Unwitting Martyr

Du'a Khalil Aswad. Dead at the age of seventeen. The pictures, the video (playable in Real).

In brief, the teenage girl was stoned to death for going out with a boy of another religion. Accounts vary, but it was roughly about a thousand men from her hometown, possibly some of her own relatives, and a few local policemen. In addition, the mob had the audacity to record the execution with their camera phones. This will backfire for them, at least in the short term, since that's what happens when you record damming evidence of yourself committing heinous acts.

The mob justifies their actions as an "honor killing." Conflicting reports talk about a relationship to a Sunni boy (her family was Yazidi), possibly marriage or religious conversion. None of these reasons are justifiable for murder, especially not as gruesome, prolonged or cruel as this one. And yet basic human decency is superseded by religious dogma. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for religious freedom and different interpretations of the human spiritual experience. But when the cost is basic civility (no matter verbal, written or physical), there can be tolerance.

A brave man once said "Religion is supposed to comfort people, not scare them to death." Every single major religion Christianity/Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam (well, Sufism anyway) , emphasizes the love of God for man, and the compassionate expression of this love between each other. No boundary is placed upon the set of people that one is supposed to care for. Jesus didn't say "Love thy neighbor, unless he has a PS3; those guys suck."

Actually, the argument about the inclusiveness of compassion doesn't even enter into it. Du'a was stoned to death to people of her own religion, most likely her own family. Where does one come up with the rationality for that? How do you find justice in a region that condones this behavior? How do you try a system? How do you force these men to open their eyes to the crimes they have committed, so that they may fully realize their guilt and be burdened with the weight of their actions?

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Once more unto the breach

Every few months or so, I get a correspondence from my old college roommate, mmm... we'll call him Alai (not for ethnic reasons, you understand), asking me about how I'm doing and sharing where he is in life. Now I have a handful of closer friends, fewer than most, that I keep in contact with this way. What's unique about his messages are that they always end with a suggestion to take up blogging once again.

College was a golden time for us. The year was twenty double aught, and America was at its best. The Matrix still had the public fooled into thinking Keanu could act. Microsoft had lost antitrust lawsuits levied against it. 9/11 was still a year away from ruining everything. And the Internet was still a wild frontier, being staked out by everyone and anyone with an email address and a bag full of html tags. Napster was still free, Scour dominated, BitTorrent hadn't even been developed yet (let alone sold out), and the Internet, not yet a series of tubes, was littered with unchecked spam pop ups.

And in the middle was Alai and me, babies given full reign in a magical chocolaty land of high-speed Ethernet. He devoured flash files like candy, while I gorged myself on webcomics. We discovered commercials we wouldn't have seen otherwise (it was free back then), found walkthroughs for every single video game we could download, discovered music we never would have heard of otherwise. And, we discovered a growing number of web pages that disseminated links and information fell into the category of weblogs.

It would take two more years (and a couple ex-girlfriends) before I actually entered the blagosphere myself. And I was pretty consistent about it. I liked the feeling of participating in a community (albeit an unseen one). It felt like a mashup between a relay race and a soapbox. Information had to be found, commented and expanded upon, and then handed off to the next unseen person. You might not know who would find the info and pass it along, but there was an ephemeral assurance that one's post was a small but integral piece of the information machine.

Of course, as happens to many people, I got caught up in the little issues of my life, rather than the observations. I spent less and less time commenting on the world and more time explaining to the world who I was and why I must be pitied. What started out as a fruitful mental exercise turned into intellectual self-masturbation. So I edited myself, deciding to save my words for worthwhile topics, and found that really, I had little to say.

Life went on. I graduated college and moved to a different country. It's been several months, and though I speak the native language more-or-less fluently, I keep tabs with the States (in some cases, not as well as I should), not just on video game developments and friendly exchanges, but real issues and news items. And in reading about the world, I became more involved. I rediscovered my voice. It's not yet as creatively original as I want it to be, but it's strong, opinionated, and
wants to be heard.

even if it likes to wack off every now and again :P

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