A young woman in Pakistan married a man her family didn't approve of.  She stayed away from her family because she had the silly fear her family might try to harm her.  What was there to fear?  Silly girl!

Before long, representatives of her family came to assure her she was in no danger.  In fact, she was told her mother even wanted to throw her a wedding reception!  Well, here's how the wedding reception went:

Zeenat Rafiq had been married to her husband for just one week[.] ... Her mother, Perveen Bibi, had never approved of her relationship with Hassan Khan, a classmate. But now, all was forgiven, her mother told her. Come home to celebrate so you're not branded as an eloper.

Rafiq's mother and an uncle arrived with something of an olive branch: if you let Rafiq return home, they said, we'll arrange a formal wedding reception[.] ... It took some coaxing, but a male relative guaranteed Rafiq's safety[.] ...

Rafiq nervously agreed.

But there was no celebration on her return to the family's home in Lahore, Pakistan. Instead, her mother and brother beat and strangled her, then tied her to a cot, doused her in kerosene and lit her on fire, according to reports at the time.

After the attack, Bibi ran outside and yelled, "I have killed my daughter for misbehaving and giving our family a bad name," the mother's sister told Agence France-Presse at the time.

Such "honor killings" are commonplace in Pakistan, where roughly 1,000 women are slain every year by relatives, most of them men, who believe they have disgraced their families. 

The article goes on to quickly add that a few Pakistani clerics issued a fatwa against honor killings, but the fact is that honor killings are closely bound to Muslim culture, and not just in Pakistan.

This is not civilized human behavior.  If anything, it is more reminiscent of Star Trek's Klingons than human behavior, with the former's obsession with "honor" as well as killing.  Was Gene Roddenberry ahead of his time?

Ed Straker is the senior writer at NewsMachete.com.