It's been a while, and I didn't want anyone to think I'd abandoned my fixations. It's just not like me to do that.

Speaking of fixations, the word applies in spades to the legitimate concerns which Muslim fathers here and abroad maintain concerning the conduct and appearance of their beloved daughters. Sometimes they are obliged to harm even adult daughters in order to teach them a lesson about respect for Al-lah, and a woman's place in the world.

America the great Melting Pot prides herself on embracing diverse customs and rituals observed by persons of all nationalities, ethnicities, and creeds. Phoenix, Arizona now joins the growing list of lucky American cities which have been privileged to witness what is known in Muslim culture as an "honor killing". Muslims are above all people of honor, to the point that they will openly and proudly kill for their faith.

Doting traditional-Muslim father Faleh Almaleki, 48, ran over his 20 year-old daughter Noor and Noor's boyfriend's mother with his two-ton jeep in a suburban parking lot last week, by his admission because of the unseemly "Western" manner in which she dressed (displaying skin) and behaved (shopping; actively seeking a career outside the home). Noor has just died of her injuries. Almaleki's relatives say there is no truth to reports he himself regularly frequented strip clubs and consumed alcohol, and Islamic clerics confirm it has little bearing on the rectitude of his honorable act undertaken to cleanse his daughter's taint upon Islam.

Displaying the well-known principled consistency and selfless courage of the modern Muslim male, Almaleki fled to Mexico immediately after the honor killing, abandoned the death vehicle, boarded a plane, and tried to enter the U.K., where he believed, based on recent British displays of hands-off accomodation for the requirements of Islamic diversity, that he might better fight extradition to America and thereby avoid facing the consequences----or enjoying the accolades, one of the two---from his bold act of religious piety. Britain inexplicably declined to receive him, and Almaleki sits, newly unrepentant, in an Arizona jail.

I hesitate to call it xenophobia or cultural bigotry without further evidences, but it's difficult to shed those labels when we consider the almost total major-media blackout on this story, a newsworthy cultural event of national significance, but yes, involving Muslim Americans. Even typically-vocal Muslim advocacy groups like CAIR, the Council on American Islamic Relations, have somehow been "persuaded" to forego their familiar clarion calls under dramatic circumstances like these for vigilance against anti-Muslim ignorance and hatred. Muslim civic and religious leaders, local and national, have declined to appear in support of Almaleki, or for that matter to express any public opinion on the honorable ritual one way or the other.

A quick check of the ever-comprehensive Google News pages, extended to their very limit, reveals only limited local coverage of Mr. Almaleki's supreme sacrifice, and some chattering from the usual right-wing "news" sites and extremist blogs. Small solace, to be sure, but we did see prominently featured on the Google News front page today that the U.S. government has reached a million-plus dollar settlement with a few Muslim men who were mistakenly and rather roughly detained by authorities in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 bombings.

On to wall-to-wall national coverage of the trials of Holocaust Museum shooter James Von Brunn and abortion-doctor killer Scott Roeder, wherein the deadly consequences of inhumane religious ideology can be properly and fully deplored without giving offense to our honorable Muslim citizens. It looks like the same good judgement and sensitivity will be employed to bar all but local coverage of the proceedings against the jihadist murderer of the Arkansas military recruiter, contemporaneously, as of course we all recall, to the killing of the heroic Dr. Tiller.

Almaleki sits, newly unrepentant, in an Arizona jail.

I hesitate to call it xenophobia or cultural bigotry without further evidences, but it's difficult to shed those labels when we consider the almost total major-media blackout on this story, a newsworthy cultural event of national significance, but yes, involving Muslim Americans.

I dunno, Inkberrow. It looks to me like it's all over the news, including the Huff Post.

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Ok, "blackout", not so much, so much. What me, hyperbolize?

But "major"? How about the CBS Evening News? The View? The Today Show? The New York Times? Keith Olbermann?

And how about they call it for what it is, and report it because of that, for its own sake, not just out of defensive maneuvering, reluctantly, after they realize it's finally coming throught the dike anyway despite their efforts, like with Edwards' love child, or Reverend Wright's race-baiting......

how about they call it for what it is

If I had a nickel for every parent who killed his or her daughter, I'd be a rich woman and wouldn't have to place bets with Urquart.

What is it -- a killing based on a belief system.

The same day the Wash Post had the story you mention, it also had a story about a Christian Korean mother who smothered her teen daughter while trying to exorcise the devil.

