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I want the US to remain a First world country. We must force our gov't to end immigration and/or change the lottery system. If I wanted to live in the 3rd world, I'd move there.

If our politician's thought as you do, America's economy would go through the roof, and this nation would not be "divided"!

Honour killings often provoke smug responses from Westerners. The judge in Yones's murder trial concluded the case was 'in any view a tragic story of irreconcilable cultural differences between traditional Kurdish values and the values of Western society'. There is more than a whiff of cultural superiority here - but this is the same Western society that sees two women in Britain murdered by their partners every week.

the police and the judiciary have tended to tread softly where cultural practices are concerned, for fear of being thought insufficiently sensitive to minority communities. Liberal BS

Honour killings are, clearly, specific to certain communities.

In 1998, Rukhsana Naz's mother held her down at their house in the Midlands while her brother wrapped a plastic flex around her neck and strangled her. Rukhsana was seven months pregnant. She had been married in Pakistan at the age of 15 and already had two children; just before her mother and 22-year-old brother murdered her, they made her sign a will naming themselves as her guardians. Rukhsana's husband had remained in Pakistan, but she had returned to Britain and become pregnant by the boyfriend she had met at school. Her mother, Shakeela, wept as she killed her. When Rukhsana's other brother, 18-year-old Iftikhar, heard the commotion and ran downstairs, she told him: 'Be strong, son.' The family put Rukhsana's body in the car and drove 100 miles to dump it.AND...Central to the notion of honour killing is the idea that death can expunge a stain, especially if accomplished quickly. Family values brought to you by TROP.

Historically, protecting women's honour, or ird, was seen as a last bastion against colonial influence; today, it is seen as a way of resisting globalisation and the unwanted values of the West. Like we are evil?

Shaheen Ali is a former Pakistan cabinet minister, a human rights and Islamic lawyer and, currently, Professor of Law at Warwick University. She goes back and forth to Pakistan a great deal and says she is 'shocked by the way a lot of Pakistani communities operate here. I can't relate to them. It's as if time stopped for them when they got off the plane. Why assimilation to America is IMPORTANT!

The Council does acknowledge, though, that the reluctance of some Muslims to address honour killings, 'in a forthright and unapologetic manner, is born out of an inherent distrust of perceived "Western" attempts to taint the image of Islam'. Irreconcilable differences?

Further, she says, whereas the Christian notion of marriage is of an ultimate spiritual union, marriage in Islam is a secular and civil contract between two individuals, each of whom is guardian of his or her own honour. 'Honour is a very individualistic notion in Islam,' says Ali.More culture clash?

Honour killings have nothing to do with Islam, other than that - in common with Christianity and other world religions - Islam survives not least because it is open to varied readings, can be almost endlessly plundered for meanings, and is capable of being interpreted in support of all manner of actions. So power aquired, regardless of how, makes you the country's leader?

One night in January 1993, Zena Chaudhuri tore up the sheets from her bed and tied them together. Using them as a rope, she lowered bags from her bedroom window at the top of her house to the street below. Then she crept down the stairs and out of the front door.
Zena had met Jack Briggs the previous summer, in the Yorkshire town where they both lived. They took to accompanying the neighbourhood children, including their various nephews and nieces, to the park. Their friendship developed into a relationship, although Zena always knew that she was intended for Bilal, a relative in Pakistan. She had been taken to meet him when she was 13 and had found him uncouth, domineering and spiteful. Her sister Miriam was already married to his brother, who beat her and taunted Zena that once she was married, too, he and Bilal would 'sort her out'.

Recently, Zena's passport had gone missing from her bedroom. She believed it was only a matter of time before she was somehow got to the airport and on to a plane. Perhaps she would be told she had to visit a sick relative. (Her mother was in Pakistan already, caring for her grandmother.) Once in Kashmir, she would be forced to marry Bilal. 'They came from a remote region,' Jack says. 'She would have had to walk the equivalent of London to Birmingham to get to a phone.'

