Honor Killings

la bestia negra wrote:anyways if your gonna link your family's "honor" with your sister/daughter's body and choices while ignoring your's is ugh i just cant find words to describe it

Religious fanaticism requires no consistency; and very often, you'll find, exhibits none. We see no different even in more modernised, liberalised (in relative terms) nations/cultures, albeit concerning far less severe issues. In the US, for example, Christian nutjobs rave about things like rights concerning homosexuality, and abortion, demanding that they be criminalised because their particular 2,000 year old holy book says so, while being completely and tellingly nonchalant on and apathetic to, in terms of legality, things like divorce, remarriage, fornication, etc. - all things not only deemed equally as sinful by their bible, but also that they themselves practice without a second thought.


They're willful hypocrites. Attempting to hold them to any standard elsewise is a complete waste of time and brain power.

McLewis wrote:Now what got me thinking about this topic was not so much the story, as we've seen this before in that region of the world, but the comments at the bottom. People immediately leapt to the conclusion that religion was to blame for this woman's death. There was almost immediate pushback on this, citing that this was a "culture" problem.

This is 99% of the time a cultural thing and has little to do with actual religion. For example in many different religions its considered a sin if you have sex before marriage, but it doesn't say you beat the guy/girl up who committed it or kill them for that matter, but people still do it due to cultural differences.

Going by the story you posted the funny thing about that is as Mamad said that parents do have the rights to approve/disapprove of a marriage, but for a valid reason. However the guy/girl also have the rights to refuse marriage and cannot be forced into one in Islam, yet there millions who got forced into these.

I've lived my entire life in Canada, but my ethnicity is Pakistani, so I know a lot of these stories around that part and have even heard of some within my own family. Using marriage as a subject I'll explain why its a big culture thing and not religion. In Pakistani theres a lot of different cultures within the country such as, Punjabi's, Kashmiri's, Pashtun's, etc. The thing is most cases a Kashmiri won't want their son/daughter to marry a Punjabi and vice versa, etc. At the end their Muslims, live in Pakistan, but because of minor culture difference, they don't want to see it. If it happens and both sides, if not only one side aren't happy this results in threats, abuse, violence and even death. This also applies to rich guy/girl wanting to marry poor guy/girl etc.

The reason why this happens is because the way society/community are like down there. For example if a girl here in Canada was to get raped (Sorry if I'm offending anyone), police would do an investigation, people within the community would show love and support, etc. In Pakistan if that same thing happen, you won't see people helping as much, but rather turning their back on that family, cursing, harass, make up all kinds of nasty stories etc, hence why honour is taken quite seriously there.

Villages is completely different and are backwards everywhere. Girls are just seen as pleasure material and being a house wife. Working, getting an education etc aren't for them, as it is sexiest in villages and again if you look into Islam you'll see that girls have a lot freedom and rights.

Ill say it again, All the examples offered here are from single religion dominated countries. Well on the larger scale it is a cultural thing.

The problem is that obviously the culturally backwards people are able to use the Islam as legitimation to do their crimes, that is, there are interpretations that can obviously be used to give people the right to do horrible crimes.

I mean, if you look at this group "Boko haram", they use the term "haram" which is directly connected with the religion to state that books (by which they mean Western education) is against the will of "God" and thus hunt down girls who want to get an education and their teachers.

Of course it is only in the interest of the patriarchic culture to keep girls illiterate and uneducated as educated and literate girls will object against being treated as property and virtual slaves to the male family members, but the point is that they use religion (and this means mostly the shari'a) as legitimation.

After all, when people (usually women) are stoned to death for adultery or killed for deciding to leave the religion of Islam (this of course goes for both genders), this is usually legitimised by the shari'a which is considered laws according to the Islam.

So even if it is a cultural thing, you can't really take the religion out of it as it is obviously often used as legitimation, and for some reason it seems that the shari'a works well in conjunction with patriarchic cultural traditions.

That country is broken

I have quite a lot of friends who tells me stories from South Asian region but some of the things you still read is genuinely disturbing.

For example take your time to read this

http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2014/06/pakistan-state-failure-20146211635164769.html

Some points if you don't want to read it

• They smashed her skull with bricks and she died instantly. Her father was arrested - but in a country where there are 800 registered cases of honour killings a year while thousands more go unregistered, culprits are rarely tried, let alone sentenced. No laws have been changed to make honour killings more punishable or to protect women. Successive military and civilian governments have followed a policy of inaction in all such cases.
  
