A Pakistani woman has been killed by her relatives outside Lahore High Court for marrying against their wishes.
Police said 30-year old Farzana Bibi died on the spot after being attacked with bricks and sticks.
…
Farzana Bibi’s parents accused her husband, Muhammad Iqbal, of kidnapping her, and had filed a case against him at the High Court.
However, she testified to police that she had married him of her own accord. Police said the couple had been engaged for a number of years.
As she arrived at the court building for a hearing, police said about a dozen family members pulled her aside and began to attack her and her husband, who managed to escape.
What a lovely “family.”
Some kind of intersection between culturally defined honor, a culturally necessitated need for chastity, a culturally accepted relegating of women as chattel to be sold to the proper suitors, and cultural acceptance that any deviance from those cultural norms will result in murder. Fuck that culture. Fuck the misogyny which takes center-stage to this murder.
Sorry, was that also a politicizing of tragedy?
She was murdered in front of a court house and no one even tried to intervene?
@theoreticalgrrrl:
The fact that no one successfully intervened is not proof that no one tried.
Also? A couple months ago on the subway (in NYC, I think, I’ll have to check) a couple of gay men were beaten in front of 50 or so people on the platform. It was an obvious gay bashing. A stranger approaches them, asks if they are together and gay. They say yes. He yells about “fucking faggots” and starts punching. The injuries to one were quite serious – including a broken orbit, IIRC – though not life threatening.
In that case we *know* that no one tried to intervene. I say that not to lessen your outrage at what happened in Pakistan, but just to make sure that we don’t fall into any racist traps later in this comment thread thinking that people in the US or Canada or western Europe are so much more likely to intervene during a public assault.
Quick!
We need some handwaving as to how this has nothing to do with misogyny and people thinking that they own women.
Probably a case of horrible indigestion that befell all the family members.
Funny how that never happens in these cases…
Yes. We’re quite able to see the clear relationship with an ideology of misogyny in this case – where the perpetrators are safely “other” – but we can’t (or rather won’t) see it when the perpetrator is a wealthy white man, one of “us”.
This was said better in an earlier thread right here at B&W (maybe even by you, Giliell?) and I apologise for not remembering who said it in order to acknowledge that I am only echoing someone else’s good observation.
Cryp Dyke,
I’m sorry, I’m really fucking pissed right now…HOW THE FUCK DO YOU GET RACIST out of what I said??
She was murdered. I don’t have to walk on fucking eggshells for people like you and play that down. She was murdered in front of a court house where there are police and other law enforcement.
I never implied Canadians or whatever the fuck you mentioned would automatically intervene.
No, you didn’t.
Can I request that we not make any precautionary pre-emptive comments “just to make sure that we don’t fall into any racist traps later in this comment thread thinking that people in the US or Canada or western Europe are so much more likely to” whatever it is? At least wait until there is something you actually see as racism before pointing it out, ok?
All I got from what theoreticalg said was horror that the poor woman was so quickly and brutally bashed to death, in front of a court house of all places.
Right here in Seattle, more than 20 years ago, a guy who had bought a wife from the Philippines shot her to death inside the court house, where she’d gone to file for divorce. He also killed the woman friend who had gone with her.
He was, by the way, a white guy. He bought a wife from the Philippines on the assumption that she would be more submissive than those local bitches.
I’m sorry for flying off the handle and using all caps, but I’m having less and less patience for charges, let alone pre-emptive charges, of racism whenever discussing violence against women in countries where Islam is the state religion.