Monday - July 13, 2009

Arranged marriage and honor killings. They just refuse to join the 21st century, or even the 19th.

This is a long but interesting story I just ran across.
It isn’t really anything new to you.  The idea that these people arrange marriages and use threats of death to enforce their dark age mentality is old hat by now.
However, this particular story reads almost like a novel. And it isn’t fiction.

Certain immigrant communities simply refuse to abide by the laws and customs of their host country. And that isn’t going to change.  Of course to be critical of them makes one automatically “racist.” The fact that their own twisted mentality contributes to how others view them is lost among them and the politically correct.
A POX on both I say. 

Just moments ago.

Across the cultural divide: The Muslim woman and older British man whose love survived death threats but was doomed to fail.

By Tom Rawstorne
Last updated at 9:24 AM (UK Time) on 13th July 2009

Before he goes to sleep, Jack Briggs goes through his nightly ritual. First, he checks there is a knife within easy reach beside his bed and a baseball bat beneath it.

It has been the same routine ever since he ran away with his sweetheart, Zena, 17 years ago. She came from a Muslim family and was supposed to wed a cousin in an arranged marriage - not Jack, a white British man ten years her senior.

And so it was that, under threat of death, the couple fled their homes and have been in hiding ever since.

Now, for the first time, the Mail can reveal that the couple, who had battled not just prejudice but violence, have separated after the strain of so many years of clandestine existence finally proved too great. But remarkably, says Jack, that changes nothing. Their lives are still in danger.

‘The threat to me and Zena is still there, and I don’t think it will make a jot of difference when her family finds out that we have split up,’ he says. ‘In their eyes, the damage has been done.

‘It goes back to the whole honour-based culture. We have put a mark - a stain - on their family and it will never go away.

‘They believe it’s passed from generation to generation and the only way they can see how to lift it is through murder. It is terrible, but it is fact.’

For a couple whose extraordinary story has been likened to that of Romeo and Juliet, news that their marriage has broken down will come as a terrible shock to the legion of supporters who have followed their plight over the years.

They met and fell in love in 1992 in Leeds, when Zena was just 21. The British-born daughter of Pakistani immigrants, her father had decreed that she would marry a cousin when she came of age.

But then Jack came along (the couple met by chance when he was visiting his sister, who lived close to Zena) and from that moment on their lives would never be the same again.

Told that their relationship was a stain on the honour of Zena’s family, the couple were forced to go on the run amid a barrage of death threats.

These threats were taken so seriously by the police that they received protection from Special Branch, assumed numerous new identities and moved house no fewer than 30 times.

It is a terrible irony, then, that only when they stopped running did their relationship itself run into problems. Informed three years ago by detectives that there was no longer a ‘credible threat’ against them, Jack and Zena attempted to settle down.

But while Zena embraced the return to relative normality, Jack struggled to cope. A disagreement over a piece of furniture brought that fact into focus.

‘We’d been out and bought a wardrobe and then brought it back to our flat,’ explains 47-year-old Jack.

‘Once we’d got it in, I picked up our bags and dumped them in the bottom of the wardrobe and shut the doors. That’s what we always did, just in case we needed to make a quick getaway.

He is determined that no one else in this country will have to suffer in the same way that he and Zena have had to, warning that the practice of forced marriages and so-called honour killings continues to be a real problem.

Political correctness, he adds, is all that keeps it out of the headlines.

‘People still think this happens only in the back streets of Bradford, Wolverhampton, Leicester, Birmingham and places like that,’ says Jack.

‘It doesn’t - it happens in the sort of leafy suburbs where people will be sitting reading this paper.

‘It touches those who weren’t fortunate to have a good education, as well as those who have degrees. It is out there and it is simply not going to go away on its own.’

Many, no doubt, will find it hard to believe that anyone in 21st-century Britain could be forced to live under such a threat.

Or, indeed, that anyone could be so twisted as to harm someone they supposedly love for simply exercising their freedom or choice in whom they marry.

But the details of Jack and Zena’s life highlight a problem that police admit may have cost hundreds of young women their lives over the years. It should be pointed out that Zena did not come from a troubled, dysfunctional family.

‘But this time Zena stopped me, put her hand on my arm, and said: “No - we unpack the clothes now. This time we’re not going anywhere.”

THE REST OF THE STORY IS HERE

This is a long story as I’ve noted but suggest again that you read the rest as not all of it is posted.  But I do want to add this.

‘I was expecting them to be angry - but nothing like it was,’ says Jack. ‘I spoke to a brother who said, very coldly, very calmly, that when they found us we would end up in several bin liners.

‘He said: “I am selling my cars, my company, and I am going to hire a bounty hunter - you are dead, you are walking corpses.”’

As you see, there really isn’t talking to these sub human cave ppl from another time.

Posted by peiper     on 07/13/2009 at 03:33 AM   
Filed Under: • Illegal-Aliens and Immigration • RoPMA • Terrorists • UK •  
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