A loving father
Read it and scream.
For Abdel-Qader Ali there is only one regret: that he did not kill his daughter at birth. ‘If I had realised then what she would become, I would have killed her the instant her mother delivered her,’ he said with no trace of remorse. Two weeks after The Observer revealed the shocking story of Rand Abdel-Qader, 17, murdered because of her infatuation with a British solider in Basra, southern Iraq, her father is defiant. Sitting in the front garden of his well-kept home in the city’s Al-Fursi district, he remains a free man, despite having stamped on, suffocated and then stabbed his student daughter to death. Abdel-Qader, 46, a government employee, was initially arrested but released after two hours. Astonishingly, he said, police congratulated him on what he had done. ‘They are men and know what honour is,’ he said.
What honour is – something that makes it not only acceptable but actually praiseworthy to stamp on, suffocate, and stab to death a 17-year-old girl who is your daughter, a girl who hasn’t killed anyone or hurt anyone but has simply developed an affection for a male person.
It was her first youthful infatuation and it would be her last. She died on 16 March after her father discovered she had been seen in public talking to Paul, considered to be the enemy, the invader and a Christian. Though her horrified mother, Leila Hussein, called Rand’s two brothers, Hassan, 23, and Haydar, 21, to restrain Abdel-Qader as he choked her with his foot on her throat, they joined in. Her shrouded corpse was then tossed into a makeshift grave without ceremony as her uncles spat on it in disgust.
Oh, god, it’s so ugly I can’t stand to read it. I can’t stand it I can’t stand it – this world where men get together to murder women then treat them like garbage then spit on them. It’s so ugly. The hatred, the contempt, the disgust – for a young girl – their own relative. It makes me crazy.
‘Death was the least she deserved,’ said Abdel-Qader. ‘I don’t regret it. I had the support of all my friends who are fathers, like me, and know what she did was unacceptable to any Muslim that honours his religion,’ he said…’I don’t have a daughter now, and I prefer to say that I never had one. That girl humiliated me in front of my family and friends…I have only two boys from now on. That girl was a mistake in my life. I know God is blessing me for what I did,’ he said, his voice swelling with pride. ‘My sons are by my side, and they were men enough to help me finish the life of someone who just brought shame to ours.’
Men enough? What does he mean men enough? Because it took strength? No – she was down, her father’s foot was on her neck, they were three against one. Because it took courage? No – they were in no danger. What then? That men are supposed to hate women enough to kill them for no good reason, apparently.
He said his daughter’s ‘bad genes were passed on from her mother’. Rand’s mother, 41, remains in hiding after divorcing her husband in the immediate aftermath of the killing, living in fear of retribution from his family. She also still bears the scars of the severe beating he inflicted on her, breaking her arm in the process, when she told him she was going. ‘They cannot accept me leaving him. When I first left I went to a cousin’s home, but every day they were delivering notes to my door saying I was a prostitute and deserved the same death as Rand,’ she said. ‘She was killed by animals. Every night when go to bed I remember the face of Rand calling for help while her father and brothers ended her life,’ she said, tears streaming down her face.
And that’s just one of many.
What can you say to creatures like this?
Just what Jeremy and I have been wondering.
I read that yesterday morning and carried the ugliness of it with me throughout the day, making it one of those days when everything in me wants to opt out of the human race. A man who had shown no violence for 24 yrs by his wife’s account, tending his well kept garden, erupting in such murderous fury? Ok, that’s one crazy. The sons and uncles and policemen and politicians (and undoubtedly some of their womenfolk) who support and encourage such depravity- that is one fucking sick society!
And the irony of both the father and mother calling upon the same ‘god’ for validation and justice.
This murderous meme is spreading across the face of our planet and we have only our own stupidity to blame if we continue to allow vicious psychopathy to hide itself within a cloak of religious ‘virtue’.
