Honor killings are an intriguing inverse of the William Parente brand of family annihilation. In a familicide, the father presumably doesn’t want to leave his family alive to suffer his shame after his death. In an honor killing, the perceived shame reflection is reversed: The father regards his daughter as casting dishonor on him and the rest of the family. In both cases, it’s the child who suffers the worst consequences. Honor killings don’t occur only among Muslim families, and some may argue that other kinds of male killings of an intimate partner represent a kind of “honor killing” to a man because he may feel his masculinity or honor is tarnished when a wife leaves or cheats on him. Honor killings, in other words, may be one more iteration of the sometimes-murderous evolutionary-based relationship between the sexes and a male’s drive to control a female. The killing may be far less about “honor” than essentially about zealously guarding a female’s sexual fidelity so an intimate partner isn’t duped into expending resources on a child not his own. But in the case of many honor killings, chastity is guarded not by the intimate partner but by a father (and sometimes by a young woman’s brothers), almost as if he’s a proxy husband until a daughter (or sister) marries.
In Hirsi Ali’s characterization of honor killings, acts of honor “are rewarded and those acts perceived as shameful are severely punished,” she noted at a videotaped symposium on honor killing and forced marriage June 6, 2011, at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in Manhattan. These “shameful” acts are “unique to women in certain cultures. It has to do with their sexuality—virginity, chastity, fidelity, and purity are emblems of honor. Sex before marriage is considered infidelity. These are sources of shame for the family or tribe. The women in these cultures don’t own their bodies. Their sexuality is a commodity and it’s of high value, which is owned by their families. These sexual commodities are seen to lose value once they’re believed to be tainted.” She complained at the conference about pressure groups that insist that “there is no violence” and that any attribution of violence to these cultures “they claim is racism or anti-Islam.”
Domestic violence and child abuse beyond the scope of honor killings are already serious problems in the United States, Hirsi Ali believes. The difference between an honor killer and the more typical killer father in the United States is that most abusers in a case of domestic violence know that “when he hits his wife or child, he’s doing something wrong, and the wife knows she should not be taking the abuse,” she said at the symposium. “Domestic violence, even though it occurs a lot in the West, is morally unacceptable and socially wrong. Things are different in cultures governed in shame, however.”
Jasser has spoken out strongly against honor killings in America—at the same time, he defends Islam. The religion does not sanction murder of a child, he emphasizes, but he acknowledges that the religion has been “hijacked” by “pre-Islamic, tribal and medieval,” even “Neanderthal” cultures by those who use Islam to mask other murderous motivations or sanction killings, he noted in his USA Today article. Honor killings are “completely wrong and immoral,” and it’s up to moderate Muslims to address this issue and set up family processes to protect women and daughters in danger, he wrote.
The motivations behind Jessica’s murder were complex, but AHA believes the crime had several aspects of an honor killing—the extreme control, battles over the hijab, Jessica’s marriage to a boyfriend at her stepfather’s insistence. Marriages may be forced or quickly arranged by a father if he fears his daughter is, or is about to become, sexually active. The marriage is a way to “legitimize” the sex and therefore not bring dishonor to the family, Parker explained to me. The perceived support of a family or a community marks the difference between other kinds of domestic violence and an honor killing, Parker emphasized. Amnesty International has defined “so-called honor killings” as “part of a community mentality. Large sections of society share traditional conceptions of family honor and approve of the killings to preserve that honor. Even mothers whose daughters have been killed in the name of honor often condone such violent acts.”4 However, no one in Alfetlawi’s community or family supported the killing of Jessica Mokdad or aided Alfetlawi after he was arrested—though he may have imagined some kind of cultural justification for his actions.
Though Jessica’s case continues to be controversial, other murders in North America were clearly considered honor killings by murderous dads who took their daughters’ lives, and by authorities who prosecuted them. The murderers represent a distinct form of killer dads, whose motivations present more clues into what drives a father to kill his own child.
