Noor Faleh Almaleki died Monday of injuries suffered when she was run over October 20 in a parking lot in the Phoenix suburb of Peoria, Arizona, police there said. Authorities said they expect to change the aggravated assault charge against her father, Faleh Hassan Almaleki, 48, to more severe counts after meetings with prosecutors, Peoria police announced.
Peoria police said Faleh Hassan Almaleki believed his daughter had become “too Westernized” and had abandoned “traditional” Iraqi values. Peoria police spokesman Mike Tellef told CNN the family moved to the Phoenix area in the mid-1990s, and Almaleki was unhappy with his daughter’s style of dress and her resistance to his rules.
After the incident, Almaleki’s father drove to Mexico, abandoning his vehicle in Nogales, Peoria police said. He then made his way to Mexico City and boarded a plane to Britain, where authorities denied him entry into the country and put him on a plane back to the United States, police said.

Well, if her father’s idea of “‘traditional’ Iraqi values” justifies things like running over his own fucking daughter with a car, who could blame her for abandoning it?

h/t: CNN

Grant Brissey covered everything from hard news and technology, to music, film, and visual arts during his time working for The Stranger. Grant's work has also appeared at Geekwire, and in Billboard,...

16 replies on “This Week in Traditional Values”

  2. I’m always confused by people who cling very tightly to the traditional values and behavior rules of a culture, yet move away from that culture into one with very different values and rules. If they find that culture so damned important, why did they leave it in the first place?

  3. @2 That was what I was thinking. If you move to a new country to “make life better for your kids”, then you have to expect your kids to reflect that better society.

  4. @2:

    Unfortunately far too many people are completely ignorant of the new culture into which they’re entering, or have had their perceptions of that culture skewed by wildly biased and imbalanced depictions of it. And of course many immigrants assume, with varying degrees of correctness, that they will be able to successfully resist the overwhelming pressure to assimilate; while at the same time completely overlooking the probability that some members of their family may actually be eager to embrace the changes offered by the new culture.

    This sad example would seem to be a case in point.

  5. Conversely, it’s a bit disingenuous when defenders of this or that traditional culture demand that their daughters be permitted to freely “choose” the second-class citizen status that their culture imposes on them, given that said “choice” is so often being made under the sort of familial duress on display in this story.

    Knowing that somebody is living under the threat of violent reprisals makes it hard to accept their choice to adopt their culture’s rules and mores wholesale at face value.

  8. @2 Because countries that have cultures like that are shit holes. That kind of nonsense makes having a vibrant successful economy very difficult. So they come here for all the nice shit we have then get pissy with the so called decadence.

  10. @7: I think that’s what “Authorities said they expect to change the aggravated assault charge… to more severe counts” means. She wasn’t dead at the time he was initially charged.

  11. @5- It is a tricky business. There are people who freely and happily choose to live by restrictive codes of conduct, and we have no business stopping them. But like you said, there are a lot of people (mostly and especially women) who live in fear of their strongly religious parents. I don’t actually think a free society can solve the problem. We can only try to mitigate it.

  15. @ 2, 4, and others, I’ll let you chew on this for a while… If you moved to some small town (I know you won’t, but try to pretend for a moment), do you think you’d “assimilate” into the local culture? You know, go to church, decry homosexuality, maybe become racist?

    Obviously it’s far beyond the pale to go into a murderous rage, and I’m starting to think that some sectors of Iraqi culture are so fucked that I could easily go on a machine gun rampage and call it justice for humanity. But… if you’re expecting people coming from other cultures to drop everything they learned about morals and whatnot, you’d do well to consider if you could do it if you had to relocate to a different culture.

  16. Silly Iraqis, don’t they know that Christian scientists are the only religious whackos allowed to kill their children in this country?

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