UPDATE 5-18-07
I’m bumping this post up to the top (first posted 4-30-07) since there is new information that has come out. Check below.
END UPDATE
It’s disgusting that a culture permits, even encourages, the stoning of a woman because of…well choose your poison. In this latest example we have a 17 year old girl, Du’a Khalil Aswad, who was part of a Kurdish family in Northern Iraq which practiced a religion called Yezidi. She met and apparently fell in love with an Arab Muslim man after which she met secretly with him. At one point she ran away from her family to be with him but when the man cut the relationship off things turned quite badly for the woman. All because she fell in love with the wrong man:
Damned under the ‘honour’ code, for running away, for choosing outside her own community and for being ultimately rejected, Du’a had nowhere to go.
She stayed with a local Yezidi tribal leader for five days until she was convinced to return to her village on the understanding that she had been ‘forgiven.’ She was abducted and brutally murdered in front of hundreds of men by her relatives — who stripped her body, beat and kicked her, and killed her by crushing her body with rocks and concrete blocks. These brutal and inhuman acts were filmed by the participants on their mobile phones and many of them have been circulating on the internet and from phone to phone. They show the participation of the police in this disgusting communal murder and the murderous excitement of the crowd as the girl’s uncle, brother and cousin commit the grisly murder.
The video can be seen below. While it was difficult to decide whether showing this video was appropriate or not I came to the conclusion that the more people who see this thing, while sad and disgusting, the better. We need to understand what we are dealing with in our war against terror. This is what many of these fanatical Muslims of capable of. Yes, I know these people are not Muslim but our enemy, fanatical Islam, believe that stoning is just and right:
Stoning to death for adultery is part of the Shariah’s penal code, whether we like it or not ! Muslims should not be apologetic about any law of the Shariah as it is not the product of the human mind, but it is divinely revealed.
To them stoning a 17 year old to death for nothing more then falling in love with the wrong man is the right thing to do……disgusting:
Gateway Pundit tells us that there was a protest in Northern Iraq against this killing and ALL honor killings.
Today in Erbil… Capital of the Kurdish region of Iraq, women and men came together to protest the murder of Du’a Khalil Aswad. The demonstration was organised by 90 NGOs and attracted protestors from across the whole Kurdish region.
Meanwhile Gates of Vienna has an excellent post up about the Yezidi in which she cites Michael’s Yon’s trip to the village in 2005.
Be that it may, whether they be Muslim or Yezidi, ANY religion that condones this kind of behavior is barbaric.
UPDATE
There have been arrests made:
Authorities in northern Iraq have arrested four people in connection with the "honor killing" last month of a Kurdish teen — a startling, morbid pummeling caught on a mobile phone video camera and broadcast around the world.
The case portrays the tragedy and brutality of honor killings in the Muslim world. Honor killings take place when family members kill relatives, almost always female, because they feel the relatives’ actions have shamed the family.
In this case, Dua Khalil, a 17-year-old Kurdish girl whose religion is Yazidi, was dragged into a crowd in a headlock with police looking on and kicked, beaten and stoned to death last month. (Watch the attack, and what authorities are doing about it)
Authorities believe she was killed for being seen with a Sunni Muslim man. She had not married him or converted, but her attackers believed she had, a top official in Nineveh province said. The Yazidis, who observe an ancient Middle Eastern religion, look down on mixing with people of another faith.
Each year, dozens of honor killings are reported in Iraq and thousands are reported worldwide, said the United Nations. The practice has been condemned around the world by governments and human rights groups. A yearly vigil protesting honor killings is held in London, England.
Two of the four arrested are members of the victim’s family, police in Nineveh province said Thursday. Four others, including a cousin thought to have instigated the killing, are being sought.
The killing is said to have spurred the killings of about two dozen Yazidi men by Sunni Muslims in the Mosul area two weeks later. Attackers affiliated with al Qaeda pulled 24 Yazidi men out of a bus and slaughtered them, a provincial official said.
The violence ratcheted up tensions between Yazids and Muslims in Bashiqa, the victim’s hometown, a largely Yazidi city in Nineveh province.
Provincial officials don’t think much could have been done to stop the honor killing, but at least three officers are being investigated and could be fired.
"The climate, the religious and social climate is such that people can do that in daylight and that authorities do not intervene," said the spokeswoman for the Organization of Womens’ Freedom in Iraq, Houzan Mahmoud.
Also, the top police official in Bashiqa is being replaced.
Hopefully justice will be done for this poor girl.
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