Honor Killing' Reflects Dark Side of Women's Struggles in Afghanistan

She was a pretty, sophisticated young TV star with the controversial, wildly popular channel broadcast in war-torn Afghanistan. Then her killing sent shockwaves through the media and across the world.

Shaima Rezayee, 24, an MTV-style veejay for Afghanistan's popular independent Tolo TV channel, was slain in her home by a bullet at close range. For a time, her two brothers were held in custody for what was being called an honor killing. They have since been released. Despite several attempts to reach the Afghanistan Interior Ministry for an update on the case, it remains unclear if an investigation is ongoing.

Rezayee had been the center of controversy in conservative circles in Afghanistan since she tossed aside her burqa and wore Western-style clothing on air, with a headscarf and a swath of her shiny, carefully styled black hair. She was fired as host of "Hop" on Tolo TV in March. The reasons given have ranged from tardiness to complaints from the public over her appearance and demeanor.

Was just reading a week or so ago about the young girls and women going back to school in Afghanistan. Apparently, more schools are being open and more females are back to getting an education. A young girl or woman receiving an education, of course, was forbidden under Taliban rule.

In these countries, change comes slowly, and it often starts and stops...sometimes it regresses, then comes back. I'd like to think that, if democracy takes hold in this region, changes will come.

It's sad that it's too late for Ms. Rezayee.

I'm going out on a limb here because I didn't read the entire article and what I write may get me flamed but I think we need to rethink how we deal with societies like Afghanistan and Iraq and Iran.

In this information age, it would be difficult but I think we should discourage people like Ms. Rezayee from trying to drag her society too far too fast into the modern age. Cultures take time to ripen. That doesn't mean she should have to wait thirteen centuries for it to catch up, but the work has to be incremental to be successful. Tragically, it only managed to get her killed and likely discouraged many other young women from trying anything similar.

This is one of my beefs with many of the do-gooders running around the Third World. They encourage those people to adopt the same values and morals of our society, especially values such as independence and arrogance without realizing that those values in our own society have been uncoupled from their restraining values of family, religion and honor. So they have taken the worse of our society, which only works now because we still have a substantial base of the traditional values to absorb the shock, and preach them to people whose societies are not so accommodating.

For example, divorce is so easy in this country partly because we have a culture where we have education, mobility, child care, supermarkets, malls and a thousand other conveniences that make it possible to get along without a spouse or supporting family. Preach the same independence to a Third World society and disaster happens (not that divorce isn't a disaster here, too, but that's another discussion). The point is that much of what we consider the perfect society today took centuries if not millennia to prepare the soil. Our Bill of Rights springs from the fertilizer of monotheism that accepts all mankind as brothers under one Father. Our ability to put ourselves first and leave spouses, parents and children to fend for themselves springs from our technological achievements. One could go on and on.

These values are no more translatable than most plants which grow only in certain soils and climates. So I hope the lesson from Ms. Rezayee's death is that change takes time. It is a lesson that today's liberals need to learn as they try shoving abortion and gay marriage down the throat of our culture. Not that I want to see that happen, but there is a lesson about preparing the soil and how, if you don't want to go to that trouble, then you resort to dictatorships--political or judicial, like we're seeing here in this country today.

Well, that's my rant. Please don't interpret any of this as justifying an honor killing or anything like it. I just think we need to deal with reality instead of fantasy when it comes to encouraging change in our society or anyone else's society.

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