Wednesday, December 28, 2011

Blood On The Mistletoe: The Unreported Honor Killing In Texas



Some of you may have seen the headlines about 6 people dying in Grapevine, Texas area after being gunned down by someone wearing a Santa suit. Just a little holiday mayhem, right? Wrong.

That 'Santa' was a Muslim, enraged that his daughter was dating a non-Muslim, that his uppity wife had the nerve to leave him. So he killed them, and every one else in the house. And then he shot himself.

The Santa-suited killer has been identified as Aziz Yazdanpanah; the victims were his estranged 55-year-old wife, Fatemeh Rahmati, their 19-year-old daughter, Nona Narges Yazdanpanah, his 15-year-old son, Ali Yazdanpanah, Fatemeh Rahmati’s 58-year-old sister, Zohreh Rahmaty, her husband, Hossein Zarei, 59, and their daughter Sahra Zarei, a 22-year-old pre-med student at the University of Texas at Arlington.

Yazdanpanah, a Muslim, was obsessed with his daughter's non-Muslim boyfriend and was exhibiting classic stalker behavior.

Here's how some of his daughter Nona's classmates describe the killer:

“She would come to school crying and telling us her dad was crazy,” said Lacie Reed, 18. “He wouldn’t let her wear certain things. He was always taking her phone away, checking her call history and checking her text messages.”

Friends said Nona’s father had installed cameras all around the home so he could watch the family’s comings and goings. Others said he nailed her bedroom window shut so she could not sneak out at night and see her boyfriend.

“She couldn’t date at all until she was a certain age, but when he was going to let her date she couldn’t date anyone outside of their race or religion,” Reed said. “He would take her phone away and her mother would give it back to her and her brother would let her use his phone,” Alvarenga said. “She was doing good. She was just excited that her life was going to start and she was going to have control of it.”
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Yet none of this surfaced in the initial reports on the story as the above local news video shows. And the policeman in it is quoted as saying they're more interested in reconstructing the crime than motive.

Like Major Hassan's one man jihad - aka 'work place violence' at Fort Hood,just another random tragedy, nothing to see here, move along...

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

It's a stretch to call this an honor killing. People of all religions have snapped over marital problems. And it's also not uncommon for fathers to demand a daughter date a man of the same religion (Jews, mormons, e.g.). This guy was just a terrible, abusive asshole who did something unspeakable. Unless he was yelling Allah Akbar while he did it, I would say that his religion is ancillary.

Rob said...

If you read the rest of the linked article, anonymous, you'll see that he was essentially stalking his daughter and her mom.

Given that Jews, Mormons and Christians don't do honor killings and their religions and customs don't sanctify it, equating Islam with them seems naive to me.And dangerous.

Events like this are a product of culture and mindset, and honor killings simply happen too often to divorce the religion from it.

If you read up, you'll see that even in Muslim countries where this is a crime,the punishment is usually pretty light.

The Qu'ran ( and the sharia derived from it and the hadiths) allows wife beating,makes rape almost impossible to prove,treats women as chattel property, and discriminates against them in courts of law. No other religious scripture in the world does.

Regards,
Rob

Anonymous said...

(American) Jews as a demographic of course are quite liberal on immigration and contributed, as a demographic, significantly to scenarios here like this.
Have you posted yet btw on the polarization of Israeli Jews re the antics of the "ultra-Orthodox" so much now in the news, and taken a stand on it?

Rob said...

Oh yeah...American Jews like Teddy Kennedy, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama! Especially Teddy, the father of the diversity visas.

Get serious, please.

As for the other item you mention, I'm not planning on commenting, especially since the term 'ultra-Orthodox' gets thrown around a lot without being defined, and the 'polarization' amounts to a few demonstrations of a couple thousand people, many of whom could be described as 'ultra-secular.' Of course, that term isn't used in the media.

Basically, it comes down to the fact that in certain sections of Jerusalem, a small minority of Jews wants sexually segregated buses because of their religious sensibilities. I'm sure it will work itself out.

Anonymous said...

If you read the rest of the linked article, anonymous, you'll see that he was essentially stalking his daughter and her mom.

And this pertains to Islam how? Is stalking only a Islamic thing? Do you really believe that there are no Christian stalkers out there?

Given that Jews, Mormons and Christians don't do honor killings and their religions and customs don't sanctify it, equating Islam with them seems naive to me.And dangerous.

Chrisitans and Jews don't do honor killings?

