Creek Running North

The story - yet another reason to want nothing to do with my species.

Your response to the story - yet another reason to not give up. Not yet anyway.

I offer the tiniest of caveats; we cannot be allowed to hold that this is only a Muslim behavior.  It is more ancient than that, and was practiced across the planet for generations among tribal cultures and others; likewise clan revenge and “ridding the seed” were also manifestations of these powerful forces to act violently in self-interest. 

And because we here in the US don’t run out and overtly kill people that we presume shame us, doesn’t mean that we don’t practice a less violent version with: racial profiling, anti-homosexual bigotry, recently increasing gender oppression (Ann Coulter {or Arthur Coltrane?} needs to feel deep shame btw), and particularly anti-Hispanic immigration. 

I can only hope that the xTian fascists, who are rising up now (Pace and Petraeus for President?), should they gain power, do not reinstate the older testament biblical laws as they profess to want to do.  In relation to most of those, Sharia almost seems rational.

thank you, Chris. Your response was perfect.
These things happen when men consider women as property and less than human.

Oh, the horror.

Excellent caveats, spyder. In fact, Syria’s senior mullah (I am forgetting the precise title) has been coming under some fire from traditionalists for speaking out against so-called “honor” killings. Fortunately, that fire is metaphorical at the moment.

This is a beautiful, important, wrenching humanizing of both Zahra and her brother, Chris.

Zahra deserves this, requires it: we must understand her as a human child, individual and profoundly alive in these details of living and family and loving.

Not a symbol, not an abstraction of a young girl kidnapped, raped, and finally stabbed in the head by her brother for the ‘stain’ on family honor.

A child. A person.

In another conversation, we once talked about how it makes people deeply uncomfortable to admit the humanity of the killer, the rapist, the misogynist.

I believe, though, that we must also recognize the details of humanity in him, or we fail utterly to understand honor killing, rape, misogyny - and we fail utterly to grasp what must be addressed to stop it.

He also is not a symbol, an abstraction of ‘monster.’

He is us, just as she is.

And we make this possible.

The poem is beautiful.

It does exactly what it must.

Thank you for writing it.

Spyder,

It is just and proper to observe that a variety of cultures have practiced the “ridding the seed” phenomenon you describe.  The ancient Spartans had such a practice with respect to children born with disfigurements.

However it would be rhetorically unsupportable to suggest that because such practices exist within the larger history of western civilization that our modern western societies are no better than that described in the above story from modern day Syria.  The west has undergone great periods of introspection in which we have grown and developed far more tolerant societies.

The fact is that we do practice much less violent versions of the same traditions; to the extent that they still exist.  Gays in Iran are murdered by the state* while in the west we debate homosexual marriage*.  There is a definite, substantial difference between the two conditions.

While we shouldn’t revel in our deficiencies, we should maintain a sense of scale with respect to our internal issues and those being dealt with in other countries.

Such a sense of scale would normally preclude equating fascism with modern American Christianity.  If for no other reason than such comparisons insult the memories of those that suffered and died under actual periods of fascism in world history.

Regards,
Dann

*for the record, both state actions are wrong, IMO, but there is a signficant difference between the two.