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.@RashidaTlaib: Deflecting Blame for Horrific Palestinian Honor Killing clarionproject.org/palestinian-ho…
@RashidaTlaib A horrific Palestinian honor killing got the attention of Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, who, in typical fashion, deflected blame from her own people and put it squarely on her two favorite enemies: the “patriarchy” and Israel.
Some background (warning: the story is gruesome):
Some background (warning: the story is gruesome):
The honor culture, which is heavily prevalent in Palestinian Muslim culture (as well as many other places in the Muslim world), dictates suffocating rules of conduct between men and women – in this case, those who are dating.
A few weeks ago, 21-year old Isra Gharib, an aspiring make-up artist in Bethlehem with a large following on Instagram, asked her mother (honor mistake #1 – not asking her father) if she could date a certain young man.
With her mother’s approval and with chaperones on their dates, the young couple found they liked one another – in fact, a lot – enough to get married.
Right before they were to get engaged, Gharib took a video of them together at a coffee shop and posted it on her Instagram account (honor mistake #2 – it’s forbidden for a girl and boy to be seen together in public before they are officially engaged).
The post was seen by her cousin, who, outraged at such an honor breach, finked on Gharib to her father. When Gharib arrived at home that day, her brothers and a brother-in-law were waiting for her.
They beat her so severely, she jumped out of a two-or three-story window to escape them, incurring a spinal cord injury (her family claims she fell).
While in a hospital in Bethlehem, Gharib posted a picture of her bruised face, telling her fans she wouldn’t be able to work for a couple months, but that they shouldn’t worry about her. 
“I’m strong, and I have the will to live — if I didn’t have this willpower, I would have died yesterday,” she wrote. “Don’t send me messages telling me to be strong, I am strong. May God be the judge of those who oppressed me and hurt me.”
Yet shortly afterwards, her father, brothers (including one who recently came back from Canada where he is a resident) and a brother-in-law came to her bedside to finish the job. With no interference from the hospital staff, they beat her again.
One nurse, standing down the hall, recorded the horrific incident, in which one can hear Gharib screaming for her life:
Afterwards, the family removed her from the hospital. The brother who had recently arrived from Canada then finished the job, beating her on the head until she fell into a coma. Gharib later died in another hospital in the Arab village of Beit Jala.
The honor killing, ignored by the Western media, touched a nerve among women who live in the Palestinian areas of Israel, where honor killings account for an estimated 12 percent of all murders.
Yet commenting on the killing among the Palestinian population she so identifies with, Talib had not one negative thing to say about them --
– rather she tweeted out an article by a Palestinian blogger that blamed the killing on anything but — the patriarchy, corruption, colonialism and its imposition of foreign laws and, of course (the most tried and true excuse), the Israeli “occupation.”
