The Cost of Honor

This is a link to a Tech Central Station article about honor killings among Muslims in Europe, often done by contract killers.

http://techcentralstation.com/020205.html

This is a link to a Telegraph UK article about a Palestinian Muslim girl who grew up beaten and in fear for her life in a West Bank village, who had seven sisters murdered as infants, whose adult sister was strangled by her brother, who was herself set on fire and then almost poisoned by her loving mother- all in the name of religious conformance and an authentically evil perversion of the concept of "honor".

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2004/04/26/ftburn26.xml&pos=portal_puff3&_requestid=25966

Read this and tell me again that all personal manifestations of religion are equally "valid" and good. For me, the moral relativism stops with murder.

Aside from the sorrow and contempt and anger I feel, I'd like to mention the impact to the success of these groups as a whole. With this internecine decimation, how can we find it suprising that many Palestinians live in impoverished squalor like the unassimilated Muslims of Europe? Widespread and widely-accepted barbarism against one's own population proves the inherent inferiority of one's credo. Oh how I wish its doom would come faster. Nonethelss, it's unarguable that it's difficult for a modern people to thrive when half are uneducated; the other half spends its productive hours in blood rage against the weaker, ignorant ones; and a family's meager income must be forfeited for contract killings. According to the Telegraph story, Soauad and her sisters constantly feared their father would throw them down the well. If that's a common enough occurrence to worry about, what a waste of clean water to foul it with the rotting corpses of misbehaving girls. And with all this occupation of beatings and killings, not to mention the impaired productivity of your battered workforce, who is then available and educated enough to run the computerized utility centers and provide advanced medical care and redesign the landscape with improved infrastructure and cultivation? Oh, yes - No One.
So much for information and technology, welcome to the Iron Age, barely.

Today, the majority of valuable and essential functions do not require masculine muscle power, and for a society to fail to capitalize on women's contributions permanently cripples its prosperity and progress. May all such cultures fail by tomorrow afternoon, crushed beneath the burdens of their backwardness, and may their women be freed to live happily and safely among wise men who value them.