In the first widely covered honor-killing case in 1989, naturalized American citizen and Palestinian immigrant Zein Isa stabbed to death his screaming 16-year-old daughter, Tina, while his wife held her down in their St. Louis, Missouri, home, as Zein shouted in Arabic: “Die! Die quickly! Die, my daughter, die.” The murder was recorded on electronic bugs planted by the FBI, whose agents were tracking Zein’s participation in a possible American terror plot at the time. The jury concluded that Zein killed his daughter because he believed she had shamed the family by becoming too rebellious and Westernized, listening to American music and dating a non-Muslim boy. Zein was sentenced to death (he later died of complications from diabetes while in prison).
In 2009, unemployed Arizona trucker Faleh Hassan Almaleki ran down his 20-year-old year-old daughter, Noor, and the mother of her boyfriend while they walked in a parking lot outside a welfare office in the Phoenix suburb of Peoria. Noor died thirteen days later, her spine crushed. Her boyfriend’s mom, Amal Khalaf, with whom Noor was living, survived with several broken bones and had difficulty walking for months. She saw Almaleki’s “angry face” through the car window just as he struck her, Amal later testified at his murder trial, throwing her some 30 feet and shattering her femur and several vertebrae. He then made a beeline for Noor, and the impact of her body cracked the grill of his Jeep Laredo in half, a police investigation revealed. He ran over his daughter, snagging her body on the undercarriage as he drove across the parking lot, and Noor tumbled from beneath the car at a curb. The “weapon was a motor vehicle, a 4,000-pound piece of metal,” said Detective Chris Boughey, the key investigator in the case.
Minutes before she was struck, Noor had spotted her dad walking into the welfare office where she was applying for benefits. “Dude, I’m so scared,” she texted a friend, according to evidence presented at Almaleki’s trial. “At the welfare place, and guess who walks in? My dad! I’m so shaky!” She added: “I’ve never known a person with so much evil.”
The eldest of seven children, Noor, at the age of four, had moved from Iraq with her parents in 1998 to escape Saddam Hussein’s regime. She straddled two cultures, quickly absorbing her new American culture at school but remaining true to her religion. She traveled to Iraq at the age of 18 to wed a man chosen for her in an arranged marriage, but she fled just months later to move back to America, the jury learned at Almaleki’s murder trial.
After Almaleki mowed down his daughter, he fled across the border to Mexico, then flew to England, with the help of money from a relative, police learned. As police hunted for the missing father, his eldest son explained in a news interview that his sister had “triggered my dad’s anger” and went “out of her way to be disrespectful to the family,” adding, “I don’t like Noor’s boyfriend,” and “there are different values in different cultures.”5
Police tracked Almaleki to London, where immigration officials allowed Peoria investigators to question him. “The interview was long. It was frustrating. It was a cat-and-mouse game for several hours,” Chris Boughey explained at the 2011 AHA-sponsored Manhattan seminar on honor killings. “He was not very forthcoming. He changed his story several times. It went from being an accident. He lost control and lost his mind. Then, he said he wanted to scare them. He was always blaming her boyfriends for ‘being out of their culture’ and being bad people because of that. He never took respons
ibility for anything he did. He said if he wanted to kill them, he would use a gun or knife. Then, finally, he admitted he did mean to hurt them. During the interview, he made an analogy, saying that if you have a little fire, you have to put it out or that small fire will burn the whole house down. Noor was the fire. The whole house was the family.”
Boughey added that while Noor clung to life, “not once” did Almaleki “ask how his daughter was. We had a five-and-a-half-hour plane ride back to Phoenix. He never asked how his daughter was doing.”
In phone calls from prison secretly taped by police, Almaleki told a cousin to ask the Iraqi consulate to intervene with the American government on his behalf. “Connect it to honor and dishonor and, I don’t know, whatever,” he said in a transcript of the call. “An Iraqi is worth nothing without honor.” He later told his wife on the phone, “No one hates his daughter, but honor is precious, and nothing is better than honor, and we are a tribal society that can’t change.” He told her to write “‘honor’ on signs” in a demonstration outside the embassy. “I’m not a criminal. I didn’t kill someone off the street. I tried to give her a chance, but no result.” At one point, he says, referring to Amal, “What can you do about these bitches who are burning us?” and “No one messed up our life except Noor.” His wife, who appears to fluctuate from support to anger over the killing, at one point suggests, “We can say that you have . . . a psychological problem. You have to tell them, ‘I am suffering because of the war.’” He agrees it’s a good idea. “Tell them I am tired and feel nervous,” he says. “Tell them I got sick in Iraq. OK?”