This is not religion. It is wild rage arising from jealousy and ignorance. You see results of similar primitive instincts when conquering armies violate civilian females and kill males. (I think it’s the same anyway)
It is a shocking reminder of the fact that civilised behaviour is a bit of an evolutionary novelty.
Many developed countries have a long history of religious tolerance. This tradition might do with a pretty close look to ensure our current understanding of ‘relgion’ accords with reality and to ensure we have a clearer and picture of where to draw the line in tolerating freedom to practise religious traditions.
Sue you say nothing scum like this are best dealt with by giving this young girls soldier boy friend 5 miuites alone with them!
“This is not religion.”
Yes, it is. Religion includes the bad things that are inspired by belief in a deity as well as the good.
This is an example of the type of religious practice we shouldn’t tolerate.
OT, the bloated corpses that litter Myanmar and the poor devastated people who personify longsuffering – which god to blame for the horror and evil of that country’s government? The passivity of its people?
Had a lunch gathering at my mother’s yesterday for a couple of burmese kids, family friends’ offspring, studying at the local uni. All of the xtended family turned up – they’ve all been to Myanmar, even the kids, except me- and so there was a lot of emotion but very little talk of the situation. We were all a bit undone by the sheer hopelessness of it all. Later in the evening, my 7 year old niece asked me many questions – she’s been watching a lot of TV news – why isn’t the government helping its people, why don’t the people complain to the police about the government, why can’t we pack our bags with food,medicine and take a plane there, pretending we are on holiday? She’s beginning to be bewildered by our world; the full horror of what we can descend to, what we can do to others and have done to us awaits her.
Sorry for the rant; I know I am getting ever so unhinged.
“Sue you say nothing scum like this are best dealt with by giving this young girls soldier boy friend 5 miuites alone with them!”
Violence for violence, blood for blood. Is this more of your good Christian morality, Richard?
The trouble with trying to imagine solving problems like this through the tenets of humanitarian liberalism alone [and I trust we accept that barbaric slaughter of innocents to avenge wounded ‘honour’ is a problem?] is that there isn’t enough money in all the world to pay for TV-equipped prison-cells and one-to-one rehabilitative counselling for all the f*ckers who think like this, are prepared to act like this, and abet and condone others who act like this.
OTOH, I imagine that all the money p*ssed away on unsuccessfully attempting to replace Ba’athist modernisation [Stalin model] with Friedmanite liberation [PNAC model] could have done some good, somewhere…
dzd: “Violence for violence, blood for blood. Is this more of your good Christian morality, Richard?”
I think that using horrific crimes like this as opportunities for hating our near neighbours (on the grounds that they don’t agree with a small selection of our key political or moral views) is in itself not worthy. A bit like Dave having a swipe at Bush on this thread too, don’t you think?
Reminds me of the story about the kid watching monkeys, who sees the alpha beat the stuffing out of a smaller male. The smaller male gets up and saunters off, then grabs one smaller yet and beats him up.
You could call it a parable if you like.
I feel with Richard, a normal human anger at the horrible and violent crime. Expressing that response in angry wishes is, fyi dzd, normal. I believe others here also speak in that way when appropriate.
The line that bothered me most was that this happened often – its just that this time a foreign soldier was part of the story.
And what, exactly, was illegitimate about my observation? The US govt has spent more money than any sane person can imagine on creating an environment in Iraq where the attitudes we all find abhorrent have effectively no countervailing cultural force resisting them. [Which is not to say, obviously, that there was much going for Ba’athism, but at least it was a different set of ideas to this tribalism.] Ask yourself, honestly, has the Iraq war made it easier or harder to confront these attitudes constructively? If you really think the answer is ‘easier’, I’d love to see your reasoning on that.
Can’t disagree with you, Dave. The Bush admin, the foreign jihadis and the Iraqi militias have all contributed handsomely to the gruesome mess there.