Really?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honor_killing

Do your research, please. Google "Christian Honor Killing" "Jew Honor Killing" and then reevaluate your mindset.

By the way, the Bible doesn't sanctify a lot of things (murder, adultery, prostitution) that Christians and Jews do every day. What is your point here?

Events like this are a product of culture and mindset, and honor killings simply happen too often to divorce the religion from it.

Any chance that you have a statistic on that or is this another one of those things that you're going to throw out there without proof?

If you read up, you'll see that even in Muslim countries where this is a crime,the punishment is usually pretty light.

Absolutely true. Also irrelevant to your initial post.

The Qu'ran ( and the sharia derived from it and the hadiths) allows wife beating,makes rape almost impossible to prove,treats women as chattel property, and discriminates against them in courts of law. No other religious scripture in the world does.

Have you read the Old Testament? It doesn't exactly stink of chivalry.

---

A response (and proof of your statements) would be greatly appreciated. You didn't acquit yourself well last time and I'm sure you wouldn't want to leave that impression up on the internet for all to see.

Rob said...

Should I bother? Oh why not, just this once.

Citing wikipedia, where any moron can write and edit articles is always a de facto giveaway of someone who doesn't know what they're talking about, but just for giggles I did a search on 'Christian honor killings' and whaddya know? Lots of listings, but they all come from the words 'honor killings' and deal almost exclusively with Muslims!

Even went to the wiki page you cited. Same story.

Oh, yeah, you can stretch it ( and you undoubtedly do) to include crimes of passion, where a husband catches his wife cheating on him, etc.. But the difference, genius, is that they aren't religiously based or sanctioned. Honor killings are.

As for stats, they're not easy to find, because they usually deliberately aren't broken down by Muslims and non-Muslims. Once in a while, you find a stat like the spike in rapes in Oslo for the past year, almost exclusively committed by 'immigrants' ( read 'Muslim' ) on native Norwegian women. But Interpol has some interesting stats to play with if you do country comparisons between predominantly Muslim and non-Muslim countries.

Do a per capita comparison of women killed by family members between say, Pakistan or Saudi Arabia and the US or Canada and see what happens...and that doesn't even account for the incidents involving American or Canadian Muslims. By the way, there's a direct statistical correlation between the rise in Muslim immigration to western countries and a rise in the homicides of women by family members.

The European Journal of Public Health identified in recent study that one in every five homicides in Pakistan is an honor killing. And that figure is considered a lowball because of cultural and reporting factors

Whom are you trying to fool here?

You're totally correct that Christians and Jews do things the Bible doesn't sanction. That's exactly my point - the Qu'ran and sharia do. Therein lies the difference.

You're also right when you state that the Bible has some questionable things in it. Tell me genius...when was the last time you saw an adulteress in a Christian country stoned to death? When was the last time it happened in Jewish society? ( the answer, never). Have you ever seen someone murder his wife or daughter in western society, get convicted and get a three year sentence? Happens all the time in the Arab world. Read Phyliss Chessler on the subject sometime.

Care to show me a single place in the Old or New Testament that directly sanctions wife beating? The Qu'ran does, and modern Islamic leaders like Qaradiwi think its just dandy. None of the four major Muslim fiqhs has ever said it isn't.

What about rape? Ever see a woman in a western courtroom have her case tossed out because she couldn't provide four male witnesses? Standard sharia law.

My point here is not that all Muslims do honor killings - but that the culture, sharia and the religion allow and abet it if they're so inclined. And the prevalence of this obscenity is so much higher in Islamic societies as to make your argument ridiculous on the face of it.

As to your last bit, when it comes to people like you, I think I acquit myself just fine, thanks - with half my brain tied behind my back.

I frankly could care less what you think, and usually you and others like you stay in the spam filter where you belong..unless I happen to look inside like I did today and see something I felt was amusing enough to share with my readers and respond to.

I balanced my own amusement with the undoubted thrill you're getting because you actually got a comment printed and got a response from me.

This time, my amusement won out.

Regards,
Rob

You really are anonymous, boyo - in every sense of the word.

Anonymous said...

Jews as a demographic poll more liberal on immigration than Catholics or Protestants as demographics and certainly more if you limit it to white Catholics and white Protestants.

But frankly I'm not at all sure that the "Muslim honor killing" phenomenon is nearly as negative a commentary on American family life as, say, no-fault divorce, and feminism in general running amok since the 1970s.

But the latter are outside your blogging concerns,(not really,these affect America's stay the course warring spirit, but these need curtailing anyway) so post on!