Read my post again. I wasn't for a moment suggesting that beheading is quick or painless- I'm sure it isn't. I was saying that killing someone is brutal, period, and that the end result for the victim is pretty much the same no matter how it's carried out. Alex is alarmed at the means. If he'd just shot her in the head, this thread wouldn't exist.
You may be right Auriaprottu... if this man shot his wife instead of beheaded his wife the spectre of the story would be lifted; but there again, if this man was a Christian who beheaded his wife, I am certain there would be six open threads on the topic herein with erroneous and wild speculation on its religious causes.
Yep, he missed it in the original post and missed it in my post too. This excuse for a human could have choked her, bludgeoned her to death, shot her, stabbed her, he had a myriad of options yet he chooses to murder her by beheading. For someone allegedly promoting moderate islamic values, why does he choose to murder his wife in a ritualistic fashion? Why does he react to her request for a divorce in such an extreme fashion? For all the western style clothing he wore, this guy's thinking was still somehow rooted in the 17th century. Makes you wonder right? I hate to sound like a racist and I am sure that most Muslems would not go to the extremes this guy did in murdering his wife if asked for a divorce, but I can tell you from my interactions with a number of Muslems, many who are still friends and business relations that many are rooted in the 17th century. They do not embrace the open society we love and cherish. they rather have strict adherence to their religious belief and do not approve of those who are not like them. When Berg and others were beheaded in Iraq including the female red cross worker, I mentioned it to a Palestinian friend of mine. He said they had it coming to them for trying to expolit money out of Iraq. I had to walk away.
No, not absolutely. But I do think that had he shot the poor woman, it would have been interpreted differently by the media and perhaps not been in an article where someone could put it here. If you two are referring to the irony of someone whose job was minimizing stereotypes and then falling (or jumping) into one himself, I already addressed it. There's no irony in my response to any posts. Which is why I said the bit about the thread not existing had he murdered her some other way. The method (beheading) has taken on more importance than the crime of murder, and it was always the focus of the thread. No, it doesn't make me wonder at all. He lost his mind and reverted to a style of killing that was/is popular among some segments of his faith, as opposed to shooting, stabbing, srangling, whatever. Hey, maybe the Larry Craig comment wasn't appropriate after all. My guess is that this guy likely wasn't thinking to himself, "Hey, I work here trying to help folks not stereotype Islam, but if MY wife ever asks ME for a divorce, I'm cutting her ********ing head off, old-madrassa style..." a week before she hit him with the request. Craig, OTOH, is a member of a political party whose basic platform involves making life difficult for a bunch of different people, and it turns out that he's been one of those people for some time.
So opposing gay marriage = beheading your wife. Good to know. You're right though that there are plenty of other ways he could've killed her. He could've stoned her, thrown acid on her, immolated her...
I hope you're not trying to associate the acid attacks that are increasingly more prevalent in S-E Asia with Muslims exclusively. Because you would be dead-wrong in doing so. Many of the victims and offenders are Hindus.
I think this entire thread is full of people failing to distinguish culture from religion. They are not analagous. Western Christians don't stone people to death anymore (for the most part), despite it being proscribed by the Bible as the punishment for a variety of religious crimes.
What's important isn't the method of death. What's important is the intention, the thought-process that lead to the murder and the method of death is a hint to it. What we have here is a thought-process alien to people that work in the media, combined with the fact that this person used to be part of the media so you have all those elements of surprise and contradiction that make a good story.
Actually, all we have now are assumptions about his thought process. Really, that's all we'll probably ever have. He's not the first man to kill his spouse in America. Probably not the first to do so over (apparently) over divorce procedings. There are really two reasons this is newsworthy - he's Muslim and he beheaded her (and those two things aren't necessarily directly related; I bet if one of those weirdo folks down in Texas who found evangelical Christianity "too lax" and converted to Islam were to murder his spouse, he probably wouldn't decapitate her. He'd probably shoot her.)
Don't be so surprised. Many Muslem's believe the US supports Israel blindly (which was true) and does not care about the problems or issues affecting Muslem countries. Many believe like this guy that the US went into Iraq strictly to plunder and pillage it and get another foothold in the region. They also believe that anyone working for US corporations in those countries got what they deserved. You could argue Halliburton went to make a profit in Iraq, but some engineer or red cross worker? You've got to be kidding.
Not sure about Asia, but the vast majority of cases in North America and Europe involve Muslims. This source shows a handful of cases involving Sikhs, none involving Hindus (other than the Hindu woman murdered by her husband for refusing to convert to Islam), and a unsettling number involving Muslims. Like I said I have no idea about what goes on in South Asia itself, but Hindus and most Sikhs who have immigrated to the West seem to have left this evil "tradition" behind.
Your source (I don't know much about MEForum or their agendas) would seem to support my assertion that this is a cultural issue, rather than a religious one. IOW, in many middle eastern cultures "honor killings" happen with no respect towards the faith of the perpetrators. We should all remember the Kurdish girl (non-Muslim) who was brutally stoned to death on video for dating a Muslim man. I suspect they are assimilating better to Western culture (which probably does have something to do with faith).
Good point (I don't know anything about the site I linked either, but their information seems to be appropriately cited)--but these things are happening with people of both Middle Eastern and South Asian descent. It's likely that one of two things happened centuries ago: a) The idea of "honor killings" began in South Asia, was picked up by Muslim occupiers, and spread to other Muslim lands such as the Middle East and SE Asia, or b) The idea began with Muslims elsewhere in the world and was brought by them to South Asia, where some Sikhs and Hindus adopted it
You can find honor killings in the Bible too. And Western society has it's own history of brutality. It's just that our culture has (for the most part) evolved to now frown upon those things. And you can find lots of "westernized" moderate Muslims. I'm not making excuses for these kind of brutal cultures - I have little sympathy for cultures that find physical mutilation appropriate punishment for petty crimes, and that have such widespread institutionalized discrimination against segments of the populace. But I think painting an entire religion as "the problem" is counter productive (and incorrect) - and I'm generally of the opinion that if we all moved on from religion we'd probably be better off.
I mostly agree with you BUT I don't think that you can entirely take religion out of the picture. I'm very sympathetic the moderate majority in the Muslim world, and it pains me to see perfectly decent and admirable cultures like that of the Slavic Muslims (to use the example I'm most interested) unfairly tarred with the same brush as the hideous tribal cultures we're discussing here. But...there is really no way to ignore that there appears to be a systematic and widespread culture of misogyny in certain elements of the Muslim world to a degree not found in other cultures. Of course, bigots and "Islamophobes" use such observations to justify and intensify anti-Muslim bigotry, but they of course ignore that the primary victims of such religiously-justified outrages are Muslims themselves. We should simply ignore the Geert Wilders of the world and focus on reaching out to our brothers and sister in the Muslim world. That said, culture certainly plays a huge role as well--I'd wager that many mostly-secularized nominal Christians have little if any idea just how loathsome the moral code of the Old Testament is, and how lucky we are that hundreds of years of secularization have tamed the ability of strict fundamentalists to implement a literalist reading of Biblical morality onto any Western society.
Religion seems to be mostly a force that acts to maintain the status quo (or revert back to a previous state). That's hardly surprising - when you are working off of an ancient text, pretty much any change is going to move away from that text. The most notable counter-example I can come up with is "liberation theology" in the Americas, but look at how controversial that is. Which has mostly been my point - we've undergone that change, while in most Muslim countries they have not. (Turkey, for example, has strict laws against honor killing, and they do prosecute. It hasn't yet eliminated the practice, but cultural changes can take a while to fully seat themselves.)