Barbara Kay makes an extremely important point, and one in urgent need of making. She points out in this excellent article below how Multi-culturalists insist on failing to differentiate between the exception and the rule. The exception? When a non Muslim murders a family member. The rule? when a Muslim does it because she (I treat it as given that the victim is female) broke the Islamic laws that require women to act as property and not as people capable of making choices. Choices that their owners, (father, brother or husband) may not like.
Canada’s first and best example perhaps of what Barbara is talking about below, might be the Ecole Polytechnique shooting by one ‘Marc Lepine’, the son of an Algerian Muslim who stated quite clearly that women should not be taught engineering but should be at home looking after men and children.
Canada’s feminists and media used this horrific mass killing as an excuse for misandry and, to the shame of all levels of government, so did they.
This monument, itself a direct and clear violation of Canada’s own hate literature laws was placed in downtown Ottawa to commemorate the Lepine massacre. To this day the vast majority of Canadians do not know that he was in fact Muslim, and his real name was Gamil Rodrigue Gharbi.
Eeyore for Vlad
Posted: July 29, 2009, 8:00 AM by NP Editor
Following news of the arrest last week of Mohammad Shafia, his wife, Tooba Mohammad Yahya, and their 18-year old son, Hamed, for the alleged murder of four female family members, a case exhibiting several earmarks of a culturally motivated crime, I steeled myself for the usual media scramble to deplore all acts of “domestic violence.” I was therefore pleased that Saturday’s Post instead featured plain-spoken anti-Islamist Tarek Fatah’s vigorous denunciation of the practice of “honour killing.”
No doubt ruffling many multi-culti feathers, the fearless Mr. Fatah, a distinguished scholar of Islam and religious hypocrisy’s scourge, categorically stated that “man-made shariah law, which has been falsely imputed divine status, does allow for the killing of women if they indulge in pre-marital or extramarital consensual sex.”
Liberals deliberately conflate domestic violence with honour killing because they feel that making any distinction would “racialize” the crimes, indicting a whole culture. But in order to avoid offending the minority communities in which honour killings occur, they must then “genderize” the practice by force-fitting it into the category of all male-on-female domestic violence.
For theory’s sake — all cultures are equal — they willingly indict an entire sex for these horrific crimes. Clearly liberal ideologues consider misandry a lesser evil than racism (and to many feminists no evil at all, rather an entitlement and a pleasure).
Male-female relations are culturally determined. In reality, for a Western man to kill a girl or woman under his protection for any “reason” at all — let alone her sexual choices — runs so counter to our own chivalric tradition of honour (vestigial as it is), that such rare acts are always linked to psychological derangement. To misrepresent the impulse to murder one’s wife or daughters as a generically male characteristic is a misandric slander, and every bit as contemptible as racism.
Part of the problem lies in the phrase “domestic violence,” which seems to encompass any violence that occurs in a household. And, unfortunately, it is received wisdom in our highly feminized society to believe that domestic violence, like honour killing, is a one-way street: male on female. That’s not the case, but cracking the shell of this unusually hard-boiled myth is a thankless task for truth-tellers in the field.
For greater clarity around domestic violence in Canada, we should use the term Inter Partner Violence (IPV), now favoured by many academics in this field. Normative IPV is violence that springs from psychologically troubled people — both men and women — who have problems dealing with intimate relationships, but have no healthy model for resolving them. Many of them have come from abusive backgrounds. Much of IPV involves alcohol, drugs or both, not the case with honour killing. IPV is usually situational and therefore spontaneous, rarely planned in advance like honour killing. Unlike honour killing, too, which invariably involves males killing females, about 50% of IPV is “assortative” — cases where damaged like seeks like — and the partners bilaterally provoke each other.
Canada’s male-on-female IPV murder numbers — about 45 women partners (not daughters) a year, low for a population of 35 million — are directly linked to an important cultural fact: Murdering women, especially their own loved ones, is anathema to healthy Western men. Unlike honour killings, such crimes are universally condemned: They are never validated, let alone encouraged in our institutions or houses of worship; indeed, all abuse of women is abominated rather than tolerated in the general culture.
We must understand above all that IPV and honour killings represent different stakes for society. IPV is not sociologically catchy: Healthy people do not take their intimate relationship cues from the pathological amongst them. Honour killing, on the other hand, is a form of ideological terrorism linked to a particular religious and cultural outlook, an implied threat to other women of what can happen if they don’t toe the party line and an emboldening “inspiration” to their male cultural peers. Like suicide bombing, another culturally induced form of hysteria, honour killing is a sick practice that can go viral if not nipped in the bud.
Cravenly ascribing the problem of honour killings to all men’s nature, which is what we do when we subsume it under the heading of domestic violence, itself misunderstood, rather than acknowledging the specific cultural matrix from which the phenomenon emerges, will only end in more dead innocent girls and women. That seems a rather high price to pay for our liberal elites’ pleasure in dancing to the vivacious gallopade of the multicultural-correctness polka.
National Post
bk**@vi*******.ca
