Shafia trial jurors find family guilty of 1st-degree murder

[iverglas]

28. I agree, that's what I was saying

I just think the whole "honour" thing should be left completely out of the discourse -- by the prosecution, the judge, the media ... The prosecution would better have said simply that we had here a man whose own contempt for women was so deep that he killed them for disobeying him, in my own opinion.

For sure, I don't think "there is some nefarious undercurrent of propaganda trying to convince us that it is 'less bad' because it may have been motivated by some warped sense of honour that, as you said, doesn't need to exist here in Canada".

I think exactly the opposite -- that hiving these and similar murders off and applying the label "honour killing" to them makes them seem qualitatively different from and more bad than all the other violence against daughters and wives, here and everywhere else.

I thought the judge's comments about having to abide by local standards were really out of place. They minimized the extent to which locals themselves don't abide by the standards.

A murderer may try to frame their actions as "honour" motivated, but that doesn't mean we have to buy it. --

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shafia_family_deaths

Mohammad Shafia can be heard saying, "God curse their generation, they were filthy and rotten children," and "To hell with them and their boyfriends, may the devil shit on their graves." Further wiretaps reveal Shafia saying, "Even if they hoist me up onto the gallows, nothing is more dear to me than my honour."

I'd read that as "nothing is more dear to me than my ego." He just was not under external pressure that required him to restore his / his family's honour in the sense in which the word actually applies in the concept of "honour killing".

It seems to me that it is the broader community applying the term/concept to the murders, rather than the murderers themselves, or the community in which honour killing, properly speaking, is an historical practice, doing that.