Iraqi YouTube Sensation Murdered by Father in ‘Honor Killing’ By Ben Bartee
Via CBS News:
Dozens of Iraqi protesters gathered Sunday to decry the so-called “honor killing” of a 22-year-old YouTube star who was allegedly strangled by her father, adding fuel to calls for legal reforms protecting women.
Interior Ministry spokesman Saad Maan on Friday announced that Tiba Ali was killed Jan. 31 in the central city of Diwaniyah by her father, who then turned himself in to the police. Reports say the father strangled Ali at night while she was asleep.
The so-called “honor killing” was met with condemnation from women’s rights groups and residents, who sounded the alarm on violence against women in Iraq and the need to reform legislation to impose harsher punishments on perpetrators.
Under Iraq’s penal code, Article 409 reduces the severity of punishment for men who injure or murder their wives in the pursuit of moral justice to as little as three years in prison.
A couple of takeaways:
- Operation Iraqi Freedom apparently didn’t deliver liberal democracy to the Middle East as promised by the neocons. First, ISIS emerged from the wreckage, and now honor killings are more or less sanctioned in the law. It turns out that changing a society for the better requires more than bombs and bullets.
- This shouldn’t be taken as an endorsement of honor killings, but if Western fathers were as involved in their children’s online activities as this Iraqi man was, the internet in the West might not be so cringe. Dylan Mulvaney might just find the fear of God — Allah, Christ, or otherwise.
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