I am at a loss for words to describe the savagery of people who would kill their own daughter because she left a forced marriage:
A Kurdish woman was brutally raped, stamped on and strangled by members of her family and their friends in an "honor killing" carried out at her London home because she had fallen in love with the wrong man.
Banaz Mahmod, 20, was subjected to the 2-1/2 hour ordeal before she was garroted with a bootlace. Her body was stuffed into a suitcase and taken about 100 miles to Birmingham where it was buried in the back garden of a house.
Last month a jury found her father Mahmod Mahmod, 52, and his brother Ari Mahmod, 51, guilty of murder after a three-month trial. Their associate Mohamad Hama, 30, had earlier admitted killing her.
They believed Banaz had brought shame on the family by leaving her husband, an Iraqi Kurd she had been forced to marry at 17, and falling in love with Rahmat Suleimani, an Iranian Kurd.
Her former unnamed partner had raped her as well as repeatedly beating her, the court heard.
Hama, who prosecutors said had been a ringleader in the murder, was caught by listening devices talking to a friend in prison about the murder.
In the recordings, transcripts of which were relayed to the court, Hama and his friend are heard laughing as he described how she was killed with Banaz's uncle "supervising".
"I was kicking and stamping on her neck to get the soul out. I saw her stark naked, only wearing pants or underwear," Hama is recorded as saying.
There are terribly brutal murders in the United States all the time, to be sure, and Americans must recognize that we live in a diseased culture. Even so, we have not yet descended to the place where whole families laugh at torturing and killing a daughter because she has embarrassed them by leaving a marriage she had no say about in the first place.
And where are the feminists who have over the years repeatedly condemned the White House for denying funding for abortions in third world countries because that denial allegedly oppresses women? Where is their outrage at a culture that treats women as lower than dogs? Why are they silent?
RLC
