Perhaps I am just fed up with political correctness and well meaning people attempting to defend the indefensible. My heart bleeds for people in other countries who are oppressed by this theocracy that treats women and even men as slaves but it is their country and their right to live as they wish there, but it infuriates me when it comes to our shores. I don’t think Americans want to deal with this type of mentality.
I am not being politically correct when I say that dishonor killings pre-date Islam and are un-Islamic. I have been working on this problem for years, taking risks most people aren’t willing to take, and I am wa-a-a-a-ay past the stage where political correctness is going to keep me from saying what I know for sure. But I am not going to bang on Islam where Islam is not really to blame, just because it is popuIar in some quarters. I am for basic, universal human rights, and I have dedicated huge chunks of my life and personal assets to defending them. I have also dedicated huge chunks of my life to trying to educate people about these crimes, because there is so much misinformation out there, and that just isn’t helping anything.
Where it gets murky for a lot of people is that, of the U.N.-estimated 5,000 dishonor killings per annum globally, it is definitely the case that the majority occur in Arab/Muslim countries and in Arab/Muslim immigrant communities elsewhere. This is just an empirical reality. But it has more to do with culture and the tribal mentality than with faith. And it isn’t helped by the fact that, in some of these cultures, there seems to be a prevailing tendency not to speak up about that which is wrong. Maybe it’s because there tends to be no freedom of speech in those countries. . .one can be fined and imprisoned for saying anything against the ruling families or the government, for example. And speaking out against laws that favor perpetrators in these crimes can be perceived by the people in power as criticizing the regime and, thus, penalizable.
As for the laws of the countries where these crimes tend to be concentrated, they tend to be a mixture of tribal law, Shari’a law, and laws taken from the previous occupiers (in the Levant, this would largely be the British, the French, and the Ottomans). They aren’t comprised 100% of Islamic/Shari’a law. . .that is just one component.
I agree with you that most Americans probably don’t want to deal with this mentality. And, personally, I don’t think we should tolerate it in some misguided notion of being open and tolerant. So far, it seems to me, the Canadians and the Europeans have been doing a lot more hand-wringing about the dishonor killings that have occurred on their soil. The killer of Aqsa Parvez in Canada, for example, is being tried for second-degree murder, not first (maybe there are good reasons, but I haven’t heard them). Basic, universal human rights should trump political correctness, and we are a nation that values human life and individual freedoms. We should uphold them in all cases and not let this cancer eat away at us on our land without speaking out against these crimes and seeing that the killers are tried as any others would be.
Dismounting my high horse now.