There’s a Nick Cohen article on Cif about Burma suggesting that aid be muscled in – and the overwhelming chorus of “Iraq!!” is hard to argue with, notwithstanding the fact that I think liberal intervention in Myanmar (but NOT by the bushies, remember they fucked up Hurricane Katrina too) might just actually work. They have Daw Aung san Suu Kyi (missing a roof and with no electricity), a commitment to non-violent struggle, a popular mandate for the NLD… Of course it will never happen, but that’s one helluva escapist fantasy!
You can’t hit misogyny, or cut it, or shoot it. A dose of vigilante justice on who perpetrate it might make you feel better, for a time, but it does nothing to eradicate the root causes.
And expressing the wish that a Western soldier should kill more Iraqis is just a little too far beyond the pale, to me. Iraq has more than enough lawlessness because of us already.
Oh, Richard, please stop that – I’ve asked you before. It’s so worthless. Of course “giving this young girls soldier boy friend 5 miuites alone with them” wouldn’t solve anything! Matching the bullies in lust for revenge solves less than nothing, and it’s disgusting in just the way they are disgusting. Please, the next time you have an urge to say something like that here, DON’T DO IT. Keep your silly macho military revenge fantasies to yourself, please. (The soldier wasn’t even her boy friend.)
I’m serious. Stop it.
That bit about ‘alerting’ his sons is very interesting indeed. I was pondering that yesterday. If he ‘alerted’ them that means they must not have realized before – so this is something new. This is presumably the ‘radicalization’ we hear so much about. Well how pretty – overnight, fathers decide they’ll have to kill their children if the children do this that or the other. How pathetic humans are.
Alerting the boys to their deadly fate (at his hands) was also I think a way of normalising and deminishing (in his own mind) his own despicable murderous action.
Some of you might be interested in PZ Myers’ reflections on this obscene case – only one of many, by the way. Here:
True Monsters
However, having pointed that out, it is worthwhile reflecting on the kind of friendly press religions receive. Recall the pope’s visit to the US? The US media treated him like a celebrity. Did anyone mention, in all of this adulation, that this is a man who proscribes all forms of birth control (except the dubiously ‘natural’ rhythm method!), thinks it morally appropriate to refuse protection for wives whose husbands are HIV positive, forces young girls and desperate women to bear their children to term, no matter what harm this does, is quite prepared to shackle women to child-bearing until menopause, protects Bernard Law (and anyone else?) in the Vatican against the just anger of the victims of his careless policy regarding sexual offenders amongst his clergy, refuses choice to those who are dying in irremediable pain – well, do I really need to go on?
If this is the kind of reception that is accorded to someone who could be fairly described as a moral monster, why should we be surprised at the fateful story of Rand, who died with her father’s foot on her throat, stabbed to death, for what might be described as puppy love?
Good heavens, all the Archbishop of Canterbury needs to do is open his mouth to utter another pompously incoherent inanity, and the press reports him with great faithfulness, and mutter dark sayings about the profundity of the bearded wonder from Lambeth. Isn’t it just about time we started to say to these people, straight up: Justify this behaviour, these foolish words? Enough of kow-towing to archaic systems of belief and the people who govern them. Time to say to sub-human creatures like Abdel-Qader Ali or Benedict: Enough is enough! It’s enough to make one throw up!
Western democracies could begin to make moves to remedy some of these situations now. Stop listening to religious nonsense. Expect accountability for people’s behaviour, motivated by religion or not. Punish those who act from religious motives as firmly as those who act from selfish ones, since religion is one of the most selfish ideologies around. Start forbidding forced marriage, polygamy, and the shrouding of women. Ensure that no education consists in religious indoctrination, and the perversion of children’s minds. No doubt there are lots of other things, but this would be a beginning.
Yup of course I recall the pope’s visit; I commented on the friendly press at the time. It’s been bugging me for years, the way the US media slobber all over the pope as if every single one of us were Catholic. Why are we supposed to be so damn interested? Why are we supposed to care at all? Let alone why we’re supposed to admire the bastard.
