I don't know who's worse, the terrorists or the dad. I think there are a thousand other ways the father could have handled the situation, all of which would have been better than murdering his own daughter. What do you think of this? Is the father a hero, a villain, or just misunderstood?

 

BAGHDAD – When police came hunting for a 19-year-old woman they believed had been recruited by al-Qaida to be a suicide bomber in a town north of Baghdad, they found she was already dead: Slain by her father, who told police he strangled his daughter out of shame and then cut her throat.

 

The killing of Shahlaa al-Anbaky, reported by police Friday, appeared to be from an unusual melding of motives — part to defend the family honor, part to prevent her from joining the militants. But how much of each weighed in her father's mind remains unclear, with police still investigating the details.

 

Al-Qaida has been recruiting women for suicide attacks because they can pass police checkpoints more easily than men by concealing explosives under an abaya, a loose, black cloak that conservative Muslim women wear. Suicide bombers have been al-Qaida's most lethal weapon in Iraq, killing hundreds of civilians and members of Iraq's security forces.

 

Read more: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20101224/ap_on_re_mi_ea/ml_iraq

Some parts of the world operate with very different concepts of the importance of honor relative to the importance of human life than we in the West have, and some have very different notions of the independence of each individual from the ethical identity of the family than seem natural to us. If you can get yourself to think of a notion of selfhood in which each member of the family is not really autonomous apart from the family, then such actions as occurred in this news report don't seem so unethical. You would have to step back and ask whether the entire culture and its more communitarian notion of the ontology of the self is legitimate or not, and the answer to that would depend on how willing you are to accept cultural relativism or adhere to a universal notion of human identity and moral rights.