"The New Inquisition," The Nation: http://www.thenation.com/article/new-inquisition?page=full
An excerpt:
Caldwell also suggests that Muslims are far more likely to commit violence against women. Under the heading "Virginity and violence," he writes that "there were forty-five [honor killings] in Germany alone in the first half of the decade." Since the argument here is that Muslims are more inclined to commit homicides against women in the context of "some trespass against sexual propriety," it would have been helpful if Caldwell had included, for the sake of contrast, the number of ethnic German women killed in incidents of domestic violence, as well as numbers for an entirely distinct and recent immigrant group, such as Eastern Europeans. Without such empirical comparisons, it is difficult to see how he can reach the conclusion he does, which is that "such acts make law. They assert sovereignty over a certain part of European territory for a different sexual regime." The label "honor killing" makes violence against women and girls sound like an exotic import rather than the pernicious and all-too-frequent reality that it is. Caldwell doesn't mention that domestic violence has been treated as a criminal problem in Europe thanks to the work of European feminists in the 1960s and '70s, and that now European Muslim feminists are working to create a similar zero-tolerance level about honor killings. Encouragingly, a recent Gallup study found that Muslims in Paris, Berlin and London disapproved of honor killings and crimes of passion about as much as the general French, German and British populations.
And this is Noah Feldman's piece on shariah. I don't know anything about this subject. Take it for what it's worth: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/16/magazine/16Shariah-t.html
Oh come on. That's friggen absurd. It's asinine to suggest that there's nothing to distinguish the practice of honor killings from domestic violence against women that results in death.
ReplyDeleteBoth are horrendous, but honor killings are premeditated, "rationally calculated" acts based off of a perverse and evil system of justice (and often coordinated among several individuals).
Domestic violence generally comes in a huge array of forms, situations, and impetuses (none of them excusable). This includes those instances that result in murder.
It's insulting to one's intelligence to imply that they're no different. They're as different as a carefully planned violent bank-robbery and a violent street mugging.
Which is why they would be charged differently in a court of law (premeditation being an obvious factor, but not the only one).
I mean jesus...if we can't even agree that there is something distinguishable about the most extreme example of Islamist practice (Islamist not being the same thing as Islamic, btw), then what's the point of our even discussing this stuff?