Let us pray. My God. My God. Let us pray.
My first understanding of the madness of some few from the cultures from the Mideast came here in the USA when Iranian-American women and their children fled to our shelter for battered women, one of the first in the country, back in 1970.
Their family men battered the walls and locked doors with their bodies, broke windows, screaming insanely without cease. Rage. Rage with no skin.
The bellowing aggression of the abused women’s family men… rivaled car-fulls of men who rode with rifles and hoods on the back roads in my backwoods where I grew up. At the shelter, we needed police with guns drawn to protect the women who had fled their families, beautiful beautiful women, with beautiful beautiful children with eyes like does’ and glossy black hair. How could anyone harm such innocence? How could they? How could anyone?
Arresting the men was the only way to contain them. A woman was not allowed to leave a man. A woman was not a separate being. A woman could not defy a man who was dead wrong. She just could not. Should not. Better not. No woman could do that to them, could humiliate them that way. Forgetting that they raised welts on such tender female flesh with fists and hangers and belt buckles… throwing the women and children to the ground and stepping on their faces like they were putting out a cigarette, in order to soil the tender cara, the faces under their shoes. Mad, not as in angry. Mad, as in insane.
So begins the essay "The Burka With No Woman in It: Honor" by Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes (hat tip: The Moderate Voice). Please read the rest.
Deafening Silence abhors and repudiates all honor killing- no matter who practices it. It can never be accepted, excused or "explained." It must never be "tolerated" out of "sensitivity." Instead, it must be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law and the murderers put away. We don't even need new, special laws for this- murder is murder and we can simply enforce the laws we already have. If we can't find the courage to do so, our much-vaunted humanity is a sham.
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