Seriously? More than a week later and that’s the best you could come up with? A less-useful rehash of post #7?
I suspected, while reading this thread, that the race issue would rear its head sooner or later.
Let me say one little thing with regard to this minor distraction: As someone who has carefully watched and observed the rap music scene, not only in the US but around the world, for many years, I can assure you that the only reason why rap music as portrayed by the mainstream American media is in the silly, ridiculous, uncreative, uninspiring and unadmirable form that it is is precisely because it is ultimately controlled by white men in a historically racist country. It is instructive to note that creative, admirable and inspiring rap music is heavily promoted only when a white guy is doing it. But such forms of rap that have been produced by black people –and there are tons of them- are kept hidden under the rug of American popular media.
Anyway, with regards to the subject of this thread, I doubt there are many people who would hesitate, when asked the question “would you prefer your loved one to be raped or to be murdered,” to choose the former. However, we live in such cosseted, politically correct and feministic societies that we tend to split hairs over the issue and engage in all kinds of legalistic, conceptual and semantic gymnastics. Of course, either fate is a horrible one that we can barely imagine happening to someone we care about. But it is still somewhat of an odd question. I initially suspected the question to be a subtle complaint about the fact that alleged rape victims are given special treatment by (at least) western legal systems compared to other victims of violence.
Granted that the question may have been misstated and should have been “are rapists worse than murderers,” there still seems to be a problem in the way people tend to respond to it. I notice that there tends to be a ‘switch in meaning’ when jumping from one word to the other. The word ‘murderer’ is assumed to mean possibly a person guilty of a one-off, spontaneous murder done in the heat of the moment. On the other hand, the word ‘rapist’ is assumed to only mean a habitual serial rapist. Some respondents on this thread seem to forget that just as there are habitual rapists there are also habitual killers (serial killers, gangsters, armed robbers, etc…). Likewise, rape obviously has its own ‘heat of the moment’ counterpart to murder.
So here is a more even-handed comparison for us to philosophize over (it may not be perfectly even-handed but I believe it comes close): Is a man who is unable to stop himself from going ‘all the way’ on a woman against her will during a moment of sexual passion more evil or despicable than a man who is unable to stop himself from grabbing a nearby rock and smashing out the brains of his acquaintance during a fight? Put this way, it would seem there is considerable room for hairsplitting.
No one seems to have examined the issue from the Islamist point of view. If my sister is raped, she has brought dishonor to the family and must be killed.
sort of puts a different twist on it when you put it that way. The VICTIM as the one who should then be murdered. Surely, if being raped is so awful that you must be killed for it, then raping must be astronomically worse. Well, they don’t kill the rapist, do they…just the victim.
Sorry, that should be ‘companion’ and not ‘acquaintance’. I guess I still have a lot of work to do on my english.
If being raped is “astronomically worse” than been murdered, then how can being murdered be an appropriate punishment?
Unless the idea is not to punish her but to simply get rid of her. In which case, she is not considered guilty of anything but merely an embarrassment.
Way too much of it going on in the world, even in the places to which Muslims immigrate. I read of one case where a father killed his daughter for ‘talking’ to a boy on Facebook.
i really don’t think we should excuse those honor killings because they are based in some culture foreign to our beliefs. Murder is…murder.
That’s not Islamic, that’s cultural. A religious excuse is maybe cooked up, but there is nothing in Islam that demands a raped woman be killed.
The only “twist” it puts on it is that societies which believe it are sick.