Prosecutor Laura Reckart told jurors in her closing arguments that Faleh Almaleki believed his “own law was above all others.” It’s “chilling that you could mow down your own flesh and blood with your car because it suits your culture. It’s just cold,” said Reckart. Defense attorney Jeffrey Kirchler argued that Almaleki cared deeply about his daughter, showing a blown-up photo of the newborn Noor gripping her father’s finger with her tiny hand on the day “everything changed for him.” As a father, “you want your child to be good, to have manners, to have values,” Kirchler said. Before he was sentenced to 34 years in prison, Almaleki told Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Roland Steinle, “I wish I was dead and not her.” As Steinle sentenced Almaleki, he called the case “the most difficult in my six years on the bench.” He said the “press moniker” labeling the case an “honor killing bothered me. I cannot believe that a religion would allow” the killing of “other human beings.” He concluded that the case had nothing to do with religion and that, more accurately, it was about a defendant who apparently believed, “‘I brought Noor into the world, she’s my property, and I will take her out of the world,” adding: “To me, he became Saddam Hussein in Phoenix. He became the man he fled from.”
The case particularly rattled Reckart and Boughey, Reckart revealed at the AHA seminar. “This case affected us like no other. It really got to us. Why did this case have such a profound effect on us? We decided it’s about entitlement. This makes you go crazy. He believed he was entitled to this, and that’s what made a difference,” she said.
The detective agreed, pointing out that the Maricopa County town just west of Phoenix is a common bedroom community like countless others where an honor killing was something he never expected to encounter. “This case threw us both,” he said. “This is going on in the US. It happened in Peoria, Arizona, so I’m guessing it’s happening in New York City and elsewhere,” he added, offering to help other law enforcement officers dealing with any similar situations. “Contact us. We’re not experts, but we hopefully can be a resource,” he added at the conference. “Do we know about everything? No. This is new ground for us as investigators and prosecutors. I think we need to remember that murder is murder. Wrong is wrong. That’s what we do,” find the criminals. “That’s our job. That is what you entrusted us to do, regardless of where you come from, where you live, what religion you are, what color you are, what preferences you have. You call us, we show up and do our jobs. I think it’s important that we do a better job of making it easier for these victims, for these women, to feel comfortable reporting problems.”
The year before the Almaleki case, Texas cab driver and Egyptian immigrant Yaser Abdel Said allegedly shot to death his daughters Amina, 18, and Sarah, 17, because he was furious they had become “too Westernized” and had non-Muslim boyfriends, officials say. Sarah Said, shot nine times, managed to phone the Irving Police Department’s 911 call center as she lay mortally wounded. “My dad shot me and my sister,” she said, “I’m dying,” police records show. Said is a fugitive and has made the FBI’s “most wanted” list. He’s believed to be in Egypt or possibly behind the wheel of a cab in New York City.
Across the border in Montreal, an Afghan father and his wife—along with their son—were found guilty in 2011 of killing their three teenage daughters and a “co-wife” in what the judge described in court as “cold-blooded, shameful murders” committed because of a “twisted concept of honor.”6 Mohammad Shafia, 58, his wife Tooba Yahya, 42, and their son Hamed, 21, killed the three teenage sisters because they dishonored the family by defying Shafia’s strict rules on dress, dating, and using the Internet. Prosecutors said the defendants drowned their victims Zainab, 19, Sahar, 17, and Geeti, 13, and Rona Mohammad Amir, 50. They were all found in the family’s newly purchased used Nissan, at the bottom of a lock on the Rideau Canal in the summer of 2009. The sisters were all Tooba’s biological children, though Shafia’s first wife (Rona) had helped raise them as her own. The parents and son were charged with killing the women elsewhere, then placing their bodies in the car and pushing it into the canal. They insisted the Nissan had accidentally plunged into the canal after the eldest daughter, Zainab, took it for a joy ride with her sisters and Rona. Hamed said he watched the accident, although he didn’t call police from the scene.
