| Topic: |
Religions > Atheism |
| User: |
"Michael Gray" |
| Date: |
21 Apr 2007 07:20:21 PM |
| Object: |
After the killing, female relatives decided to speak up. |
By ISABEL KERSHNER
Published: April 20, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/20/world/middleeast/20honor.html?ex=1334721600&en=1f0bf7bfbf8faf5f&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss
RAMLA, Israel — The Abu Ghanem women are buried just inside the main
gate of the old Muslim cemetery, eight in the last seven years.
Reem eloped with a lover to escape an arranged marriage. Her brothers,
one a pediatrician, are on trial for murder. Sabrin rests under a bare
concrete slab with her name roughly scratched on by hand. She is said
to have been killed by a cousin whom she refused to marry. Shirihan,
15, the youngest of the dead women, is also said to have rejected a
marriage. Her stepbrothers are suspected of having killed her.
Others lie in crudely marked graves, covered with plain marble or a
mound of earth marked with an oval of stones — all a few minutes’
drive from Israel’s gleaming new international airport, here in this
hardscrabble town of 64,000 Jews and Arabs.
So-called honor killings among Muslims are a phenomenon across the
Middle East, including in Israel, where Arabs, most of them Muslim,
make up almost 20 percent of the population. The Israeli police and
courts have caught and convicted some of the killers; unlike the laws
in some Arab societies, Israel’s do not make allowances for such acts.
Yet among the Abu Ghanem clan here in Ramla — where family honor can
be tainted by a woman’s desire to go study at a university or her use
of a telephone — the bloodletting has carried on. Some women’s
advocates have accused the police of a dismissive attitude toward
Arabs, while a Jewish district police official speaks of the
"ambivalence" of Israel’s Arab citizens, who do not always want to
cooperate with investigations "for nationalist or local reasons." So
far, the Abu Ghanem cases have ended without convictions, the police
say, mainly because relatives maintained a conspiracy of silence and
washed all the evidence away.
Then in January, after the last killing, of Hamda Abu Ghanem, 18,
female relatives decided to speak up. Twenty of them.
The most incriminating testimony came from a witness the police
identify only as Y for her protection. She came forward to say that
she had heard shots, then saw someone she believed to be Hamda’s
brother Rashad, 30, fleeing Hamda’s home. The police found traces of
gunpowder on the brother’s clothes.
Hamda’s mother said her daughter, who had hoped to be a nurse, had
done nothing wrong although she had been beaten by her brother a few
months earlier and complained to the police, possibly setting off the
brother’s anger. According to the police, Hamda had refused to marry a
man her family had arranged for her as a husband.
"In most cases we manage to bring circumstantial evidence to court,
but it’s not enough to convict for murder," said Superintendent Yigal
Ezra, a Jew who is the head of investigations and intelligence at the
Ramla police station. This time, he believed, there was a solid case.
But Y, the police said, had refused the police protection they
offered, and in late February she disappeared. Now, with Rashad Abu
Ghanem’s trial under way, it is still unclear whether she is in
hiding, has been abducted or is dead. Without her, the case could fall
apart.
"It won’t be easy to convince the judge to convict a man of murder
without the witness appearing," said the defendant’s lawyer, Giora
Zilberstein. Mr. Abu Ghanem denies killing his sister, Mr. Zilberstein
said.
Police officials concede that if the court fails to convict him, the
likelihood of witnesses coming forward in future cases would be slim.
Ramla was once an entirely Arab town, but most of its residents fled
or were exiled during the 1948 war. The Abu Ghanem clan, which is
Bedouin, arrived in the 1950s, settling on the edge of Ramla and in
the nearby town of Lod.
The meeting between traditional desert culture and modern urban living
has not been particularly successful here.
"They all use drugs," Amama Abu Ghanem, the mother of Hamda and
Rashad, said of the clan’s criminal, controlling core, an observation
echoed by the police.
While many of the Abu Ghanem seem to live on welfare, Mrs. Abu Ghanem
washes dishes at a no-frills wedding hall in the town center. Some of
the cut-price stores here have signs in Russian, to cater to the more
recent arrivals. Ramla is about 80 percent Jewish today.
Mrs. Abu Ghanem said even if her son, who she says has an illegitimate
child with a 17-year-old Jewish woman in another town, had not killed
her daughter, she did not want him back. "Give me 10 years for my soul
to dry out," she said.
Mrs. Abu Ghanem, 52, had nine children before her husband left 16
years ago to move in with a new wife in an apartment below hers. He
now has 11 more children, none currently in school though education is
supposed to be compulsory from age 5.
A reporter and photographer were angrily shooed away from Mrs. Abu
Ghanem’s apartment by her eldest son, Muhammad, who said the family
did not need more scandals. "They are still in shock about Hamda,"
Mrs. Abu Ghanem said, sitting in the apartment of the second wife.
Aida Touma-Suliman of Women Against Violence, an Israeli group that
works in the Arab sector, said 8 cases of honor killings were reported
in Israel last year, 11 the year before. Yifrach Duchovny, the
commander of the Coastal Plain district police, said there were 17
cases in Ramla and Lod in the past five years.
Ms. Touma-Suliman blames years of neglect by the local police and
social welfare services. But she acknowledges that even Jewish women
at risk of domestic violence can be reluctant to go to the police, and
Arab women are all the more so, given the political history and
tensions between Arabs and Jews.
Superintendent Ezra keeps a package of black body bags on the shelf
behind his desk, below a tray for outgoing mail.
"They’re not there for nothing," he said grimly.
"These are clever girls who write diaries and poems," he said of those
he has helped find refuge. "But once they are no longer minors, they
often say they’re going back home. We say, ‘You’ll end up in one of
those.’ "
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| User: "Darrell Stec" |
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| Title: Re: After the killing, female relatives decided to speak up. |
23 Apr 2007 05:10:38 PM |
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Michael Gray wrote:
Reem eloped with a lover to escape an arranged marriage. Her brothers,
one a pediatrician, are on trial for murder. Sabrin rests under a bare
concrete slab with her name roughly scratched on by hand. She is said
to have been killed by a cousin whom she refused to marry. Shirihan,
15, the youngest of the dead women, is also said to have rejected a
marriage. Her stepbrothers are suspected of having killed her.
Last year I read a book called "Osama" about a teenaged Palestinian girl
living in a small town in America. Her parents stabbed her about 40 times
resulting in her death because they said she was too American while her
aunts and uncles were cheering the parents on over the telephone.
The book is scary because it shows a unified Palestinian terrorist network,
international in scope and usually occupying small towns running a local
grocery store or motel often carrying hundreds of thousands of dollars in
cash in the trunks of their car along with the hand held missles.
The episode was caught on tape because the family was being investigated.
It is a sad (but true) story about all the secret government calousness and
willingness to hide even a murder. The outcome of the story will frighten
any sane person.
--
Later,
Darrell Stec
Webpage Sorcery
http://webpagesorcery.com
We Put the Magic in Your Webpages
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