Can this culture be saved?
Honest to God, I really do wonder sometimes if the garden-variety fusion betwen Islamic and Arabic culture is salvageable:
A teenage Iraqi girl who fell in love with a British soldier when he was in Basra was murdered by her father in an “honour killing”, it was revealed today.
Rand Abdel-Qader, 17, was suffocated and then hacked at with a knife after her family discovered she was friends with the 22-year-old soldier who she knew only as Paul.
The pair first met when Rand was working on an aid project for displaced families but it is thought the soldier is unaware of the girl’s fate.
She was stamped on, suffocated and stabbed – leaving her with puncture wounds all over her body, including her face.
Her own mother, Leila Hussein, has spoken out about the crime, revealing how her husband called out that he was cleansing “his honour” as he carried out the murder.
She told the Observer he was arrested after the brutal murder but was released without charge two hours later because it was an “honour killing”.
“He was released two hours later because it was an ‘honour killing’. And unfortunately that is something to be proud of for any Iraqi man,” she told the paper.
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Five months on, she was brutally killed and buried without the traditional mourning ceremony in a mark of her “impurity”.
Her uncles are also said to have spat on her body because of the shame they felt she had brought on the family.
These people were not “radical Islamists,” they were not bomb throwers, they were just an every day family of Arab Muslims whose men mutilated a 17 year old girl to death and spat on her body because she had the temerity to like a man. This ferocious level of misogyny and self-loathing (because only people who really hate themselves can be so insecure about the face they present to the world) may be beyond any remediation.