O.B So I am not supposed to be angry about this sort of thing?
dzd Let me tell you what the root cause of this is, the guy is a barbarian thats it!
Richard, given your vocal support for a unjustified war that has murdered or displaced millions…let’s be careful who we define as “barbarians.”
I take it you mean my support for removing a brutal,facist,genocidal dictator to give the people of Iraq a shot at freedom Brian?
Yes, Richard, that one, which led to the situation you now propose to solve by killing the perpetrator. Does the phrase “unending spiral of violence” mean anything to you?
Richard, I didn’t say don’t be angry, I said don’t do what you did in your first comment and have done many times before. You know perfectly well what I mean. Don’t keep telling us that the solution is to unleash more violence. We all know that’s what you think; you’ve made your point; don’t make it again. I don’t want it on the site. Okay? Is that clear enough? And don’t argue. Don’t pretend that all you did is express anger. I’m strongly tempted right now to delete every comment you’ve ever made. Have some god damn manners. Don’t deposit your revenge fantasies on Butterflies and Wheels. Just don’t. And don’t give me any more crap about it.
I would like to make a point in support of Richard. It seems to me that the concept of revenge, or retribution if you prefer, is the only mechanism that is sufficiently immediate in an ill-educated or willfully misled society to discourage acts of barbarism. It is all very well to pontificate on long term solutions such as education for the masses, but human beings generally respond to short term threats.
Another argument for revenge is that if there is no justice in an afterlife – whatever that might be – then justice in this life must be seen to be done.
Let me be quite clear, I am a determinist, but a determinist of the Steve Jones’ Persuasion. We may not have free will, but our only ethically reasonable option is to behave as if we have free will.
Sure – in a brute fact sense it’s true that an army with guns surrounding Rand Abdel-Qader would have prevented her father and brothers from murdering her. But in the long term that doesn’t really get us anywhere. Think about our own lives. We feel able to go out and about and get on with things without huge risk of being murdered for some stupid reason, not because we’re surrounded by thugs and not even because murderers are savagely punished. We feel that way because we live in places where people on the whole don’t want to murder each other for stupid reasons. That’s the only real security. Mutually assured destruction is a nightmare way to live.
I’m not sure that saying ‘if there is no justice in an afterlife…then justice in this life must be seen to be done’ quite amounts to an argument. ‘Must’ why? Seen by whom? What kind of justice?
Would it be satisfying or consoling to learn that Abdel-Qader Ali had been stamped and choked and stabbed to death by his ex-wife? No, not really. It would be much more satisfying to learn that he had somehow learned better and thus fully realized the horror of what he had done. That’s a much more vindictive outcome, actually. But it does without the stupid cycle of violence and the stupid gloating over it. The problem is saying “scum like this are best dealt with” by more violence, more violence as punishment rather than prevention. Well that’s just false – all that does is breed yet more violence. Thugs don’t learn anything by beating each other up.
OB, I understand your point in a local or micro sense, but the cheerleading heading into, and the persistent state of denial regarding the Iraq war puts the lie to your statement: “We feel that way because we live in places where people on the whole don’t want to murder each other for stupid reasons.”
No, but they don’t mind if it’s happening on 1000’s of miles away.
Yeah, true. Although that becomes less true if there are the right kind of film clips on tv. That applies to everywhere from Burma to China to Rwanda to Gaza to Iraq. But of course before a war starts, there are no shocking film clips of the results of that war.
would be much more satisfying to learn that he had somehow learned better and thus fully realized the horror of what he had done. That’s a much more vindictive outcome, actually. O.B. isnt it far more likely that this guy will continue to rationalise his behavior?
Yes of course it is, Richard, that’s my point. (You surely don’t think that getting beaten up would actually teach him anything do you?) Of course I don’t think it would be easy to change his mind. That’s why I said ‘somehow’. But what I said is, if he did learn better (somehow), then he would be in real pain.
