Chesler Chronicles » Brother on Trial for Killing Sister in Ottawa: Guess Where He’s Originally From
In 2006, another news source, CBC, quoted Khatera’s boss at a clothing store in a Mall. “Her manager, Jenny Jeffrey, said the young woman was gorgeous, both in looks and personality. She was fun. She was bubbly. She was pleasant. It was a real shock that something could happen to somebody that’s so young,” she said.
Khatera was not cowering, she was not cowed, nor was she obedient and subordinate. She grasped her happiness with both hands. For this, her brother, (and perhaps her family), decided she deserved to die.
In the photos of honor murder victims, (I keep the smiling photos of the Said sisters, Amina and Sarah, near me), the young girls seem so vivacious, so alive, so lively, so happy, that perhaps, this very fact offends and threatens the same people who are offended by the pro-life vitality of Israelis and Westerners.
And, as I watch documentaries and videos in which Arab and Muslim women argue in favor of womens’ subordinate status, I can’t help but note how very angry and aggressive these women in head and shoulder scarves are—how filled with hate they are for those women who seek women’s elevation within the mosque. But also, their affect, even their rage, seems dead, flat, as if they are following a script that has been brutally drummed into them all their lives. (There is an important PBS feature due out in June which documents Asra Nomani’s struggle to elevate Muslim women. It is titled The Mosque in Morgantown and will air on June 15th, 2009.)
Now, back to the Ottawa trial.
2 comments:
The logic of the defense escapes me: It's not first degree murder because it's an "honor killing." The fact that the brother deliberately intended to murder the girl based on Sharia and Islamic tradition is not premeditated because the insult to his honor is provocative, i.e. grounds for pleading manslaughter.
One of my most famous headlines actually is a play on killing, entitled something to do with Mans Laughter." It's even less humorous if more appropriate in this context. The guy has to be laughing himself sick over this nation's justice system, such as it is.
Well, we haven't actually heard the defense yet, nor the decision of the court... IN any case, there is a well-developed body of law that defines manslaughter and there is no reason to think a court will readily fit honour killing into it.
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