Faced with what she anticipated would be 'a life of lovelessness and rows and drudgery stretching out for ever,' Zena ran away. She had almost no idea of what she was letting herself in for: she took 20 pairs of shoes and a French manicure set with 30 nail varnishes. She would ditch all of it, except for two pairs of shoes, within a couple of days.

Zena phoned her family immediately to let them know she was safe. Her brother Karim, who'd played football with Jack and counted himself a friend, told the couple the family had already hired a bounty hunter. Karim was selling his precious cars to pay the costs of tracing and killing them. 'I'm going to make it my life's mission to find you,' he said. 'You're both going to end up in bin liners.'

Miriam claimed Zena's disappearance had given her father a heart attack. He was in hospital and might die; she had to come back. Jack and Zena rang the hospitals; it wasn't true. Meanwhile, three men smashed the windows of Jack's mother's house, broke down the door, pushed his mother (who had cancer) up against the wall and said: 'We want to introduce you to the man who's going to murder your son.' Someone telephoned Jack's sister and told her they were going to 'chop up' her children.
Jack and Zena ended up in Grimsby, where someone at the DSS leaked their whereabouts; three men turned up at the office claiming to be Zena's brothers and demanding to know her address. Luckily, someone alerted the couple before they could be found. They went to the police, who told them a £9,000 theft charge had been laid by her family against Zena; she would have to return to Yorkshire to answer questions. She was driven back and spent the night in a police cell before being released.
Zena and Jack were put on the national sensitive register for social security and stayed on the move: Huddersfield, Cleethorpes, Grimsby, Lincoln, Sandown (where they married), Bournemouth, Torquay... they didn't linger anywhere. They stayed in B&Bs, buying a 4lb bag of oven chips for £1.29 at the beginning of the week and building meals around it - a tin of spaghetti one night, a tin of stewed steak the next.
Today, the man who calls himself Jack Briggs (which is not the name he uses in his private life, obviously) meets me at a London hotel. 'Do you mind,' he asks as I sit down, 'if I sit there? I can see the door then.' Jack and Zena Briggs are still on the run. They have moved 30 times since 1992 and have no idea if they are still in danger (bounty hunters are usually paid on completion) or, if so, in what form it might come. 'At first, if an Asian guy looked at me twice I was anxious, but now I know that's not how it works. It could easily be a white Christian with the knife or the gun. We are dealing with intelligent, resourceful people, who fully believe what they are doing is justified.'
Zena and Jack were eventually given new identities: new passports, national insurance numbers and medical cards. But these came without educational histories, work backgrounds or character references and, if they'd used their own, they could have been traced. In practice, this meant it was virtually impossible for Jack to get work. (Zena does now have a part-time job.) 'I am able to work and I want to,' Jack says. 'I think it's everyone's legal and civil right to work. We should have been a third of the way through a mortgage by now, instead of which we have rent arrears. Zena doesn't even have a winter coat.'
Neither is in particularly good health. Jack says his 'mind divides everything into two: threat and non-threat. Unfortunately, the non-threat part is like a sieve.' It's hard not to feel that the violence, psychological as much as physical, has won. But Jack says he has never doubted that he and Zena did the right thing. 'I love her. She's a really courageous woman. People are blown away by her. It's worth living because we are together.'
Lately, Jack has given seminars for the police. In the summer, he spoke at an international conference on honour-related violence in Sweden. 'When we first went to the police we were met with disbelief. How could a loving family like Zena's be a threat to their child? I'd like to think that someone in our situation would have more help now, not just from the police but from social services and housing departments; and also that it would be easier to rejoin society.How maniacal is that for "a culture"?

Remember, this is TROP.

'Honour killing is not about one woman, or about 10, it is about an entire gender,' Diana Nammi says. 'What honour killing does is to make women's lives conditional - on wearing the right clothes, on not speaking too loudly, on not being seen with the wrong person, not even being the subject of rumour, for rumour is enough to stain the family's honour.'American women should love that this is about them yoo

This is just one of many reasons why america needs to get control of Immigration!