The whole concept of 'honor killing' is anathema to Rico.
There have been two major cases in the United States recently:
On New Year's Day, residents of Lewisville, Texas were shocked to hear about the brutal murder of teenage sisters Sarah and Amina Said. The two were found shot to death in a taxi after having made a last phone call to a police dispatcher asking for help. The police immediately issued an arrest warrant for the girls' father, Egyptian-born cab driver Yaser Abdel Said, who remains at large to this day.
The slayings of Sarah and Amina Said came on the heels of another apparent honor killing, that of 16-year-old Aqsa Parvez in Mississauga, Ontario, last December. Aqsa was a vivacious and popular young woman whose attempts at a normal, Western teenage social life angered her Pakistani father, Muhammad Parvez. Aqsa, who was opposed to wearing a hijab and sometimes changed her outfit once she got to school, often clashed with her father and had left the family home a week before the attack out of fear. But she eventually returned, only to be met with strangulation at the hands of her own father.
The notion that a family (typically run by some domineering father figure who often abuses his own daughters) can decide that their child is 'dishonoring' the family by doing terrible things like wearing Western clothing, dating non-Muslim boys and, worse yet, having sex with them, and thus deserves to die is so unspeakably alien that Rico can't even come up with a snarky quip about it.
Suffice it to say that Rico thinks death is too good for those who practice this diabolical religious nonsense...
There was a third North American dishonor killing that occurred between these two. A suburban Chicago father believed his daughter married beneath her caste, so he set fire to her apartment building, killing her, her husband, their child, and their fetus.
ReplyDeleteEllen R. Sheeley, Author
"Reclaiming Honor in Jordan"