OB,
Indeed, but I recall that when Al-Jazeera published footage of eviserated children, bodies splashed against walls, charred limbs etc etc, they were roundly hounded by the ‘western’ media (and many websites) for being 1) typical bloodthirsty arabs 2)propagandists.
The same occured in Lebanon 2006.
But if you dare show a flag draped coffin……..!
Do I think a beating would change this guy? if I am honest I suspect that both reason or my more direct method would fail to change him, what is the answer to this sort of thing? does it just go on for ever?.
Well, Richard, then you should have been honest before you made the original comment; in other words you should have thought before you posted it. You now admit that you suspect that violence would fail to change him, but when you first commented you said “you say nothing scum like this are best dealt with by giving this young girls soldier boy friend 5 miuites alone with them!”
I’m sorry to be so adamant about this, but honestly – can’t you see that the thinking behind comments like that is exactly like the thinking behind the fathers’ actions? Calling people scum and saying they’re “best dealt with” by more violence?
Now you admit that you suspect that’s wrong – yet you don’t take it back or admit you spoke too hastily. Well I wish you would. I don’t like having calls for violence on B&W.
That poor girl, and her poor mother.
I wonder what it takes to think like that. Surely it’s not just “culture,” whatever we mean by that. The mother seems to have escaped that thinking, after all, and there are so many Muslim men (even arch-conservatives) who would never think of killing their own daughters.
“That girl humiliated me.” Because girls are just tokens of pride and humiliation, not actual PEOPLE.
O.K I take it back, trouble is I cant help myself reacting to this sort of stuff, my late father never raised his hand to my mother and my brother and me were bought up Never to hit a girl, I once asked my dad what I should do if a girl hit me and his answer was girls can be spitefull but you should be a man and take it. I guess what I mean is that this sort of father is so alien to me, let alone the girls brothers that I react that way, I shouldnt because I promised you I wouldnt but I did, sorry.
Nobody, but nobody in this world has any God given right to lay (negatively) a hand on another person/animal without their permission.
It gets my goat when I see this occurring on the streets, which is a lot of the time, with parents, who physically lash out at children whom they perceive to be misbehaving.
They are just big bullies/cowards who manipulate the physical/emotional vulnerabilities of little children.
Richard,
Thanks!
I entirely understand the fury, of course – I promise it made me just as furious. My post wasn’t what you’d call calm!
I should add that I think women who hit men because they feel secure that the men won’t hit back – are bullying almost as grossly as men who hit women. Or maybe every bit as grossly.
I could probably deal with this stuff if it wasnt happening in places like Bradford as well, is it just me or is this sort of thing spreading and getting more brutal as each day passes or is that just because it is only now being reported?
In some places it is getting worse – Basra and Kurdistan to name two, NWFP and Afghanistan to name two more. But I think there is a lot more reporting, too.
But Islamism is spreading, and the more Islamism spreads the more the war on women spreads; the two are pretty much the same thing.
O.B Why does this one drive me more nuts than other examples? is there something unique about it or is it just selective outrage on my part?
There should be hit squads to deal with animals like this. Why doesn’t anybody murder them?
Previous comment posted in anger (*breathes*).
However, to be honest, I think that execution is the only way to deal with evil of this magnitude. And I don’t think that’s even remotely a macho revenge-fantasy attitude. It’s just a reality – there is no reason for creatures like this to be allowed to live.
Second followup comment – bad form, but…
I hadn’t read the whole thread when I posted my insane ranting. Otherwise I wouldn’t have, so… sorry OB!
Did this type of activity occur under Hussein?
I do not mean to imply that the anti-female attitude was not present, but is the almost complete ruin of that society unleashed a higher order of barbarism?
So in other words it is George Bush,s fault?DFG.
Umm, Richard. YOU said that. I did not say nor did I imply it.
It was a serious question in regards to the above posts.
Get over the GWB thing. Him and his allies fcuked up. Badly.