Georgia Muslim charged with murder in honor killing of daugh

http://www.jihadwatch.org/archives/021682.php

Georgia Honor Killing Update: "Dad charged with murder in bride's 'honor killing,'" from CNN, July 8 (thanks to all who sent this in):

ATLANTA, Georgia (CNN) -- A Pakistani man is charged with killing his 25-year-old daughter in Georgia because she wanted out of an arranged marriage, police said.

Somber and tearful, Chaudhry Rashid, 54, of Jonesboro, an Atlanta suburb, made his first court appearance Tuesday in connection with the death of Sandeela Kanwal.

He was advised through an interpreter of the murder charge, and of his legal rights.

He was arrested early Sunday, after his wife called police at about 2 a.m. She reported that she had been awakened by screaming but couldn't understand the language, a Clayton County police report said. She said she was afraid and left the house to call police.

Officers found Kanwal dead in an upstairs bedroom of the home, according to the police report.

Rashid's wife told authorities Kanwal recently had been married in Pakistan -- an arranged marriage, she said. The young woman's husband was living in Chicago, Illinois, police said, but Kanwal remained at her father's home and worked at a metro Atlanta Wal-Mart for a brief time.

"The victim was not interested in marrying, nor remaining married to her husband," the police report said, citing information authorities received from Rashid's wife. "This was causing a great deal of friction between the victim and her father," so much so that the two had not spoken in two months, the report said.

Police found Rashid sitting behind a vehicle in the driveway, and he seemed "distraught and possibly mournful," the report said. He told police, "My daughter is dead." But when asked how she died, Rashid did not answer -- "he just dropped his head."...

CNN then bravely considers the possibility of whether this is a...you know...a "South Asian" thing:

"My immediate reaction was that this is an anomaly in the South Asian community," Ajay Nair, associate dean of multicultural affairs at Columbia University, told CNN on Tuesday. "Most South Asian-American families enjoy wonderful relationships within their families."

"I think there's ways that we can rationalize it and make sense of it, particularly in thinking about new immigrant communities in the U.S. and thinking about some of the struggles that they face and the generation gap and the cultural differences that children do face," he said. "I think there are some issues there, but by and large, this isn't a rampant problem within South Asian communities. What is a problem, I think, is domestic violence, and that cuts across all communities."

Domestic violence does indeed cut across all communities. But honor killings are not a "South Asian" problem -- they're an Islamic problem, and CNN's courage somehow falters when it comes to even considering that. Yet nowhere except in Islamic communities is it seen as something that has religious justification. Jordan's Parliament has rejected on Islamic grounds attempts to stiffen sentences for honor killings.

Nair said he believes a "significant human rights campaign" is needed to address such killings....

You can say that again, Nair.
_________________
"The conversion of the entire population to Islam and the extinction of every form of dissent is the ideal of the Muslim State - This is Islamic Peace"

A moderate Moslem is one who sends others blow themselves up.

Georgia honor killer says he did nothing wrong, demands Islamic food in prison

http://www.jihadwatch.org/archives/021696.php



Contrary to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution headline, he didn't actually say he was innocent. He said he had done nothing wrong. That's not the same thing. According to an earlier story on this case, he confessed to killing his daughter, and explained that he had done it to cleanse his family's honor. When he appeared before the judge, it is unlikely that he changed this story. He just said he didn't do anything wrong. And by the lights of the Islamic culture from which he comes, which thinks that a father killing a daughter who has sullied his family's honor is perfectly justified, he indeed hasn't done anything wrong.

His demand for halal food, meanwhile, is bitterly ironic in light of the PC blackout in the mainstream media on any mention of the Islamic character of this murder. CNN went searching for clues as to why it happened in South Asian culture. The Chicago Tribune searched for motivations among the practices of long-dead European royalty. On Beck, Zuhdi Jasser dismissed it as a "pre-Islamic" practice.

The price of this politically correct refusal to confront the ugly realities of the Islamic link to honor killing will be, quite simply, more honor killings. No one will call upon Islamic groups to do something about this practice. No special scrutiny will be focused upon Muslims in the United States, or any studies undertaken about how honor killings can be prevented. No one will examine the question of unrestricted Muslim immigration in light of this problem. While learned analysts search for clues in South Asian cultural habits and the practices of European royalty, more young women will be murdered by their Muslim fathers, husbands, and brothers to cleanse their family’s honor. These young women are the ultimate victims of political correctness.

