NBC News reports:
By NBC News’ Shahid Qazi and Carol Grisanti
In a tangle of bushes and trees outside a remote village in southwest Pakistan, six close male relatives of three teenage girls dug a 4-foot wide by 6-foot deep ditch, on a sweltering night in mid-July, and allegedly buried the girls alive.
The girls’ crime: they dared to defy the will of their fathers and the customs of their tribe and choose their own husbands. The mother of one of the girls and the aunt of another were shot and killed while begging for the girls’ lives, according to local media reports. …
“This action was carried out according to tribal traditions,” said Israrullah Zehri, a senator representing Balochistan in the upper house of Pakistan’s parliament in the capital Islamabad. “These are centuries-old traditions and I will continue to defend them,” he said.
These murders in the name of “tradition” are a sickening reminder of the widespread cultural barbarism altogether too prevalent in and surrounding the Middle East. Note that this is not merely vigilante injustice; it is sanctioned and endorsed by the “government.”
When will we see the Muslim world rise up against such horrific crimes with a tenth, with a hundredth, of the intensity that it rises up for censorship of cartoons?