Monday, August 11, 2008
Jeff gets into the rub at the end here, I think. 'Honor Killing' is about more than just Islam, it's intertwined with the tribal cultures that dominate the Middle East, and from which it can be very difficult to separate out the religious sanction. It points up one of the many weaknesses of uncontrolled immigration and the dangers of the fear of criticizing other cultures for fear of being labeled a bigot. People bring their cultures with them.
'Honor' killing comes to the US
NO ONE knows just how many Muslim girls and women are murdered each year in the name of family "honor," since their deaths frequently go unreported and unpunished. The cases that do come to light are ghastly. "Women and young girls are set ablaze, strangled, shot at, clubbed, stabbed, tortured, axed, or stoned to death," a United Nations report noted in 2004. "Their bodies are found mutilated with their throat slit, or they are chopped into pieces and thrown in a ditch."
The report singled out as especially horrifying the honor killing in Pakistan of "a 16-year-old girl who was reportedly electrocuted to death after being drugged with sleeping pills and being tied to a wooden bed with iron chains." Her offense: marrying a boy from the wrong community. Countless others have lost their lives for refusing an arranged marriage, wearing Western-style clothing, having a boyfriend, or even being raped...
In the recommendation to admit indiscriminately foreign emigrants of every description to the privileges of American citizens, on their first entrance into our country, there is an attempt to break down every pale which has been erected for the preservation of a national spirit and a national character; and to let in the most powerful means of perverting and corrupting both the one and the other.
[From Hamilton, “The Examination,” nos. 7-9 (1802),