15-Year Old Victim Of Thousands Of Years of Male Insecurities

By seamus -
Let's start this day off with some crazy crazy news from Pakistan.

A 15 year old girls was gruesomely murdered by her parents for allegedly sullying the family's honor by looking at a boy, according to BBC. The story varies from news source to news source, but the gist of it is identical. The poor girl was killed by her own family by pouring acid on her. I can't stress that enough - for looking at a boy.  According to her own father, who recounted his version of the story on October the 29th, he'd caught her looking at a young lad who drove by a on motorcycle. If that seems harsh, let me tell you what her mother said:

"She said `I didn't do it on purpose. I won't look again.' By then I had already thrown the acid. It was her destiny to die this way," the mother told the BBC reporter.

I'll let that sink in for a moment.

This is just one story out of the many so called "honor killings" happening in Pakistan, where there is an epidemic of woman killings. The reasons for these killings generally relate to having unapproved relationships or marriages and for dishonoring their family. To be precise, 943 women were killed according to the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan just last year, but the death toll is believed to be higher due to the sheer number of unreported cases.



Why is it that the fundamentalist men of Islam are so afraid of women? Dishonor in a random gaze at a passer by? Is then murder more honorable? The disgusting, sinful and selfish taking of another person's life, your own child no less, is a more honorable thing than looking at someone? It's heartbreaking to see a young girl suffer for a man's insecurities.

I'd like to come back to the parent's statements on this matter. It sickens me to hear her own mother even say this was her daughter's destiny - I mean, the contrasting role of woman-daughter as perpetrator-victim here is painfully heartbreaking. One owes her death to another woman who believe it's her duty to be subservient to her man and religion - and that's something I can't but disagree with. How can one not value the lives of their own loved ones for such undiscriminating, inflexible, outdated and hermetic beliefs?

How exactly was the acid thrown, if we are to believe the dad, before the girl had the chance to apologize? Do her parents travel around with buckets of acid? I ask this because a little research on the internet reveals that it takes a lot of acid to not just harm or maim, but kill someone by simply pouring it over them.

But it's hard to blame muslims or Islam as a whole. The real baddie here is extremism and hatred, the unkind, encrusted selfishness of people hiding behind dogma as an excuse for atrocity. This kind of issue has nothing to do with islamism, or christianity-its a common human denominator for the worst that's inside us all. Dogma simply brings it to the surface.

What do you think?

Read more:
http://goo.gl/xxtK9
http://goo.gl/JRuYt
http://goo.gl/YNics


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Amazing Fig Wasp Makes You Ponder Life

By seamus -
Image
Hey there! Whenever you've had a tasty fig or two, have you ever paused to ponder on big issues like mortality, the cycle of life and - what the heck are those crunchy  bits inside the fig? The tiny hole at teh bottom of the fruit is  called an ostiole - remember that. What is the connection between figs, wasps and the more philosophical questions about life, death and purpose? It's all in the very peculiar and amazing symbiotic relationship between the fig tree and the fig wasp. When you think of wasps, you're thinking of the black and yellow striped nuisance and pesky cousin of the more benign and lovable bee. In fact, if you were to take a look at the fig wasp, you'd have a hard time telling them apart from a mosquito with the naked eye - not to mention that the males of the species have an odd, wingless worm like appearance. But the destinies of this fascinating insect and the fig tree are intertwined: fig wasps ensure that new fig plants se
Read more

World's Fattest Woman Plans To Get Fatter

By seamus -
Image
I’ve always thought that humanity as a species has reached its apex in the food chain of the planet due to evolution. Objectie natural selection and the challenges our species faced along the eons has shaped its body and pshychology. Evolution gave us our brains, and it was our most succesful tool. We have our civilization now, as our darwinian reward. Yet in may ways, we’ve broken free from the chains of natural selection and are now a sufficiently powerful element on our plan to dictate our own evolution. Now – why the introduction? Well, it’s people like Susanne Eman  that make me realize just how badly evolution (more importantly, natural selection) can be mocked and toppled by our civilization. You see, morbid obesity isn’t a survival trait. Yet we have Susanne here, an 32 yeard old American woman that weighs in at 340 kilos and is proud of it. „ . Deep down I had always known I wanted to be fat, but I thought I was alone in this feeling. ” Says Susanne on her official w
Read more

Little Big Questions - Why Is The Earth Round?

By seamus -
Image
We're smart people. We live in a world where information is literally at our fingertips, and pretty much any answer can be found online, yet how much do we educated people know about facts and phenomenons we take for granted? Source: Wikipedia Sure, nobody's asking you to know everything - with Google, after all, you don't have to. Yet there are some things we do take for granted. Imagine you were alone in the middle of a green field - no internet, no help - and a curious child asks you a simple question: why is the Earth round ? What would you say? These little questions in life that have big implications - this is what this series is about. I've asked a few friends to answer a simple question: Why is the Earth Round? Here are some of their answers: And here are some of their (and other) answers, quoted: Andrei said: "The Earth is round because it's on an elliptical path around the Sun. Moreover, it is not completely round, it
Read more