SOME AFTERNOONS I THINK THIS SPECIES SHOULD BE EXTINCT

The way in which the story – and much more important, the hideous live cell phone footage -- of the death of 17-year-old Du’a Khalil Aswad has been orbiting the periphery of the mainstream media for days now greatly disturbs me. The teenager was stoned and kicked to death by a crowd of close to a thousand men because her family were from a minority Kurdish religious group called the Yezidi, and she was seeing a Sunni Muslim boy. Local security forces seemingly looked on, and the so-called "honour killing" was recorded by dozens of cell phones – modern technology for the 10th century – and are now circulating the internet like fucking snuff movies for the amusement of the mentally hideous. The dilemma is what does one do? Anyone with half a brain and an internet connection can find the footage in approximately 18 seconds. Maybe I should just keep quiet, but the images are in my mind and will not go away, and maybe silence really does equal death. I guess that’s one of the reasons I’m a fucking writer. So I can chronicle the multitude of ways men can find to shame and disgust me.