Paracelsus
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RE: Islam and women
This thread will (probably) not end well.
That said: let's talk about honour killings first as a subset of this debate, because a lot of what's said on the subject is a load of shit.
According to the main advocacy website on the subject, there's about 5,000 per year, worldwide, 1,000 each for India and Pakistan.
However, if you go by A Voice For Men's research, it would appear that at least in Iran, vastly more men are subjected to honour killings than women. The reason the numbers are skewed is because the bodies that collect the data -- UN and feminist organisations -- vastly downplay or outright do not count the male victims, using a variety of tactics not limited to calling male victims of honour killings simply "husband murder victims" or similar. Part of it also includes translation issues, as the AVfM article points out.
Honour killings, based on those numbers, are retarded controls on men and women alike, not controls on women.
But then honour killings are not actually about honour at all - not the way the West understands it. Even that IHBA site has some trouble actually defining what an honour killing is or what its defining characteristics are. There is, however, a site that does identify what's at hand in an honour killing.
Quote:First Law of Media: offer the reader the opportunity to debate the conclusions, but force him to accept the form of the argument.
You get to argue about whether Islam allows honor killings: "religion of peace!" "No, religion of hatred!" or whether this is generalizable to all Muslims, as long as you accept their premise that she did something that deeply offended her father and Islam. Put it in the article with an apologetic cop-out:
"Although honor crimes aren't officially sanctioned by Islam, they're associated with predominantly Muslim countries"
They're not associated with Muslim countries, that's what they're called when they are associated with Muslim countries. When they're associated with rich black guys, they're called OJ Simpson.
...
V.
If you need cognitive anchor for interpreting this article, here it is: people routinely scrutinize every word of a New York or Washington Times article for bias, yet an article in Marie Claire is taken to be the whole story.
VI.
The moment you say, "wait a second, this is for Marie Claire readers?" you start to see the sentences differently. They are phrased in such matter of fact, Marie Claire simplicity that you miss that they are asinine. You buy into them immediately.
"The final blowup came that summer. In June 2009, longtime family friend Amal Khalaf awoke to find Noor sleeping in the family's van, parked in the driveway. Noor said her parents had hit her; Amal, a mother of four, took her in. To Noor's family, this was the ultimate indignity: Their daughter had chosen to live with another Iraqi family instead of her own."
Why would living with another Iraqi family be the ultimate indignity? I'm not even clear why it would be an indignity at all, but the ultimate? Worse than moving in with a Jewish boyfriend? But on passive reading "living with a different Iraqi family" somehow makes sense and you stop there. You don't think to ask if there was not something else that was enraging about it, you go along with the Marie Claire, "she offended her father and his values of Islam" theory. And there was something else but the article barely mentions it, let alone explores the intricacies of it. 6 pages, 5000 words long, and this is all they say:
"It's unclear whether a wedding actually took place. Some friends say she only attended an engagement ceremony; others tell me they believe she did get married, albeit against her will. Still others say Noor was given a choice of five brothers, but her parents didn't like the one she chose, so the wedding was called off. Noor's parents, in police documents, maintain that a marriage did, in fact, occur. Whatever the case, Noor returned to Arizona a few months later without a husband, and moved back in with her family. She missed her younger siblings, friends say, and her parents needed help caring for them."
Why didn't he kill her when she when she first started talking to boys? Why didn't he kill her when she started wearing American clothes at age 4?
The answer is: they lived in America for 16 years, where that behavior doesn't shame him. He may not like it, but there is no one who would look down on him here. Shame is exposure, and as long as all these behaviors stay in Phoenix, no one knows what "s/he's" done.
It all fell apart because he sent her to Iraq. When he committed to the all-in, hail mary plan of sending his daughter to Iraq to get married, where she either rejected five men as unsuitable(!) or worse, got married to one of them and then went on cavorting with men in the U.S. (!!!!)...
... never mind what Allah thinks, now everyone in Iraq knows what kind of a man he is.
VII.
The article doesn't mention any such communications; it barely references the marriage. The article wants it to be about a woman finding herself, and struggling to separate from her father. In other words, it's a domestic abuse story that they package as a honor killing story.
If you are an immigrant or of immigrant parents then you'll know: that man was in daily communication with people in Iraq thanks to the stupid internet and mobiles. He was better connected to some Iraqi 3rd uncle than he was to his next door neighbor. And, especially after his daughter returned, those communications were torture. Explaining what went wrong with his daughter, why she wasn't being honorable, why he couldn't control her, how it was his wife's fault, his sons' faults-- in short, constantly on the defensive about how he couldn't keep his house in order, constantly subject to the criticisms and patronizing responses of an extended family that is so much a part of his identity and so little a part of hers.
Not only was he ashamed, but worse, she was not ashamed at all. She didn't even care what they thought! How could this animal not understand that how relatives In Iraq she never met viewed her was far more important than any internal sense of self-worth?
And more practically, how do you explain to her "husband" and his family, back in Iraq, that his daughter is an adulteress?
That's got to be frustrating.
IX.
Go back to the asinine statement of living with another Iraqi family being the ultimate indignity. In fact, that statement was dead on though I doubt intentionally so. If she had moved in with a Jewish boyfriend he would have been horrified and enraged, but moving in with the Iraqi Muslim family was immediately worse because-- and this is the entire point-- now everyone in Iraq is going to know. And since those people are his whole identity, he's screwed.
