Another entry in how the Religion of Peace deals with family disagreements.

The story broke earlier this week about the death by stoning of Farzana Parveen, in Pakistan, at the hands of her father and other male relatives.

(Mohammad) Azeem told police he helped kill his daughter because she had shamed the family.

“I killed my daughter as she had insulted all of our family by marrying a man without our consent, and I have no regret over it,” police investigator Rana Mujahid quoted him as saying.

Parveen was attacked as she and her husband, Mohammad Iqbal, arrived at the gates of the Lahore High Court. They went there to dispute charges brought by her father that Iqbal had kidnapped Parveen, who had been engaged to her cousin for several years.

Farzana Parveen was three months pregnant when she was brutally killed by her own father.  The “honor killing” happened right outside of the courthouse, and yet no one did anything.  The husband claims that he and his family tried to get the police nearby to help:

“We were shouting for help, but nobody listened. One of my relatives took off his clothes to capture police attention but they didn’t intervene.”

The father, Azeem, has readily admitted his culpability, and police, now being pushed into actually doing something, are having to look for the rest of the male family members who helped out.  And, according to Mohammad Iqbal, Farzana’s sister Rehana was poisoned by her family when she refused to leave her husband, after her father had a fight with her in-laws.  Now that the death of Farzana has gained worldwide attention, activists in Islamabad have been protesting, and the Pakistani prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, is now wanting answers about the police’s refusal to interfere.

But before you start feeling too sorry for Mohammad Iqbal, who was initially reported as being a 45 year old widower with 5 children, who had fallen in love with the 25 year old Farzana and just wanted to marry her… we now discover that he was a widower because he killed his first wife six years ago in order to propose to Farzana.

“I wanted to send a proposal to Farzana, so I killed my wife,” Mohammad Iqbal said Thursday in an interview with CNN.

Zulfiqar Hameed, district inspector general for the Punjab police, said Iqbal’s son from the first marriage alerted police to the slaying six years ago.

Iqbal was arrested but later released on bail because his son forgave him, Hameed said.

The son, Aurengzeb, who is in his 20s, confirmed his father’s statements to CNN. He said his father served a year in jail.

Iqbal’s son apparently dropped the charges against his father for murdering his mother, and in Pakistan, that was the end of that.  According to CNN, Iqbal did get permission from Farzana’s family to marry her (killing his first wife wasn’t a big deal to them, either, it seems), but then the family changed their minds:

Iqbal, a neighbor of Parveen’s family, said he and Parveen were supposed to marry, with the family’s approval, last year. As part of the arrangement, Iqbal said, he’d given Parveen’s father 80,000 rupees and gold jewelry.

Last December, Parveen’s mother died and her father and brothers changed their minds about the marriage, Iqbal said.

The family decided Parveen, who came from a village in Punjab, should marry a cousin, police said.

Honest to God,  there is not one sympathetic man in this bunch.  And it really boils down to the fact that in this Islamic tribal culture, women are considered disposable property.  So long as Iqbal’s son forgave him and dropped the charges, the murder of his first wife wasn’t a problem.  Even Farzana’s family didn’t have a problem with it.  And allegedly, they don’t have problems getting rid of daughters that disobey them.  Iqbal claims that Farzana’s family demanded 100,000 rupees to not kill them after the marriage, but he didn’t have that kind of money to pay for “protection” from his new in-laws.

But notice that Mohammad Azeem, when he took up bricks and stones to kill his daughter, did not kill the man who he accused of kidnapping his daughter.  He knew he could get away with killing his daughter.  If he killed a man, his punishment under Islamic law would probably fall under the “eye for an eye” rule, and he would stand a good chance of being executed.  Azeem is probably amazed that anyone cares that Farzana was stoned to death.

I am so desperately tired and sad of hearing story after story of women being killed under the banner of tribal Islamic cultures because they have displeased the men around them.  And tell me truly – if Pakistan suddenly disappeared off the face of the earth tomorrow, would the rest of us really miss it?  If these barbaric examples are what we can expect on a regular basis from an Islamic society, then we should resist it with every breath in our bodies and every fiber in our beings.