The Multiculturalist Explains

[Paul Gross]

This is a clip from the long wire service piece, this morning, about the latest "honor" murder of a young woman, this time in Georgia (U.S.A.):
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'...SNIP..."Honor killings" -- the slaying by family members [fathers or brothers!] of a woman or girl thought to be bringing them shame -- are usually kept quiet, making it difficult to determine how frequently they occur. The United Nations Population Fund estimated in September 2000 that as many as 5,000 women and girls fall victim to such killings each year.

"My immediate reaction was that this is an anomaly in the South Asian community," Ajay Nair, associate dean of multicultural affairs at Columbia University, told CNN on Tuesday. "Most South Asian-American families enjoy wonderful relationships within their families."

"I think there's ways that we can rationalize it and make sense of it, particularly in thinking about new immigrant communities in the U.S. and thinking about some of the struggles that they face and the generation gap and the cultural differences that children do face," he said. "I think there are some issues there, but by and large, this isn't a rampant problem within South Asian communities. What is a problem, I think, is domestic violence, and that cuts across all communities."'
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1. 5,000 is an "anomaly?" Not a "rampant" problem? Struggling immigrants?
2. All who know about this ancient and honorable practice within Islam say that the number is much, much larger than 5,000. The current estimate of Scotland Yard for the UK alone is several hundred.
3. The Columbia Dean -- another of those Colulmbia sages of multiculturalism -- explains: It's an immigrant problem, friends. The fault is something about conditions in the USA, etc....
4. But how can that be when the practice of honor killing is far more common in the home country (in the current case, Pakistan)?
5. Never mind. We have to be culturally sensitive and not say a certain unkind word when one of our politically correct multiculturalists "explains" things.
6. In other words, it's just nice old domestic violence. You do it too. In logic, this kind of "explanation" is among the most ancient of fallacies: "tu quoque" ("It's nothing, sport, you do it too.")

["Garry*Wheeler"]

I have never professed as to being a learned multiculturalist, so I may be way off base here:
1) We (second or third-generation Americans) can't even begin to appreciate all of the adult pressures on immigrant families to assimilate into any country's society.
2) My personal view is that these "honor" killings of young people are more mercy killings and almost like a suicide, only perpetrated by a parent or someone in the community.
and
3) I offer some trivia: Back in the '40s and '50s, Saline County Nebraska (a sparsely populated county settled by German & Czech immigrants in south-eastern NE) had the distinction of being second to Cook County (includes Chicago) in the national rate of suicides by hanging. In my opinion, American society deemed many immigrant farmers failures when they lost their farms and they and their families suffered as a result.

[Paul Gross]

[Michael Ellis]

There is, perhaps, a greater probability of women stepping outside these cultural codes when in western countries because they meet other young people who are less constrained by their own ethnic cultures.

When I was in my early working years, I had a Pakistani colleague who told me that he was from an area where the women covered everything but their eyes. He said it was terribly erotic seeing parts of women's bodies he had never seen before, and would only expect to see if they were going to have sexual intercourse. It took him a long time to settle.

This in no way excuses the practice.

[Paul Gross]

[Lyell Rodieck]

[Michael Ellis]

Paul, I had no intention of excusing the killing anywhere, my "This in no way excuses the practice" comment was intended to be general.

I'm not sure how to takes your "Yes, I know: one man's evil is another man's good; or such is the argument if you are a modern, Western, university-style, cultural relativist." comment. When it comes to insurgents fighting an occupying army, in their own country, with the weapons to hand, whether they be "terroristic" or not, I am relatavistic. Is not possible to follow logic and conclude that it is good if we approve and evil if we don't.

I was interested in finding out if the practice of "honor killing" has a religious or cultural base, so I did some searching and found some interesting results.


First: Shahrzad Mojab, she is a prominent Iranian Kurdish scholar and researcher and her paper is mainly about the Kurds. It goes in a couple of surprising directions though. “Honor Killing”:Culture, Politics and Theory

Second: Anver Emon, examines the law in various places, and possible ways to correct the situation. Anver Emon on Honour Killings

There was a reference to the "Code of the Hammerabi", and I since I was interested in the history of the practice, I found this translation,
Code of the Hammerabi I didn't find anything exactly matching, but it is certainly male centered.

I will be interested in any reactions, I don't want to quote the parts that I found most interesting, I don't want to build resistance before anyone reads these pieces.

["Garry*Wheeler"]

[Paul Gross]

[Michael Ellis]

Paul, we really do have a communication problem. I understood your opening post completely, and agreed with it, completely, I simply added the comment that when such a family group is living in a western country, the children are exposed to different cultures and the freedoms that those cultural groups enjoy, exposures that they would not experience in their original home.

My thought was that with the temptation to enjoy these freedoms, the incidence of "transgression" might well be higher, with a concomitant higher incidence of "honor killing".

I have seen the practice labeled variously as Islamist and as cultural, so I went looking to see if it predated Mohamed. I found two academics, with eastern ethnicity and western qualifications, who disagree with your Columbia man. I thought others might be interested in seeing where "honor killing" is legal, or in Shahrzad Mojab's piece that "One may argue that the culture of honor killing is traditional, tribal, feudal or rural. But what is the significance of this traditionalism if we consider the fact that in the United States men kill 10 women every day? While these murders are not necessarily motivated by “honor,” the motivations are hardly more humane: the decision of a woman to end a relationship prompts the male partner to kill her. Seventy-four percent of these killings “occur after the woman has left the relationship, filed for divorce or sought a restraining order against her partner” (Seager 1997: 26). In Sweden, according to 1989 data, 39 women were battered daily and one was killed every 10 days by a man known to her (Elman and Eduards 1991: 411)."

Just so you know, I am against killing except in self-defense. I am against the death penalty because it says that there is a time when deliberately causing death of another is justified. Once that justification exists, it can be stretched and rationalized to justify non-judicial killing.

Paul, I'll ignore your last paragraph, I don't understand how you got to that point. I merely went looking for information, certainly not to justify your Columbia man,

[Paul Gross]

[Larry Burns]

Come on, you guys! Let's get a little serious around here. How about J. Lo's new Bikini body, only four and a half months after giving birth? Or whether Bernie Mack hurt Obama's campaign with his off-color jokes about sex?

[Paul Gross]

[Michael Ellis]

Sorry guys, one more serious one.

[Paul Gross]