Pakistan: 90 honor killings reported in first quarter of 2008

“If the government award strict punishment to honour killers, such incidents would not be reported in the country,” she said

I wonder how many honour killings go unreported anyway. What killings are reported are probably the tip of the iceberg.

Strict government laws mean nothing to a believer who following Mohammad's strict laws.

Ninety? NINETY? In the first *quarter*?

Is this some kind of deranged contest among Muslim families -- to keep up with the Ifrits next door, you don't put a new roof on the mud hut or buy a new goat but instead murder a daughter? "We've got more honor than you. See, I can prove it." Is that what this is?

How can this get any more insane? And what are they going to do when they run out of daughters to kill?

"“If the government award strict punishment to honour killers, such incidents would not be reported in the country,” she said

The honor killing will continue whether or not they are reported...Honor killing are supported by Islam, the same Islam that guides the government.

Key word is 'reported' are all or even most of them reported? From what I've read most honor killings are hidden by entire families and clans acting in collusion.

Pooetcomic, you're right. The primary purpose of honor killings is to HIDE a family's shame, usually that of a daughter who gets pregnant or is found to not be a virgin through being raped by a father or brother. Since most Paki women marry their uncles, this is bound to be unearthed more often in Pakistan.

What the f is the Aurat Foundation? 'Aurat' is Urdu/Hindi for 'pudenda.' Granted, it has come to mean 'modesty,' but only in the Anglophone world where intentional mistranslation of Islamic texts is pervasive. Where is says that women are to guard their 'modesty' in English, what it says in Arabic or Urdu is that women are to guard their pudenda, which is their entire body except for their eyes, a pretty easy-to-accept interpretation given the fact that 'woman' and 'vagina' are the same word in Arabic. This is also easy to accept when you consider that Arab culture is Muslim culture, and the only Arab women who have ever managed to be more than vaginas in practice are non-Muslim Arab women. If anyone can provide me with a counterexample I would be open to hearing it.

jdamm-

Is that really true? 'Woman' and 'vagina' are the same word in Arabic? I can't WAIT to throw that one at a schizoid Islamophilic feminist.

So when will we see the outraged protests of the extreme feminist lobby at the activities of this bunch of fuckwits ?

I thought so........

Talking to Daily Times, Aurat Foundation Peshawar Resident Director Rukhshanda Naz cited lengthy judicial procedure and delay in disposal of such cases as the main reasons for increase in honour killing in the country

So judicial delay is the reason for an increase in honor killings...

It's all starting to come together in a crazy sort of way...

And here, POTUS parrots: "Let us give thanks for the many ways that Muslim Americans have enriched our lives."
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2008/09/20080917-11.html

More rights for women under islam! You go girls!
Reported and verified would be great in all cases BUT the fact that there is ONE honor killing under this perverse, bloodthirsty cult is one too many.Yet so many turn a blind eye(maybe they have lost them both in an islamic court of "law") that it is sad, and disgusting to all islamic women who
live under the fear of this "religion of peace."
So due to the delays in courts they rush "justice"
mohammed style. Wow how amazing being stuck in the 12th century. The islamic governments will continue to be blind as they approve of these killings. Only when is islam is defeated, perhaps we will be witnesses to the end of the horrors that are islam.

My - and aren't they just dripping with honor? or is it blood?

"About the three teenaged girls allegedly buried alive in Balochistan by the tribesmen in the name of honour, she said that the inhuman incident not only earned a bad name to Balochistan but also to the whole country."

Yes, the fact that it makes Pakistan look like a stone age fantasy land for Muslim men is much more important than the fact that 3 children were killed as well as two older women who tried to stop this thuggery. How much money do we send to this little spot of hell on earth?

Yeah, Poetcomic. 'Woman' and 'vagina' are the same word in Arabic. And in no place does any Islamic text say 'modesty.' It translates more accurately into 'vulva' than 'pudenda' in Arabic, but it's a negligible difference. And 'slave' and 'black person' are also the same word. Arabic has just short of 100 words for 'slave,' but only one for 'black person' which also means 'slave.'

And in K 2.223, where it says 'Your wives are a tilth' it actually says 'women,' and goes on to define 'women/vaginas' as 'wives, slaves, daughters, and sisters.' The word for 'wife' in Arabic means 'that which is penetrated'' and 'buku nikah' - marriage contract - means 'permission to penetrate.' Arabic speakers usually euphemize and say 'cousin' instead of 'that which is penetrated,' since the word for 'wife' is considered offensive.

And it gets much sicker. Islamic texts use one word, 'nikah,' to refer interchangeably to sex, sex slavery, rape, marriage, incest, child molestation, and prostitution. Arabic has other words for all those things except for marriage, but in Islamic texts it is interesting to note that consent is never a concept, let alone a factor, nor is love, partership, reciprocity, etc. Just money, property, and violence. That's Muslim sex.