This is why discussions about honor killings get mired in a nonsensical theory debate about whether Islam promotes this. Even if it did, the part that requires the violence isn't some internal sense of right and wrong or "against Islam", but exposure to other human beings who will look down on them.
He doesn't care that she's Americanized or even an adulteress. He cares that people are laughing at him.
This is narcissism, and here I do not hesitate to spell it out explicitly. The obvious is that he sees her only as an extension of himself, only as she impacts his own existence and not as an independent entity. He's not better than her, she's just not a fully formed character, she's an extra. But the more telling and scary part of the narcissism is that he thinks that by killing her, he has not merely stopped her but fixed things, erased his shame, as if it never happened. As if the people back in Iraq aren't still snickering, as if human nature and reality are subservient to the magical thinking of a man who believes a Jeep can alter what God already saw.
X.
Two constants in stories about honor killings. First, some ridiculous multicultural idiocy that honor is extremely important in such societies. The word is incorrectly used, because it means different things to West and East. Honor in a western sense something earned (even by dynasty), like a hero might have. It is internal, and while honor can be tarnished it had to be acquired first. No one would say that the Chrysler mechanic downtown is honorable, you'd just say he's a good guy, etc. But the word "honor" as it applies in "honor killings" denotes an absence of shame. Honor in that sense is a baseline, under constant threat of exposure and entirely at the discretion of everyone else.
Partly this is a function of education, partly of culture, partly of religion, but inevitably the result of shaky identity that draws its strength in the way other people see them.
The second constant is the shocked surprise that the mother or brothers helped the man get away with it (or commit it.) Why would that be surprising? If his family didn't understand, if his family would be shocked and horrified and appalled at what kind of a man would murder his own daughter, then he wouldn't be doing it. Again, he's not doing it out of internal sense of justice, he's doing it to alter how he is viewed by others around him.
If you needed (unintentional, and therefore hilarious) support for this analysis, try the FAQ from the IHBA website above, as in, their own definitions of what constitutes an honour killing:
Quote:What is Honour-Based Violence?
Honour-based violence is a phenomenon where a person (most often a woman) is subjected to violence by her collective family or community in order to restore ‘honour’, presumed to have been lost by her behaviour, most often through expressions of sexual autonomy.
What is an honour killing?
An ‘honour’ killing is the most extreme form of HBV where the supposed offender against family ‘honour’ is killed to restore the ‘honour’ which has supposedly been lost through her behaviour. An ‘honour’ killing is the most extreme form of violence which may be expressed as a final resort; however there are other lesser responses, such as forcing marriage or other forms of violence which may also be expressed.
Expressions of personal autonomy, particularly where this is in the realm of relationships and sexuality, are the usual triggers for ‘honour’-related abuse. Those cultures in which ‘honour’ crimes occur are considered ‘high-context’ where the family predominates over the individual, and therefore any individualistic choice which challenges the collective identity and aims of the family may be considered selfish and a violation of that family’s honour.
Potential sites of conflict between the individual and the family may include:
Choice of sexual/marital partner
Education and employment
Dress
Behaviour and contact with the opposite sex
Sexuality
General conformity to the family and community’s culture and expectations.
We have seen on this site that Islamic cultures are particularly prey to narcissism because an individual in that culture is completely focused on what other people think of them. CIA assessments dating back to the nineties bear this out. Islam, being a religion of fourteen hundred years' vintage unblemished by progress, has any number of triggers or justifications which make it easier to link an honour killing to religion, but that's misidentifying the source: the culture and the narcissism that is its product.
Per this old quote from an old thread right here:
Quote:A similar surrogate within the individual is the outside mask or face to which the self or ego is transferred by the Arab, along with all his pride and self-esteem. This face presented to society at large then assumes more importance than his real self. The finding of defects or faults in it constitutes an attack on his very being, for there is no alternative surrogate to which the ego can be transferred. Hence the Arab whose integrity or face is challenged and in danger of being found imperfect is in quite a delicate position. He has to go to extremes to keep his social mask intact, thus taking actions completely contrary to the Western ethic and bewildering to the Westerner.
The constant effort to keep up face seems almost paranoiac by Western standards.
In short: honour killings are not societal controls, and they are not sexual controls on your women. They are one and all manifestations of narcissism by the person who carries them out, evidencing that you see your wife/daughter/(offending concavity owner here) an extension of yourself or an extension of your will. That is probably the most anti-libertarian concept I can think of, and it is not a Western concept. This is something entirely different from telling daughters not to ride the cock carousel.
And it's not Western patriarchy, either: Western patriarchs do not regard their daughters as extensions of themselves, Western men are not worried about saving face 24-7, Western men are content in themselves and their own masculinity that they don't prioritise the rest of the family snorting in amusement because their daughter's run off with a [Insert Objectionable Race/Job/Religion/Social Class Here]. That is one of the better fruits that individualism and Christianity gave us; Islam requires external transformation, i.e. change that is only visible to others, i.e.e. the foundation of shame and narcissism -- Christianity requires an internal transformation.
On the other hand, given the West is turning into a shame-based paradise thanks to Gen Y and millennials being addicted to social validation like never before, I'd actually suggest the frequency of honour killings -- really, narcissism killings -- is going to rise. In Arabic cultures, it's the poor opinion of the family that prompts the murder. In the West, it's the poor opinion of your fans on Facebook.
Remissas, discite, vivet.
God save us from people who mean well. -storm
(This post was last modified: 01-19-2017 12:41 AM by Paracelsus.)
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