• A day earlier, a Pakistani-born US citizen Mehdi Ali Qamar, 50, a prominent heart surgeon from Ohio state, was shot dead in front of his wife and three-year-old son, as they visited the family graveyard near Rabwah in central Punjab. Two men on a motorcycle pumped 10 bullets into Qamar at close range.
  
  He belonged to the minority Ahmadiyya sect that has long been vilified by Islamic extremists, who believe that Ahmadis cannot be termed Muslim, are apostates and barely human. Successive governments believe strongly in inaction in protecting Ahmadis, because it may incur the wrath of the extremists. The killers are still at large.
  
• On May 7, Rashed Rehman, a well-known human rights lawyer from south Punjab, was shot dead in his office by gunmen. He was defending a university professor who was being prosecuted according to Pakistan's vaguely worded blasphemy law. The killers are still at large.
  
• Another case that has only highlighted the absurdity of the blasphemy law are the blasphemy charges put on 68 lawyers from Jhang in Punjab by the police. Most of them belong to the minority Shia sect, who have been targeted by Sunni extremists.
  
• he courts, judges and police are now too scared to carry out trials against militant groups, with their hitmen or leaders who carry out such killings. The government refuses to reform the system or even condemn such killings. It took two days before Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif reacted to the killing of the pregnant woman. The publicity field is left free for a variety of extremist groups to take control.
  
• The extremists are also decapitating the health sector. Half a million children will not be inoculated against polio, the disease which cripples children, because the Pakistani Taliban will not allow doctors into the regions they control. Since late 2012, the Taliban has gunned down 56 nurses, doctors and policemen who were part of inoculation teams The World Health Organization has declared a global public health emergency, saying the Pakistani strain of the virus has been found in Syria, Iraq, Egypt and Israel so far.
  
  Thus Pakistan has gone from being the epi-centre of terrorism to the global epi-centre of a disease that should have been wiped out in 2012.
  
• People were told that those Taliban fighting the Americans and the Afghans were the "good" Taliban, those fighting Pakistan soldiers the "bad" Taliban.
  
  Later, right-wing Islamic parties produced a new narrative - that the Pakistani Taliban killing Pakistani soldiers were actually paid agents of India, the US and Israel. The public discourse became heatedly anti-American and anti-Western. Democracy, human rights, women's rights or polio inoculations were seen as Western plots to subvert true Islam. Neither the army nor the politicians countered this narrative.
  

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Welcome to my Country

The most populated city Karachi(in the south) is run by MQM whose leader safely (until a few days ago, arrested) resides in London since 90s, has multiple cases against him, from murder to blackmailing in Pakistan etc but no one can do anything because his party goes and shutsdown the whole city and creates riots (like right now)

The North Western area is a tribal area where they have their own laws, Majority of people there are Pashtuns (many moved from Afghan when Soviet war happened) who live in a stone age culture, wife can't be seen by any man expect husband, laws based on Tribal leaders. Stronghold of Pakistani Taliban, who themselves are group of smaller groups some who hate each other. Mountainous area, easy to hide and sometimes takes days or weeks to go from one village to another

Now lets go to the West, Balochistan is bordered by both Afghanistan and Iran. Is another lawless land as any non Balochi specially Punjabi people and Shias get slaughtered by Separatists. Probably foreign influences there such as RAW(Indian Intelligence), Uzbek fighters. Untouched natural rescources from Gold Mines to Coal to Oil who is worth Billions

North East we have Kashmir problem

And now in the North we have China Xinjiang problem (aka Muslim seperatists) and  Uzbeks terrorists causing problems

I like Kashmir.

But the problem is so does Pakistan.

Nishank wrote:I like Kashmir.

But the problem is so does Pakistan.

So does China

I am Kashmiri, family is from Indian side

Horrible really. Happens in India too sometimes , in the north obviously..When will North Indians learns to respect the laws? when will they start respecting women ? U.P rapings are a shame to the country and culture, North India should learn from the south which is a much much better place culturally.

Regarding Pakistan. Britain's fault really, they should have never made a country based on Religion. It was obviously going to be extremists playground. The internal politics was always going to be extremism vs more extremism.

Regarding