The family had left Afghanistan in 1992 and lived in Pakistan, Australia, and Dubai before settling in Canada in 2007. Shafia, a prosperous businessman, owned commercial property in the Montreal area and ran a business buying used cars in North America and shipping them overseas. He took a second wife because his first wife could not have children. Shafia was a strict disciplinarian, and his son acted in his stead when he was away on business, the jury heard. The months leading up to the deaths were increasingly tense in the Shafia household, according to evidence presented at trial. Zainab, the oldest daughter, was forbidden to attend school for a year because she had a young Pakistani-Canadian boyfriend. She fled, terrified of her father, to a battered woman’s shelter, but was eventually sent back home. The prosecution said her dad became livid after finding condoms in Sahar’s room along with photos of her wearing short skirts and hugging her Christian boyfriend, a relationship she had kept secret. Both Zainab and Sahar wore fashionable clothes and resisted pressure from their parents and eldest brother to wear the hijab. They also both reported incidents or threats of violence from their father and brother to authorities. Geeti was becoming almost impossible to control, her parents believed, skipping school, failing classes, being sent home for wearing revealing clothes and stealing, while declaring to teachers that she wanted to be placed in foster care, according to the prosecution.
Wiretaps of Shafia’s phone conversations, which were revealed in court, captured him spewing vitriol about his dead daughters, calling them treacherous whores, and invoking the devil to shit on their graves. “There can be no betrayal, no treachery, no violation more than this,” Shafia said on one recording. “Even if they hoist me up onto the gallows . . . nothing is more dear to me than my honor.”
As Judge Robert Maranger of the Ontario Superior Court of Justice sentenced each of them to life in prison without the possibility of parole, he declared: “It’s difficult to conceive of a more despicable, more heinous crime. The apparent reason behind these cold-blooded, shameful murders was that the four completely innocent victims offended your completely twist
ed concept of honor, a notion of honor that is founded upon the domination and control of women, a sick notion of honor that has absolutely no place in any civilized society.”
The murders sparked a debate in the public and in the media about the wisdom of singling out the attacks as honor killings, with some community spokesmen emphasizing that intolerance of violence against women is not just a Canadian value but a universal value, and that Afghans, like any other people, condemn such acts. “Calling the murders ‘honor killings’ accomplishes two goals: First, it makes it seem as if femicide is a highly unusual event. Second, it makes it seem as if femicide is confined to specific populations within Canada and specific national cultures or religions in the world at large,” said an editorial in the Montreal Gazette.7 “But Canadian statistics prove otherwise. From 2000 to 2009, an average of 58 women a year were killed in this country as a result of spousal violence. In that same period, 67 children and young people aged 12 to 17 were murdered by family members. In contrast, recent estimates tell us that there have been 12 or 13 so-called honor killings in Canada in the last decade. It does not take a genius to see that comparing 12 or 13 against the hundreds of women and children who were victims of familial violence serves only to frame ‘honor killing’ as peculiar, when in reality it is part of a larger pattern of violence against women.”
When pediatrician Dr. Kaija Hartiala came to work at her practice in Turku, Finland, one day in 2011, she was looking forward to meeting a new patient scheduled that morning. Something about the face of the young mother, who was bringing in her newborn to be checked out, rang a distant bell, but the doctor didn’t waste much time puzzling over it. As she usually did with new patients, Kaija sat down with the mom first to introduce herself and explain some of her background and what kind of care to expect. The pediatrician typically introduces herself as a mom of four children, a former member of the local city council, and a deputy mayor in Turku, and notes that she has spent years working at the main hospital in town. “‘Oh,’” responded the surprised patient, Kaija recently told me over dinner in California, “‘you must know about me in that case. That’s where I was bought after my father tried to kill me.’” In fact, Kaija had been working in the emergency room some 20 years earlier when the young mother now before her, then a little girl of nine, was rushed in with a bullet in her brain. Her father, despondent over the family’s failing business, had waited until his wife left on an errand, then methodically shot his three children before turning the gun on himself. The older daughter and son died instantly; the third made it to an examining table before Kaija. Two decades later, that same girl, now a young woman, sat before her.
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