"I'm innocent, says man held in daughter's death: Chaudhry Rashid wants to observe Muslim beliefs while jailed," by Kathy Jefcoats for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. July 8:

A Pakistani man accused of killing his daughter five days after she filed for divorce to end her arranged marriage wept in court Tuesday, telling a Clayton County magistrate he is innocent.

"I have done nothing wrong," Chaudhry Rashid told Chief Magistrate Daphne Walker through interpreter Younis Farhat. Farhat said Rashid speaks primarily Urdu and Punjabi.

But police say Rashid, 54, used a bungee cord to strangle Sandeela Kanwal, 25, early Sunday morning in the family's Utah Drive home in Jonesboro.

Rashid, who is being held without bond, told the judge he wanted to observe his Muslim beliefs in the Clayton jail. He wants to follow a diet that forbids the consumption of pork in any form and requires other meats are prepared according to Islamic rules.

[...]

In court, Rashid made guttural noises and cried. He rocked back and forth and appeared to be talking to himself before the hearing started. Through Farhat, Rashid told Walker he was mourning the loss of his daughter.

"My daughter just died and I am not in a state of mind to ask any questions," he said.

We have seen the Islamic displacement of responsibility and utter incapacity for self-criticism before, but this one really takes the cake.
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"The conversion of the entire population to Islam and the extinction of every form of dissent is the ideal of the Muslim State - This is Islamic Peace"

A moderate Moslem is one who sends others blow themselves up.

Honor Killing in Georgia

http://www.jihadwatch.org/archives/021703.php



No one knows why he did it, even though he told them

Why did Chaudhry Rashid kill his daughter? In FrontPage today I discuss the mainstream media obfuscation of the clear answer to this question (news links in the original):

Last Sunday Chaudhry Rashid, a Pakistani immigrant living in Clayton County, Georgia, strangled his daughter to death. According to police, Rashid explained to them that he had killed his daughter, Sandeela Kanwal, in order to restore his family’s honor, which she had sullied by planning to divorce the husband to whom she had been given in an arranged marriage. Clayton County Police spokesman Tim Owens explained: “Apparently she and the father had argued over the marriage and the fact that it was arranged, and at some point during the altercation he did end up killing his daughter.”

The family appears to have adhered to traditional Islamic mores. A neighbor noted: “I would see the young lady outside every once in a while dressed in the traditional Muslim gear.” Added another: “The father, he would pray at certain times of the mornings and evenings.” And indeed, honor killing most commonly occurs among Muslims. While there is no direct sanction given in the Qur’an or Islamic law for it, the practice is encouraged by the shame/honor culture that Islam has created. A transgression of the moral law is not seen only as a sin to be somehow expiated by the individual who committed it, but as a blot upon the honor and purity of the family of the victim – and that blot inheres in the sullied purity of the victim, not the perpetrator.

“Honor killings” are distressingly common throughout the Muslim world. Phyllis Chesler reports that “in 1997, in Cairo Egypt, twenty-five-year-old Nora Marzouk Ahmed’s honeymoon ended when her father chopped off her head and carried it down the street. ‘Now,’ he said, ‘the family has regained its honor.’ Nora’s crime? She had eloped.” And “in 2002, in Tehran, an Iranian man cut off his seven-year-old daughter’s head after suspecting she had been raped by her uncle. ‘The motive behind the killing was to defend my honor, fame, and dignity.’ Some people called for this man’s death under Islamic law, but ironically, only the father of the victim can demand the death sentence.”

Chesler recounts many such killings. “In 1999, in Lahore, Pakistan, Samia Imran was shot dead in her feminist lawyer’s office by a man whom her parents had hired to kill her. Her crime? Seeking a divorce….In 2001, in Gujar Khan, Pakistan, Zahida Perveen’s husband attacked her, gouged out both her eyes, her nose, and her ears. He wrongly suspected her of adultery. He was arrested, but male relatives shook his hand and men decided she ‘must have deserved it’ and that a ‘husband has to do what a man has to do.’…In 2005, in Gaza, five masked members of Hamas…shot Yusra Azzumi, a twenty-year-old Palestinian woman, to death, brutalized her corpse, and savagely beat both her brother, Rami, and her fiancé, Ziad Zaranda, whom she was to marry within days. This self-appointed Morality Squad wrongly suspected Yusra (herself a Hamas member) of “immoral behavior.”

