Multan, Pakistan – Nazir Ahmed appears calm and unrepentant as he recounts how he slit the throats of his three young daughters and their 25-year-old stepsister to salvage his family’s ‘honor’…
Alas for Mr. Ahmed’s daughters, that’s all a long way away for Susan Sarandon, Gloria Steinem and the other sisters whose contribution to the liberation of Afghanistan was to oppose it. But the “honour killings” are getting closer. In London last summer, the police announced they were re-opening investigations into 120 deaths among British Muslim girls that they’d hitherto declined to look at too closely on grounds of “cultural sensitivity”. There’s a small flurry – enough almost to form a new category for the Governor-General’s Awards – in books itemizing the violence to women, gay men and other approved groups in the new EUtopia: Claire Berlinski’s Menace In Europe and Bruce Bawer’s While Europe Slept are a staggering accumulation of riveting vignettes, like the non-Muslim girls in les banlieues of France opting to wear veils and other Islamic coverings to lessen the likelihood of being abused and assaulted in the streets.
Which issue will impact more women’s lives? The lack of female pipefitters? Or the combination of factors at play in those French – and Belgian, and Scandinavian, and maybe even Canadian – suburbs? Yet western feminists sing the ancient songs of long-won revolutions as relentlessly as drunks on St Patrick’s Day: “Have fewer children, later in life,” advises Joan Peters. That’s the strategy that demographically’s delivering western Europe into the hands of a culture far more patriarchal than a 1950s sitcom dad.
“Keep your Bush off my bush!” chanted the ladies on Washington’s Mall a year ago at the Million-Abortionist March or whatever it was called. If any of those women still exercise their “reproductive rights”, they might want to ponder the likelihood of any girl born today being able to prance around demonstrations in the Eurabian Paris or Brussels of 2030 or 2040 yelling “Hands off my bush!” C’mon, gals! Anyone can beat up post-feminist neutered western males. Why not pick on a target worth the effort?
According to Khurrum Awan, Muneeza Skeikh, Naseem Mithoowani, Ali Ahmed and Daniel Simard, the authors of Maclean’s Magazine: A Case Study Of Media-Propagated Islamophobia, the above is “Islamophobic” because of the following assertions:
1. Muslims believe that Men are better than Women
2. Muslims believe that honour killing of women is acceptable.
3. Many European Muslims are now engaging in honour killings.
4. Non-Muslim girls and women are forced to wear veils and other “Islamic coverings” in France to save themselves from being abused and assaulted in the streets by Muslims.
5. The growing Muslim populations in France, Belgium, and Scandinavia have resulted in a severe threat to women’s rights. In particular there is a growing chance of women being killed in the name of honour or of them being assaulted / abused.
6. Feminists and feminism are “delivering” Western Europe into the hands of the Muslims and their culture.
7. As a result of the growing Muslim population in the West, women will be unable to participate in protests by the year 2030.
8. By 2030 Europe will have become “Eurabia”.
9. Feminists need to be “picking” on Muslims and their culture as opposed to “picking” on “postfeminist neutered Western males”.
THE ISLAMOPHOBE RESPONDS:
Apropos point #5, the relationship between Islam and “women’s rights” is certainly a topic worthy of exploration, even if distressingly few western feminists seem attracted to it.
Let’s start with the basic premise that developed societies are now absurdly deferential toward Islam. We heard a lot in the wake of 9/11 about various headscarved women and bearded men being pulled out of the airport security line: They were guilty of nothing other than “Flying While Muslim”. Okay, but how about being pulled over for DWP – Driving While Polygamous? That’s what happened to Mohammed Anwar, who was stopped by Glasgow police for doing 64mph in a 30mph zone. In normal circumstances, that would be enough for automatic disqualification from driving. But at Airdrie Sheriff Court Mr Anwar explained that he needed his car because he has one wife in Motherwell and another in Glasgow and sleeps with them on alternate nights. Sheriff John C Morris ruled he could keep his license. Make it one for my baby, one for my other baby, and one more for the road.
Is a de facto acceptance of polygamy in the interests of women? Clash-of-civilizations types often say that Islam wants to return us to the 7th century, etc, but in fact Muslim networks are very effective at picking and choosing which bits of the modern world suit its purposes. Take arranged marriages. No need to schlep all the way back to upcountry Pakistani villages to pick up your child bride any more, when the marriage ceremony is just a phone call away. From The Toronto Sun:
Long-distance telephone marriages can be dialled up under sharia law and then used to sponsor loved ones into Canada, Muslim leaders say.
Two Muslim leaders have told The Toronto Sun telephone marriages are permissible under Islamic law and require two witnesses and imams here and abroad to conduct the vows, which may have the bride in Pakistan and the groom in Toronto…
The vow takes less than five minutes and a dowry is exchanged to seal the ceremony, Ali said.
Dial 1-800-1st-COUSIN and leave off the “IN” for Inshallah.
There are now forced cousin marriages in Muslim communities throughout the developed world: In 80 per cent of New York Pakistani families, the parents determine whom and when you marry; the rate of cousin marriage among British Pakistanis (57 per cent) and the recognition by Canadian immigration authorities of arranged marriages performed over the telephone are noted elsewhere in this book. There are “FGM resource coordinators” – as in “Female genital mutilation” – in Australian hospitals. In the Netherlands, Muslims account for the vast majority of those taken in to battered women’s shelters. Yet western feminists are increasingly at ease with a two-tier sisterhood, in which upscale liberal women twitter about the lack of female pipe-fitters while the women of the fastest growing population group in the western world are forced into clitoridectomies, forced into burqas, forced into marriage, forced into psychiatric wards, forced into hiding – and, if all else fails, forced off the apartment balcony by their brothers and fathers to fall to their deaths, as has happened to a startling number of young Muslim girls in Sweden.
The state isn’t much help in such cases. A Muslim advisor to the British Home Office recommended to Baroness Scotland that she scuttled planned legislation against honour killing on the grounds that that these culturally sensitive issues would be better handled informally. Two things strike the casual observer:
Western nations now need laws against honour killing
…but they’re too controversial to pass.
The girls can go to the authorities, but there are now many stories of young women under police protection having the addresses of their safe houses leaked to their parents by Muslim officers. Many simply disappear. According to Yasmin Whittaker-Khan, every year 3,000 British schoolgirls vanish: “One day they are in their classroom, the next they are gone” – abducted by their parents and shipped to an arranged spouse somewhere else. According to a report by Kevin Brennan, the minister for child safety, in the heavily Muslim city of Bradford and in 14 similar communities hundreds of girls have simply dropped off the school register, and it’s not clear whether the police even investigate. As Ms Whittaker-Khan says, “The police and teachers are often reluctant to intervene for fear of being seen as racist.”