December 30, 2005

This Mother's Rage...Not Quite Contained

So my hubby pointed me over to a post Howie has up at The Jawa Report.  You can see that post here, but I have a few thoughts as well.  Be prepared to be upset, as I was.

MULTAN, Pakistan - Nazir Ahmed appears calm and unrepentant as he recounts how he slit the throats of his three young daughters and their 25-year old stepsister to salvage his family's "honor" — a crime that shocked Pakistan.

Honor, blemished by the idea that his step-daughter committed adultery.  And because of that, the other three girls had to be eliminated because they would likely do the same thing.

Bibi recounted how she was woken by a shriek as Ahmed put his hand to the mouth of his stepdaughter Muqadas and cut her throat with a machete. Bibi looked helplessly on from the corner of the room as he then killed the three girls — Bano, 8, Sumaira, 7, and Humaira, 4 — pausing between the slayings to brandish the bloodstained knife at his wife, warning her not to intervene or raise alarm.

"I was shivering with fear. I did not know how to save my daughters," Bibi, sobbing, told AP by phone from the village. "I begged my husband to spare my daughters but he said, 'If you make a noise, I will kill you.'"

"The whole night the bodies of my daughters lay in front of me," she said.

The next morning, Ahmed was arrested.

Speaking to AP in the back of police pickup truck late Tuesday as he was shifted to a prison in the city of Multan, Ahmed showed no contrition. Appearing disheveled but composed, he said he killed Muqadas because she had committed adultery, and his daughters because he didn't want them to do the same when they grew up.

He said he bought a butcher's knife and a machete after midday prayers on Friday and hid them in the house where he carried out the killings.

"I thought the younger girls would do what their eldest sister had done, so they should be eliminated," he said, his hands cuffed, his face unshaven. "We are poor people and we have nothing else to protect but our honor."

And he has no remorse other than the fact that he didn't kill his step-daughter's alleged lover, too.  I found it interesting that he made the choice to buy the butcher's knife and machete after his midday prayers.  You cannot tell me that what is taught in his religion had no influence whatsoever on his choice to slay his female children.  Ah, but Islam is a religion of peace, right? 

All of this angers me to the point of wanting to catch a plane and making sure this man never sees sunlight again.  But as a mother, what took me down the path further is the fact that this mother sat and watched her girls get slaughtered without putting up a fight for them.  First of all, I'd give my life for my kids...that's just the way it is.  Aside from raising them, feeding them and clothing them, I need to protect them from harm.  And how could I live with myself knowing that I stood there and watched him do it?  I wouldn't *want* to live with myself knowing that.  I would have no choice but to stand in the way of this man and let him kill me if it meant that I could save even one of them from death.  Sure she was scared - I would be, too.  But to stand by and do nothing?  That's just wrong.

Honor killings?  Bah.  This man has no honor.  He is a vile, disgusting pig of a living organism.  I can't even call him human.  Howie said it best "If Pakistan does not give this man the firing squad, then they are a nation of cowards as well."