In Balto, a mother let her 3-yr-old daughter starve to death because she didn't know how to pray. Then she put the body in a suitcase and took it to another city. She told the judge she would plead guilty if he would let her free if her daughter came back to life. The judge agreed.

What about all those Jehovah's Witnesses who don't allow their kids to have life-saving operations?

No, Inkberrow, I'm not going to pre-judge all Muslim-Americans based on what one fanatic does.

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Africa is troubling, Meh Goddess, and it's a tragedy whenever Christians must administer corrective and protective violence against one of their own in order to keep the Adversary at bay.

I find this honor killing a tad more troubling nonetheless, however, justified as it was not by the relatively extraordinary invasion of women by supernatural forces, occurring among half-wits in Nigeria, but a garden variety American father administering prosaic chastisement under religious auspices in a parking lot in Phoenix.

Moreover, Christians leaders worldwide will not be difficult to find condemning the African measures. So far the only American Muslim leaders and religious spokespersons who will even acknowledge the existence or noteworthiness of honor killings, comment typically with, and I paraphrase, "The slut had it coming".

Just judge them.

through all this reading, writing, contemplating ..

have you felt sad for her (yet)?

undercurrent of victimhood (yours) that seems incongruent given what I believe I know about you. Feels somehow like life on the frontier. That said, Von Brunn and Roeder were acting out traditional Americn imperatives while the killer of the Arkansas military recruiter was following a script whose origins lie somewhat east of Gibraltar. It seems natural that our sense of reponsibility is heightened where the first two are concerned but is mitigated where the Arkansas killer is concerned. just sayin.

It's been the top story on the local news every night since it happeneed. Nobody has called it "honorable," nobody has stepped forward to defend Almaleki. Perhaps you can link me to someone who has?

Please explain how this is "a newsworthy cultural event of national significance," and not simply another case of a parent committing filicide (something that sadly, as MaryAnn points out, happens every day and is rarely reported nationally).

to try and speculate on why a story doesn't get the play you think it deserves. Each individual news source has its own reasons for deciding to go with one story over another. But I'm pretty sure applying Occam's Razor doesn't get us to broad Muslim sympathies or fear of Muslim reprisal within the news media.

Admittedly, not since. Anger and contempt, since. I'd like five minutes in a room with Almaleki. I'd show him allahu akbar.

of my own victimhood, which as you suspect I don't consciously feel to be applicable.

For a psychological explanation, I'd reluctantly hew to the truism that the highest level of animus often comes from those closest to the offender in outlook or worldview. Maybe a lapsed fellow Abrahamic fundie will balk at Muslims more than say an agnostic or a Unitarian or an Elk.

For a factual explanation, I'd say that Muslims represent far and away the most loathesome and dangerous worldview of any large organized group on the planet.

The homegrown Arkansas killer's original story was penned in the East, true enough, but the script's been reworked by Farrakhan and others for wide distribution in American prisons and other hotbeds of race-baiting, classist resentment. Ironic, eh? The millenium's biggest and most unapologetic practitioner of slavery, Islam, continuing to this very this day, finding common moral cause with and co-opting the inchoate resentment of the descendants of American slaves.

Every Night it's obviously a newswothy event of national significance. (Or do you live in 'Zona?). But it has not received the treatment it deserves, in the plain termswarranted. Have you even heard the word "Muslim" used in the stories, Lono?

No one has affirmatively stepped forward to defend Almaleki that I'm aware of. My point is that snce no one from the Muslim community, local or otherwise, has stepped forward to condemn Almaleki, or marginalize his act from mainstream Islam, that we have therefore a group condonation of his "sacrifice". The Silence Of The Misogynists? Nah, equal treatment---the same deafening silence accompanies every American jihadi killing, except when CAIR sees fit to bleat about Islamophobia (among those other than the victims).

No, Lono and MaryAnn, this "doesn't happen every day/rarely reported". Not this. Well, not yet anyway. Maybe coming to the Dearborn, Michigan on a regular basis soon, just as it has to one of my old haunts, Birmingham, England. Yes, filicide happens. But how about filicide as explicit religionist sacrifice, to prevent "shame" to a faith or creed?

Filicide as religious sacrifice where well-meaning American progs can't line up fast enough to contextualize and rationalize it?

von Brunn and Roeder cases in contradistinction, however, because my take is these are acceptable cultural Villains in the mainstream media narrative of American society. Muslims and African-Americans, on the other hand, are presumptively to be spared such depiction, unless necessary for overall damage-control because the story's so big anyway, and it needs to be reframed with as little damage to the Big Picture aspossible.