Aishwarya Rai

Long awaiting a break through role to take her from Bollywood fame to Hollywood, stunning Aishwarya Rai is starring in a film “Provoked” that illuminates the cultural divide between the East and West, where the accepted practice of honor killings and wife beatings are the sharpest contrast between the societies.

The new British drama “Provoked” is based on the true story of Kiranjit Ahluwalia, an Indian woman who set fire to her rotten to the core husband as he lay drunk in their bed. He died six days later and she was found guilty of murder. It took a massive campaign by a woman’s rights group to get her out of prison.

Initial reviews say the film does not go far enough, and softballs the issue.

This film depicts a real case from the early 1990s, which changed the way the British legal system viewed the battered-woman’s syndrome.

Now the current news of the stoning death “honor killing” of a 17 year-old girl in the streets near Mosul is even more telling of the cultural and social divide between the Middle East and Western values and society, especially in the arena of women’s rights.

The appearance on the Internet and on CNN this week of a video showing the stoning to death of a teenage Kurdish girl in Iraq underscores the vast divide between “us and them.”

London’s Daily Mail previously reported that religous leaders and male family members of Du’a Khalil Aswad condemned the 17-year-old girl to death by stoning because of her relationship with a Sunni Muslim boy.

Aswad’s family belongs to Yezidi, a Kurdish religious group in Iraq. The religious leaders and family members claimed she dishonored the family by failing to return home one night.

On April 7th, men dragged the girl into the street and stoned her for half an hour until she died, as a large crowd stood around and watched in the predominately Kurdish town.