Honour Crimes

TEHRAN (AFP)–Iran’s parliament plans to scrap stoning and amputation of a hand as punishments in a revised version of the Islamic penal code, the official IRNA news agency reported Monday.
“Parliaments judicial commission decided not to put some Islamic punishments including stoning in the (revised) law in line with the interests of the country,” commission head [...]

6 Iraqi gay people were executed by machine guns in Sader city in April 2009, this makes the number of executed gays in Iraq reach 10 after 4 other executions in March in the last few weeks, 25 boys and men are reported to have been killed in Baghdad because they were, or were perceived [...]

This essay motivated current post.
Reducing social problems in general and women’s problems in particular to a simple dilemma, i.e. Islam, is the misleading theme repeated by those who fail to comprehend complexity of social phenomena. From their point of view, Islam has been and is a fixed set of rules imposed on society by an [...]

According to a recent report, nearly 350 men and women were murdered in the name of honour since 2001 in Turkey. The list of ‘offences’ that are perceived to bring shame to a family is long, and includes falling a victim to rape.
“In the Morning” is a short and powerful film that is based on [...]

Remember that Robert De Nero film when he said those words? I think it was Taxi Driver, and believe me; you wouldn’t want to be the one talking to him. You probably have enough troubles without getting a crazed animal on your ass.
Is it just my imagination, or do people in the Middle East get [...]

Every so often yet another picture of a young woman appears with the caption: “victim of an honour killing”, and often these pictures are encountered as an easy way to fuel Islamophobic sentiments, playing on the Muslim woman as victim trope.
This aspect of the represenation of “justified murder” raises the question of whether there can [...]

OH… MY… GOD! I CANNOT BUH-LEIVE that this has happened. This is so sad and get’s one’s blood boiling
Saudi woman killed for chatting on Facebook
A young Saudi Arabian woman was murdered by her father for chatting on the social network site Facebook, it has emerged.
The unnamed woman from Riyadh was beaten and shot [...]

Every once in a while we hear of an “honor killing” carried out by a family member against one of their own. Kawthar’s article about an Iranian father who stoned his daughter to death, for bringing “dishonor” to him and to his family, is a case in point. The girl may, or may not, have [...]

Save Delara reports that a 14-year-old girl was stoned to death by her father a few days ago in the south-eastern Iranian city of Zahedan.
The young girl’s murder was reported to the authorities by her mother, who stated that her husband, Sharif, “is a suspicious and cruel man who abused me and my daughter. [...]