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TweetWhile it is an outrage that it has taken this long, it looks like some eyes in Washington are opening for the first time, in regards to the savage killing of two teenaged girls by their father last year. For the record, he shot the girls, and left them to bleed to death in the back of the taxi he drove. Both daughters had complained of abuse prior to their deaths, and had confided in friends that they feared their father greatly
Almost a year after two teenage girls were found dead — allegedly executed by their father — in the back seat of a taxicab in Texas, the FBI is saying for the first time that the case may have been an “honor killing.”
Sarah Said, 17, and her sister Amina, 18, were killed on New Year’s Day, but for nine months authorities deflected questions about whether their father — the prime suspect and the subject of a nationwide manhunt — may have targeted them because of a perceived slight upon his honor.
The girls’ great-aunt, Gail Gartrell, says the girls’ Egyptian-born father killed them both because he felt they disgraced the family by dating non-Muslims and acting too Western, and she called the girls’ murders an honor killing from the start.
But the FBI held off on calling it an honor killing until just recently, when it made Yaser Abdel Said the “featured fugitive” on its Web site.
“That’s what I’ve been trying to tell everybody all along,” Gartrell told FOXNews.com. “I would say that’s a victory.”
But some Muslims say that calling the case an honor killing goes too far.
“As far as we’re concerned, until the motive is proven in a court of law, this is [just] a homicide,” Mustafaa Carroll, the executive director of the Council of American-Islamic Relations in Dallas, told FOXNews.com.
He said he worries that terms like “honor killing” may stigmatize the Islamic community. “We (Muslims) don’t have the market on jealous husbands … or domestic violence,” Carroll said.
The United Nations estimates that 5,000 women are killed worldwide every year in honor killings — mostly in the Middle East, where many countries still have laws that protect men who murder female relatives they believe have engaged in inappropriate activity. A U.N. report includes chilling examples of such cases.
“On the order of clerics, an 18-year-old woman was flogged to death in Batsail, Bangladesh, for “immoral behavior,” the report reads. “In Egypt, a father paraded his daughter’s severed head through the streets shouting, ‘I avenged my honor.’”
But Islamic scripture in no way condones such actions, Carroll said.
“People have their own cultural nuances and norms from before they got their religion,” he said. “This is not Islamic culture.”
And yet it KEEPS HAPPENING in muslim countries, and in the rest of the world in muslim families. It is true that muslims haven’t cornered the market on domestic violence, I have a very hard time recalling the last time a Christian killed his daughters because they were acting in an ‘un-Christian’ manner. I got my ass beat by my old man for cussing in the house, but that is a far cry from a bullet in the back of a taxi cab.
Read the rest of the story courtesy of FOXNews.
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