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May 18, 2005

"honor" killings - 1

The suicide rate among Asian women in Britain is four times that of the indigenous population and other immigrant groups. Being so tightly controlled and abused, suicide is often perceived as the only escape. Rosie Cowan, The Guardian's crime correspondent, writes, "While killings [are] more often carried out by men, women were sometimes involved. In some cases mothers and grandmothers handed a daughter over to her murderers." She quotes Commander Andy Baker, head of Scotland Yard's homicide squad, as saying, "Those who come to police are, without question, the tip of the iceberg." London police have been advised by a behavioral psychologist to listen carefully to any young girl or woman who gets up the nerve to walk into a police station, and not to inform the families and not to try to mediate.

The fingers of "honor" killings snake through the EU, with its great masses of unassimilated Muslims living in self-imposed ghettoes and seething with contempt for their host societies. In Holland, 60 percent of women in women's shelters are Muslim. In Berlin, there is a safehouse for young Turkish women to hide to escape family violence. In the vast social housing estates of Paris and other northern cities in France, violence, including rape, is perpetrated for such minor infractions as running out to the grocery store without wearing a headscarf. In Sweden, a female Muslim campaigner against "honor" killings was herself shot dead by her father for having a relationship with a Swedish man.

Kathleen Knox, for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, writes that in Prague, a 14-year-old Turkish girl was on her way to the supermarket when she was kidnapped and raped. When she was rescued, her father allegedly murdered her and buried her in a forest. The 14-year-old had "stained the family honor" by being overpowered by an adult male and raped.

The United Nations estimates that at least 5,000 women and girls worldwide are murdered every year by way of cleansing some primitive sense of family honor, many of them, like the girl above, having "dishonored" the family by having the temerity to be rape victims.

"Honor Thy Father -- Or Else," by Val MacQueen, Tech Central Station, February 2, 2005

Posted at May 18, 2005 05:57 PM | Categories: Nihilism

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