Another episode in Understanding Other Cultures
ABU QASH, West Bank - Rofayda Qaoud - raped by her brothers and impregnated - refused to commit suicide, her mother recalls, even after she bought the unwed teenager a razor with which to slit her wrists. So Amira Abu Hanhan Qaoud says she did what she believes any good Palestinian parent would: restored her family's "honor" through murder.
Armed with a plastic bag, razor and wooden stick, Qaoud entered her sleeping daughter's room last Jan. 27. "Tonight you die, Rofayda," she told the girl, before wrapping the bag tightly around her head. Next, Qaoud sliced Rofayda's wrists, ignoring her muffled pleas of "No, mother, no!" After her daughter went limp, Qaoud struck her in the head with the stick.
Killing her sixth-born child took 20 minutes, Qaoud tells a visitor through a stream of tears and cigarettes that she smokes in rapid succession. "She killed me before I killed her," says the 43-year-old mother of nine. "I had to protect my children. This is the only way I could protect my family's honor."
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At some point, any person with a rational mind has to stand up and say "you know, this culture is seriously fucked up." It doesn't matter about the history, the languages, or how there is No One Right Way to view things. Some things just show that a culture or a way of life is very, very sick, and needs change.
When a portion of the United States believed that a person was inherently inferior because of their skin color or ancestry, nobody stood up and defended this as "just another way of viewing the world." No, it was wrong on the face of it, and nobody claimed anything else.
It's at least encouraging that the Palestinian law forbids this, even if the culture does not.
Note also, that this kind of action is not approved by Muslim theology either. This appears to me to be not so much a Muslim issue as an Arab issue.
