Sabre did a great blog entry a few days back and pointed to an entry on Joss Whedon’s blog about the stoning/kicking to death of a young girl, Dua Khalil, by her (male) family while passers-by preserved it on their camera phones.
Read Whedon’s post here because I can’t say anything more brilliant about it than he does. The CliffsNotes version (below) is enough to make you sick, when you realize this is happening in our lifetime, in plain sight, and captured not for the depravity of the situation but, as Joss alludes, as some sort of an homage to the very event itself. *twitch*
“How did more than half the people in the world come out incorrectly? I have spent a good part of my life trying to do that math, and I’m no closer to a viable equation. …
“Somewhere a long time ago a bunch of men got together and said, ‘If all we do is hunt and gather, let’s make hunting and gathering the awesomest achievement, and let’s make childbirth kinda weak and shameful.’ It’s a rather silly simplification, but I believe on a mass, unconscious level, it’s entirely true. How else to explain the fact that cultures who would die to eradicate each other have always agreed on one issue? …
“It’s safe to say that I’ve snapped. That something broke, like one of those robots you can conquer with a logical conundrum. All my life I’ve looked at this faulty equation, trying to understand, and I’ve shorted out. I don’t pretend to be a great guy; I know really really well about objectification, trust me. And I’m not for a second going down the ‘women are saints’ route — that just leads to more stone-throwing (and occasional Joan-burning). I just think there is the staggering imbalance in the world that we all just take for granted. If we were all told the sky was evil, or at best a little embarrassing, and we ought not look at it, wouldn’t that tradition eventually fall apart?”
Infuriating that this is all just another headline, in the end. When I read the blog entry, I wondered if he weren’t talking about an old issue, because I’ve heard it too many times before. It sickens me that it’s “new” news. It kills me that no one can just live their lives; happiness can yield a fearful situation, if in fact the story is true that she was stoned because of who she was seen with.
It’s her people, for crying out loud — why not try to run the dude out of town, if it has to be that way at all? Treat a woman like she’s stupid and weak and doesn’t know any better, for her whole life, and then punish her for a decision she makes about the company she keeps? God (or Allah or whatever) forbid that the family take responsibility for the way she was reared. Maybe THEY should be the ones bludgeoned to death for not protecting her from the temptations of the outside world that they themselves are allowed to enjoy but that she should never even stop to wonder about.
The mind boggles.