Attempted Murder

In England, the father and brother of actress Afshan Azad have been charged with assault and with threatening to murder her. She’s been dating a Hindu:

The father and brother of a Harry Potter actress will appear in court later this month in Manchester, England, on charges of threatening to kill the young star, prosecutors said Friday.
Abdul Azad, 54, and his son Ashraf, 28, are accused of attacking actress Afshan Azad earlier this month because of her relationship with a Hindu man, a spokesman for the Crown Prosecution Service said. The family is Muslim.

I haven’t seen the Harry Potter movies, so I’m not familiar with Miss Azad, but you might recognize her:
Afshan-Azad-Padma-Patil-harry-potter-5520501-500-750.jpg
Phyllis Chesler writes:

My 2009 and 2010 studies in Middle East Quarterly have shown that “honor killings” are all too real and on the rise. Women have been honor-killed for refusing to veil themselves, marry their first cousins, or remain in dangerously abusive marriages, for wanting to choose their own husbands, and for behaving in “western” ways.
While Hindus and Sikhs do, to a much lesser extent, honor-kill their women, in Europe 96 percent of honor killings in the last 20 years were Muslim-on-Muslim. The average age of European women who were honor-murdered was 21; 66 percent were honor-murdered by their family of origin; 44 percent were murdered by multiple perpetrators; 68 percent were gruesomely tortured.

Miss Azad is now in hiding. Chesler offers a suggestion:

Perhaps she and her actor friends could lead a campaign against honor killings.

That strikes me as rather a quaint idea. Hollywood celebrities are only interested in campaigns against “global warming,” George Bush, etc., and it has been a long time since they were willing to take on anyone who is actually dangerous. (Maybe you have to go back to when Ronald Reagan slept with a gun under his pillow after receiving death threats from Communists from whose grasp he was freeing the screen actors’ union.)
There is this, too: when adherents of the Religion of Peace are frequently willing to murder their own daughters if they adopt Western ways, how realistic is the liberal view that they will come around if only we chat with them a little more?

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