Multicultural enrichment manifested itself in Great Britain again this week in the form of a “botched” honor murder attempt when four men were found guilty in a British court for killing an innocent married couple. But in this particular honor murder case there was one noticeable difference. Instead of the usual female victim, attacked for having transgressed an Islamic religious or cultural tenet, the intended target this time was male.
Three men aged 19 to 25, Ibrahim Iqbal, Mohammed Miah and Sadek Miah, were on trial for having firebombed the wrong house in Lancashire last October when the couple and their 14-year-old daughter and nine-year-old son were asleep. The children survived the night-time attack, in which an inflammable liquid had been poured through the letterbox and set alight. A British newspaper reported the husband, Abdullah Mohammed, 41, managed to call the fire department and say there was a fire and suffocating smoke in his house before the phone went dead.
The fourth man convicted, Hiamuddin Ibrahim, 21, had organized the attack but didn’t take part in it. Ibrahim wanted to murder a man who actually lived 20 houses away from the innocent victims on the same street because he believed the intended victim had damaged his family’s “honor” by having an affair with his married sister. But the three men Ibrahim sent to restore his twisted notion of honor got the addresses mixed up resulting in two deaths.
“This was a premeditated, well planned and wicked offence by four evil young men, three of whom had travelled 250 miles form their homes in London with the intention to kill,” said a detective involved in the case.
While most western countries are now well aware of the brutal reality of honor killings perpetrated against Muslim women and girls now living within their borders, the fact that males are also the target of this horrific and savage custom is not as well known. The main reason for this is that the number of male victims of honor killings is not nearly as high as those for women.
Moreover, while most honor murder victims in western societies are Muslim females, male targets are often not Muslim or from any Muslim country. These victims are also frequently killed for racial or religious reasons. There are cases of white European men being attacked by family members of Muslim girlfriends on grounds of race, a fact the liberal media do not like to report, since, in its blinkered world view, visible minorities can never be racist. But what the male victims of honor killings in western societies all seem to have had in common, besides their gender, is that they were involved in a relationship, or friendship, with a Muslim woman.
This was the case concerning another barbaric male honor murder attempt that ended last May in a London courtroom with three men receiving sentences from eight to 30 years. As in the previous case, the victim, Awais Akram, a Danish-born Muslim, was having an affair with a married Pakistani woman. Also like with Hiamuddin Ibrahim, this transgression, her relatives believed, had brought such “dishonour” to her husband and family that only the death of a human being could restore their reputation.
“The facts of this case are horrifying,” said the judge when sentencing the men. “It was a heartless and remorseless plan.”
In relation to the crime’s details, the judge’s words are almost an understatement.
Returning home late one night, Akram was attacked by the woman’s brother, cousin and a 17-year-old youth they had recruited. As Akram was being stabbed and beaten, the brother unsuccessfully tried to pour sulphuric acid down the victim’s throat in a “premeditated and murderous assault.” The acid attack left the victim with 47 per cent burns on his body and looking like “a cross between a zombie from a horror movie and the Incredible Hulk.”
“He was standing in front of me and was telling me ‘open your mouth, open your mouth’. I had covered my mouth. He spilt it on top of my head. I was in such a state. I couldn’t really see,” Akram told the court.
Besides having to come to terms with his sadistically altered appearance, Akram still faces years of surgery to repair damage from the acid attack, which has left him in a “living nightmare.”
But British police say the conviction and sentencing of the three men is not the end of their honor murder worries in this case. The woman with whom Akram was having the affair has disappeared back to Pakistan with her husband and all efforts to locate her have failed so far. Police fear she may also become an honor murder victim, if she isn’t one already.
If such a tragedy does occur, then the husband will probably not be severely punished. In South Asian courtrooms, honor murderers often receive only short sentences, if they are prosecuted at all.
As Muslim immigration to western countries increases, the numbers of honor killings will, unfortunately, also continue to rise. Only when a woman’s dignity, free will and individuality are respected, even when she commits a personal failing like adultery, will these savage killings of both men and women finally stop. But since some among these new immigrants have no concept of words like respect for human rights and right to life and of their meaning, then the horror of honor murders are here in the West to stay.
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