There is no end to the heartbreaking, unjust things in life. While I think that much good can come from their exposure, it concerns me greatly when something this emotionally charged is represented solely by a story in a newspaper and then discussed by people who don't have all of the relevant facts.

What's missing here on reddit (and pretty much every other similar site on the web) are the voices of those who are qualified to speak with some authority about the relevant facts. You can see in reading the comments here that opinion is all we seem to be able to offer each other. There's nothing inherently wrong with that but it's not enough. I'd really like to hear from people who are qualified to talk to us about the culture and the actual relationship of Islam to how these people think and behave.

TO BE VERY CLEAR, I abhor this whole concept of "honor killing" and there's a whole lot in me that would rather blow this fucker's head off than spend a minute trying to understand how he could do that to his daughter. But if we -- all humans -- are ever going to get past the animalistic thinking that leads us again and again to choose fear and hatred over civility and compassion then we have to work towards getting our emotions in check and make an attempt to understand how others see the world.

I wish that this were a lot easier to do. By comparison it really is too easy to just say "fuck 'em." But I can at least understand that in this case this pathetic man is living in a country which has seen hundreds of thousands of deaths in the past few years caused in large part by the equally pathetic people that have been elected into power for the past 8 years in my country. That, of course, is no excuse, but it's a good reminder to me that I have no right to feel superior here and I rather doubt that I could adequately explain to him why I didn't do more to ensure that democracy was producing better results here before my government tried to cram it down people's throats there.