A seventeen-year-old girl in Basra, Iraq developed a crush on a young (presumably handsome) British soldier. Undoubtedly giggling like a schoolgirl about the boy, she confessed her crush to her friend, and word somehow got back to her dad.
He stood on his own daughter’s throat until she fell unconscious from suffocation, and then he stabbed her to death, screaming about cleansing his honor. His sons — her brothers — helped. His wife was beaten to the point of having her arm broken for protesting, and she is now in hiding because she demanded a divorce and her now ex-husband’s family has sent her messages saying she deserves the same sort of death as her “whore” of a daughter. The girls’ uncles spat on her corpse as they buried her.
One would expect that sort of thing from — well, from barbarians. At least Mom stood up to protest.
Worse, it looks like they’re getting away with it. He was released from police custody abou two hours after being arrested; the local prosecutors aren’t picking up the case, and a patron has sent him to Jordan to be out of sight for a few months until the story dies down.
It makes you wonder what we’re fighting for.
We ought to open up our universities to Iraqi girls. Let them come here, study, meet American boys and fall in love and get married and naturalize. We get the benefit of their smarts and their industry and the Iraqis get to unburden themselves of the girls they so clearly do not want.
