Some people make me really, really angry.

Yesterday I read something that really bothered me. A post on BoingBoing, specifically, posted on Sunday. Here is the title of the post:

Iraq: Kurdish girl stoned to death, mob films it on cameraphones

According to the reports, the story goes something along these lines. Du'a Khalil Aswad, a 17 year old Kurdish girl "had a relationship" with a Sunni Muslim boy in a town near by. So a mob of men from her community beat and stoned her to death on April 7. For whatever reason, members of this mob filmed the murder with mobile phone video cameras, and last week (week of May 1) posted it to YouTube.What on Earth possesses people to behave like this? The boy's religion was (presumably still is) Sunni Muslim, her religion was Yezidi (an ancient pre-Islamic religion)... and it sounds like they happened to get along rather well. I don't know what 'have a relationship' is a euphemism for in this case - they may have been going at it like rabbits or discussing the latest editorial in the Middle Eastern Times for all we know. I am making the assumption that the relationship was entered into willingly by both parties.

A couple of kids made friends, maybe even made love. In a place like Iraq, that's no mean feat, I think. And for this, the men of her community, who by being Kurds in Iraq likely have first-hand knowledge of what it is like to be attacked by an adversary much stronger than them, thousands of these men apparently saw reason to punish Du'a by beating her, tearing her clothes off, heaving rocks at her head while she lay on the ground crying and begging for help... and this is called an HONOUR killing.

So not only is a young girl killed for (hopefully) finding some happiness in the middle of a war, she is killed in a manner calculated to be painful, terrorising and brutal.

And what for? To make some sort of point that hanging out with people who are different from us is evil? What are these guys afraid of that they need to murder a girl like this?

But wait: There's more. I ran across a report (admittedly, on a Web site that doesn't have the same reputation for journalistic rigour as say, AP does) that Iraqi security forces witnessed the attack but did not intervene. How about instigating a little security for those who can't defend themselves?

Next point: I haven't seen any coverage of this on any of the major Western news sources so far. (The Daily Mail and FoxNews don't count). Maybe it isn't sufficiently verified or approved for publication, or maybe Du'a didn't have the good fortune to have an embedded journalist in the area.

Another wrinkle: Seemingly in retaliation for Du'a's murder, someone shot up a bus full of Yazidis. More hate and retaliation is likely to follow. It looks like that someone or someones were Sunni Muslims... maybe friends of his.

Just a note about 'honour' killings. I don't think there is anything honourable about murdering anybody, no matter how badly they piss you off, or how much you think they have transgressed some deeply held value or social more. You just don't go bashing people in the head with rocks just because you don't like what they've done. I really don't care whether it is a thousand year old tradition or anything like that - that just means it has been wrong for a thousand years. Cultural relativism can get stuffed.

Finally, I do note that the Kurdistan Regional Government is making some of the right noises about this in a statement published on its Web site. Good news! 'Honour' killings are against the law, and have been since 2002, and the KRG's got 40 convictions and 24 cases on the dock. Poor Du'a didn't get killed under the KRG's bailiwick, so it falls to Iraqi authorities to investigate.

For some reason I think of Admira and Bosko (apologies for the lack of diacritical marks) killed in Sarajevo in 1993.

I really am angry with the men who killed Du'a. I really am angry because these sorts of inexcusable hateful actions occur every single day that passes. I am really angry because there are people being attacked and hurt right here in Sydney. And I am really angry that us humans, who can be capable of such great depths of love, can also be so brutally struck down by great depths of evil.

June Callwood on CBC's Ideas podcast

I just listened to the April 23rd podcast - June Callwood's 2002 Dalton Camp lecture. Get it on the Ideas podcast site here while you can, it's only archived for about a month. I was only vaguely aware of June Callwood, which is rather shocking considering my university education had a lot of social awareness stuff in it, and even more shocking considering I studied in a school of communication and journalism. Just a bit of an oversight there, I suppose.

Anyway, it's a funny, penetrating, and moving lecture; one of those that sets aflame the passions of social justice in a cold, dead corporate soul. Many of the stories she recounted I am familiar with - such as the young woman who was stabbed to death in New York over a period of twenty minutes, screaming the whole time, the good burghers who heard her screams, but remained uninvolved in their apartments, and the reporter who interviewed every last one of those burghers, and got the story published - but in the retelling she somehow makes the stories mean something just a little bit more than they used to.

Even for non-journalists her counsel is achingly simple: every good, kind act diminishes the evil in the world just a little bit.

Beautiful stuff. Ms Callwood passed away on April 14th, and she still had her pilot's licence.

Civil Rights

Civil Rights - always good stuff to know about.Reporting Civil Rights - Presented by The Library of America