Islamic clerics are partially responsible for the strong association of this practice with Islam. One notorious example of this association came in the relatively moderate Muslim country of Jordan in 2003, when the Jordanian Parliament voted down a provision designed to stiffen penalties for honor killings. Al-Jazeera reported with unintentional irony that increasing penalties for honor killings would destroy families: “Islamists and conservatives said the laws violated religious traditions and would destroy families and values.”

Ignoring the clear and close link between of honor killing and Islamic culture, however, the mainstream media searched for explanations elsewhere. CNN consulted Ajay Nair, associate dean of multicultural affairs at Columbia University, to see if honor killing was a “South Asian” problem. Certainly not, explained Nair: “My immediate reaction was that this is an anomaly in the South Asian community. This isn’t a rampant problem within South Asian communities. What is a problem, I think, is domestic violence, and that cuts across all communities.”

Also ignoring the incidence of honor killings in Jordan, Egypt, Iran, Gaza and elsewhere (including among Muslim immigrants in Germany, Britain, Canada, and Texas), the Chicago Tribune attributed it to the cultural rigidity of Pakistani and Indian immigrants, and even dragged in the crowned heads of Europe: “Such cultural unions serve as social contracts among South Asians and other communities, where a marriage agreement is more about families joining forces than about two people finding love—akin to the arranged marriages of European royalty…”

To this Warner Todd Huston of NewsBusters trenchantly responded: “Last I checked my history books common Europeans didn’t go around killing their daughters for marrying ‘wrong’ and neither did their ages old Monarchs.”

In line with the widespread acceptance of this practice in Islamic culture, when he appeared before a judge, Chaudhry Rashid insisted: “I have done nothing wrong.” Speaking to the judge, he demanded prison food prepared according to Islamic requirements, and declared that he would refuse pork in any form. It was a clear indication of the strength of his commitment to Islam, even as the mainstream media remained determined not to notice any such commitment.

The price of this politically correct refusal to confront the ugly realities of the Islamic link to honor killing will be, quite simply, more honor killings. No one will call upon Islamic groups to do something about this practice. No special scrutiny will be focused upon Muslims in the United States, or any studies undertaken about how honor killings can be prevented. No one will examine the question of unrestricted Muslim immigration in light of this problem. While learned analysts search for clues in South Asian cultural habits and the practices of European royalty, more young women will be murdered by their Muslim fathers, husbands, and brothers to cleanse their family’s honor. These young women are the ultimate victims of political correctness.
_________________
"The conversion of the entire population to Islam and the extinction of every form of dissent is the ideal of the Muslim State - This is Islamic Peace"

A moderate Moslem is one who sends others blow themselves up.

Silence over 'honor killing' stuns Islam critic

http://www.onenewsnow.com/Security/Default.aspx?id=177408

A critic of Islam says feminists in the U.S. are more concerned about fundamentalist Christians taking away their right to abort babies than they are the outrageous "honor killing" of an Islamic woman by her own father.



Robert Spencer, director of Jihad Watch, recently wrote an article in Frontpage Magazine about the honor killing in Clayton County, Georgia. Police said Chaudhry Rashid, a Pakistani immigrant, claimed he strangled his daughter, Sandeela Kanwal, in order to restore his family's honor. Rashid believed his daughter had sullied the family name by planning to divorce her husband to whom she had been given in an arranged marriage.



Spencer contends Americans must understand that this crime is the direct result of political correctness and a failure to confront the ugly realities of Islam. "We've let people into the country who believe it is justified for them to kill their daughters if they've sullied the honor of their family," he asserts. "And nobody is even facing the problem. Everybody is making excuses for it and saying it's not an Islamic problem, so the Islamic roots of it are unchallenged," argues Spencer.



He believes American liberals are more concerned about fundamentalist Christians. "Feminists seem to be more concerned about preserving their right to an abortion than about people who are doing things that are much more threatening to the equality of rights of women than anything the Christian fundamentalists are doing," Spencer adds.



Spencer states that no one will examine the question of unrestricted Islamic immigration in light of this problem.
_________________
"The conversion of the entire population to Islam and the extinction of every form of dissent is the ideal of the Muslim State - This is Islamic Peace"

A moderate Moslem is one who sends others blow themselves up.