No More Mr. Nice Guy!

Prophet without honor

A young Pakistani-Italian woman is murdered by her father in an "honor killing." How sickening.

Hina (photo), who dressed in western clothes, worked in a pizzeria in the northern town of Sarezzo and lived with her Italian boyfriend was found with her throat slit buried in the garden of her family home, her head facing Mecca in August 2006.

Her father Mohammed confessed to her slaying.

Prosecutors allege he murdered Hina with the aid of other male relatives after they decided Hina had 'dishonoured' the family.

This kind of barbarism makes me think that Islam is a despicable religion that treats women as beasts of burden. A few years ago in Pakistan a woman was gang-raped by the elders of her village as "punishment" for a "crime" committed by her 12-year-old brother; he had looked at a higher-caste woman. I'm surprised the same elders didn't then stone the woman to death for committing adultery (i.e. being raped by them).

See also my review of Ayaan Hirsi Ali's book Infidel. There can be no doubt that Islam degrades and oppresses women, and this is a big factor in the relative backwardness of the Muslim world. Starting from the example of Mohammed having sex with a nine-year old girl, down to the present day, Islam has always treated women as inanimate property with no rights and no individuality. They are inherently filthy, unclean beasts who must stay at home and cover every square inch of themselves with black robes, lest the merest glimpse of them corrupt good holy Muslim men. Bollocks to that!

Now, I've known plenty of Muslims of both sexes who were good, decent people. Like moderate Christians, moderate Muslims pick and choose which parts of their holy scrolls to believe, and reject what is outrageous and repugnant, even if they don't admit or aren't consciously aware that they are doing so. The problem is that the Quran claims to be the final, perfect, unalterable word of God, dictated directly by him to Mohammed. Thus Islam is by definition fundamentalist. You can't reform it, you can only make a clean break with it, thus risking another "honor killing", since it is the duty of every Muslim to kill apostates.

It should be remembered that Christianity was once just as vicious and bloodthirsty as Islam. It took centuries of war and an ocean of blood before Christianity was reined in, stripped of absolute power, and replaced by the liberal humanist consensus that underpins western democracy. Islam must follow the same path, but with nuclear weapons in the mix, we don't have centuries to spare!

How can we overcome fundamentalist Islam? I don't have the answer, but I know that the neonazi-cons' oil-driven crusade and George Bush Junior's combination of overwhelming firepower and appalling ignorance is the worst possible response, guaranteed to make the situation infinitely more dangerous. The tendency of some European countries to excuse barbarism in the name of multiculturalism isn't helping. Now more than ever, we must stand up for the values of humanism, freedom and equality, and hope that at least some of them will rub off on western Muslims - as they frequently do, given half a chance.