A link to Wheadonesque on the subject of a woman's murder. There is nothing of honor in these so-called "honor killings, " and how can there be? A crowd of men against one unarmed woman? It's butchery. And it happens more often than most of us would like to think about.

A human being died that night, defenceless and in agony, while others taped it to show their friends what a cool time they had. There is nothing more I could possibly say to show how utterly, absolutely, incalculably wrong that is. There is no moral relativism here; if the brutal death of an unarmed person by a pack of butchers isn't wrong, then nothing is. It's as simple as that. Shades of gray only come into being through the blending of black and white. For neutrality to exist, there must be, somewhere, some things that are either solely good or evil. I believe that this kind of slaughter is one of those rare pure evils untouched by any vestige of good.

There are a number of things I would like to do to the people (and I use the term loosely) who participate in killings like this. None of them are particularly fit to print, and I imagine anyone who reads this will have formed their own ideas as well. Mine are bloody enough that I suspect there's a good reason that I wasn't put in charge of meting out punishment for this sort of thing. And I don't know if it would solve anything. It would certainly make me feel better, but me feeling better isn't even remotely the point. So as for something nonviolent we can all actually do, I'm including this link to Amnesty International, in the hopes that enough international pressure will do something positive for a change. We can only try.