules are hurled into patrol cars, taken to jail, flogged, fined, forced to wash the toilets and humiliated...

And of course many women were simply slaughtered.

What I found most interesting about the book was its point that the Marxist left often helped the theocratic right:

...Marxist organizations had tacitly taken sides with the government, denouncing the protesters [against Islamic crack downs] as deviant, devisive and ultimately acting in the service of the imperialists. ... They claimed that there were bigger fish to fry, that the imperialists and thir lackeys needed to be dealth with first. Focusing on women's rights was individualistic and bourgeois and played into their hands.

Neither America's left nor right is as socialistic as the cultural leaders in Iran are. Yet, as America's left increasingly embraces the religious right, the ultimate potential result looks frightening. If you want to see what happens when Marxists embrace theocracy, read Nafisi's alternately heart-wrenching and horrifying book.

Ahmadinejad Predicts U.S. Annihilation

As you read these words of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, remember that this is the man whom we are allowing, through inaction and appeasement, to build nuclear bombs:

I must announce that the Zionist regime (Israel), with a 60-year record of genocide, plunder, invasion and betrayal is about to die and will soon be erased from the geographical scene. ... Today, the time for the fall of the satanic power of the United States has come and the countdown to the annihilation of the emperor of power and wealth has started.

I fear to think what it's going to take for the U.S. government and people to take this man's threats and belligerence seriously.