Author: Naomi Lakritz
Publication: Calgary Herald
Date: July 31, 2009
URL: http://www.calgaryherald.com/news/Fear+offending+minorities+keeps+West+shamefully+quiet/1847541/story.html
In June, I got a cellphone and used it on a trip to British Columbia to talk
to a man who's unrelated to me. To think that this might upset my two brothers
who then might start plotting to kill me for it is laughable-- in the safe
confines of western society. Fadia Najjar, who lived in Gaza, got a cellphone
too and it cost her life. Her father, Jawdat, turned himself in to police
last week, the day after Fadia was beaten over the head with an iron chain
and punched and kicked for 40 minutes before dying of a fractured skull. Jawdat
had been furious about his daughter owning a cellphone and believed she had
used it to talk to a man unrelated to the family, according to police reports
obtained by two human rights groups, Mezan and the Palestinian Center for
Human Rights (PCHR), and cited in the Jerusalem Post. Three of her brothers
are suspected of being complicit in her killing.
According to figures released by the United
Nations, Fadia is one of 5,000 women who will die this year in so-called honour
killings. The Jerusalem Post notes she is the 10th woman to lose her life
in 2009 in honour killings in Palestinian areas and in Arab communities within
Israel.
After writing about honour killings on Wednesday,
I received a number of e-mails from people who object to the term and want
to lump these incidents in the category of domestic abuse, to avoid casting
the faintest shadow of aspersion on a non-western culture.
Fadia's death shows this argument up for the
politically correct obfuscation that it is. The sooner honour killings are
acknowledged, the sooner attention can turn to changing male attitudes in
Middle Eastern and other cultures where such horrors take place. Women die
while the West argues in its wishywashy way over semantics. If aspersions
need to be cast, let's cast them and bring this ugly stuff out in the open.
Sorry to dispense with the niceties, all you
western-bred apologists, but Fadia's death cannot be labelled domestic abuse.
Domestic violence involves chronic verbal, emotional and physical abuse inflicted
by a man upon his female partner, or --much as some militant feminists hate
to admit it --by a woman upon her male partner. According to Statistics Canada,
in 2006, 546,000 Canadian men were victims of physical abuse at the hands
of their female partners. The tally of those of both sexes who suffer from
verbal and emotional abuse is unknown, since these forms of insidious violence
leave no outward signs but are just as soul-destroying as physical abuse.
An honour killing is premeditated and men
kill their daughters or sisters because they believe the women have done something
to taint the family's honour. It is the males' prerogative, of course, to
define honour. The something these women have done would, in western society,
be viewed as merely exercising personal autonomy --such as Fadia's purchase
of a cellphone or her choice to talk to a man who's not a relative. Here in
the West, we can't even imagine what it feels like to live like that.
The Jerusalem Post, in a story jointly reported
with Associated Press, quotes Mona Shawa, a member of the PCHR, as saying
sentences for honour killings range from six months to three years. Six months
for first-degree murder? The disparity between that sentence and one of life
in prison with no chance of parole for 25 years that the identical crime would
net an offender in Canada, shows the negligible value placed on women's lives
in cultures where honour killings take place. Yet here in the West, we're
supposed to pussyfoot around the truth because saying that some Muslim men
commit honour killings somehow equates to a scurrilous attack on all Muslims.
Nothing could be further from the truth. Regardless of whose culture it springs
from, when human rights are being so grossly violated and women's lives held
to be of so little value, these things have to be spoken about with candour
if they are ever to be stopped. And it is incumbent upon enlightened, right-thinking
men in those cultures to speak out, to work toward an attitude shift in the
patriarchal mindset of others and to insist that the gravity of this crime
is reflected in the sentences handed the perpetrators.
The problem of honour killings seems to catch
the West off guard, hence the rush to place them under the generic label of
domestic violence. It reflects our uneasy relationship with multiculturalism.
We like to be able to watch the colourful peasant skirts whirling at an ethnic
festival, sample some exotic foods at the various booths and go home secure
in the belief that other cultures are charming and innocuous. We congratulate
ourselves on how tolerant we are, and we expect other cultures to reflect
our tolerance back on us, demonstrating their gratitude for it by behaving
the way we want them to. When they don't, we hasten to cover up for them and
keep the pretence going. Women are dying, but the West is dithering.