All the throaty noises alone make it a language worth eradicating entirely. Ecce Libano has about 10 or so posts about Arabic's stultifying effects on thought, expression, creativity, and progress. I'm for doing away with it, or at least marginalizing it as a language.

jdamn - You are absolutely correct. Marriage is the possession of the women's sexual organs by the man. Romantic? Not.

So in Arabic, just being female is a innate insult? Explains a lot. Excuses nothing. It seems more like a bad code system for horny adolescents than a language.

I just realized that certain psychotic killers, who have been studied, regard their victims as not having an identity, refusing to call them by name, preferring to call them by names of objects, etc, thereby making it easier to torture and kill them.

You know, and I'm in no way excusing the inherent evil in Arabic or anything, but men in America often refer to women as 'pussy' and 'ass,' even my favorite American guy ever, Mr. Richard Pryor. Thank God that's considered rude and offensive, though. There is a time and a place for rude and offensive language, but it should never be the only liguistic option within a language. Arabic speakers know this on some level, too. 'Nikah' is a euphemism. It means 'to penetrate' or 'to sow,' as in 'plant a seed in the ground.' But they don't even utter the word for 'wife' in mixed company. It's not just cousin-couples who refer to the wife as 'cousin.' They all do that, or they find another euphemism.

But to call a women's rights organization (I assume that's what it's supposed to be), or even an anti-women's rights association the Aurat Foundation is just messed-up. Urdu/Hindi (they're basically the same language, just with different writing systems, and Urdu has more Arabic loan words) has a more vibrant, more useful vocabulary. They don't need to call it that.

You've mentioned 2 of the derogatory words Americans sometimes use to refer to women. Then there's the really bad c_ _ _ word. But you're right - those aren't usually acceptable in polite company. Can you imagine if those words were used all the time? Automatic instead of in anger or only for insulting someone? God what a strange culture!

jdamn

I'm not going to argue with what appears to have happened to Arabic vocabulary after 1300 years of Islam.

Still: how do you account for the fact that the Bible has been translated quite effectively and accurately into various forms of Arabic - into classical Arabic, and into some of the dialects (and that this translation effort is still going on)? Would you condemn an Arab Christian for reciting the Lord's Prayer in Arabic?

You might like to talk to some Arab Christians, who use the language in hymns and in the liturgy, or to Mr Spencer himself, before you decide that Arabic *as a language* - which is merely one of ten thousand human languages - is inherently evil and utterly beyond redemption.

If a substantial body of Arabic speakers became Christians, I think over time the language would be transformed. Languages are flexible. Once upon a time people used to declare that primitive, barbaric *English* was far too limited and limiting a language to be able to express advanced theological and intellectual concepts!

The other linguistic feature of Arabic that people used to Indo-European languages find difficult, is its use of the consonantal stems or 'roots', which allows for a mind-boggling employment of puns.

Problem: if you want to complain about this linguistic feature and see it as intellectually and spiritually crippling, you have to bite the bullet and accept that BIBLICAL HEBREW, which belongs to the same language family, ALSO uses three-consonant 'roots'. When St Paul wrote 'the letter kills, the spirit giveth life' what he actually had in mind was the fact that in Hebrew the letters representing the consonants (i.e. the 'root') were referred to as 'bones'; then you add the 'breath', the vowels, which of course are 'breathed' ('spirit!') and voila, you know what the word is. Bones + breath = living body. The Hebrew Bible is littered with mind-bogglingly clever puns and word-play, all playing with the possibilities offered by this three-consonant root system.

As for the sounds of a language being a marker of its moral badness...honestly...

Some Aboriginal Australians were *horrified* when they first heard English speakers talking - why? - because not one Australian aboriginal language contains any of the sibilants in which English abounds, especially the 's' sound - EXCEPT in a very few rare words that happen to be curse words or words used in magic. So English speakers, making normal conversation, sounded - to Aboriginal Australians - just like wicked magicians casting spells.

Suppose some Aboriginal Australians were to declare that the presence of all those horrid snake-like hissing sounds meant that English was a language of demons?

Would that attitude be any different from your declaration that "all the throaty noises alone make it [Arabic] a language worth eradicating entirely"?

And what about Hebrew - which I understand also has breathy, throaty, guttural sounds?

Hebrew, Aramaic, Arabic, and a few other languages all belong to what linguists call the 'semitic' language family - and that's just the way those languages sound! And the way they have sounded for, probably, millennia - long before Mohammedanism was invented.

If the presence of 'harsh' sounds (throaty or guttural) cause a language to qualify for eradication, what about German, or Russian, or Czech?

By all means condemn the current Islamically-distorted social *vocabulary* of Arabic.

But don't condemn it for its phonemes, which probably predate Islam for a couple thousand years, and are shared in large part with other, related languages.

Dumbledoresarmy - Do you think the current social Islamic vocabulary became distorted because of non-evolution as a result of living in a vaccuum or "black-hole" society? Or from the effects of the Islamic faith and their "prophet"? Or a combination of both? I find language studies to be fascinating. One question - if their own word for "wife" is not acceptable in polite company why haven't they naturally replaced it with a more socially acceptable term? Unless that would be "cousin"?