Inexcusable by any standard

David Aaronovitch condemns "honour killing" in the Muslim world - and those in the West who would excuse it in the name of cultural relativism:

Sure enough, until very recently women (and men) were being stoned to death in Iran for adultery. In July 2001, according to the Financial Times, a Maryam Ayoubi was executed at Tehran's Evin prison at dawn. Iranian newspapers carried an account of her being ritually washed, wrapped in a white shroud and then carried to the place of execution on a stretcher where she was buried up to her armpits. There were many such stonings during the Nineties.

In 2003 an aide to the governor of the Iranian province of Khuzestan told the press that his office had received reports of the murder of 45 young women in a two-month period in honour killings. None of these crimes were prosecuted. Honour killings are rife in Pakistan, and there are a large number in Iraqi Kurdistan. In Jordan the sentence for carrying out an honour killing is set at six months. In the first part of this year more than a dozen Jordanian women were killed by their relations for having 'sullied the reputation of their family'.

And just so that we have an idea of what we may be talking about here, a fortnight ago there was a report from Istanbul about the trial of the father and brothers of a 14-year-old girl. This child had been raped and imprisoned by another man. The men of the family, from eastern Turkey, held a council and decided their honour could only be salvaged if the girl was killed. She was strangled by her father with a piece of electrical flex. He told police: 'She begged as I was strangling her ... but I did not take notice of her cries.'

In the 21st century? And there are less appalling variants of the same attitude. In Baghdad a month ago, while Nick Berg was staying at a hotel just down the road, I spoke with a representative of Moqtada al-Sadr. There were two things that concerned this cleric most about the new Iraq. The first was the rights of minorities to exercise a constitutional veto, which he opposed, and the second - more substantial - concerned his rejection of a code enshrining equality for women. He wanted it to be illegal to dress 'immodestly', for example. This was his red line.

There's the brave Iraqi "resistance", with whom the likes of John Pilger have thrown in their lot, and all that they stand for. As Aaronovitch notes, there are many brave activists throughout the Muslim world who are fighting what is being done in the name of their faith, and that those Westerners who claim to speak for them do them no favors by excusing and apologizing for such barbarism:

Last September, in Britain, Abdulla Muhammad Yunis was sentenced to life imprisonment for killing his 16-year-old daughter, Heshu. The judge, passing sentence, said it was 'a tragic story arising out of irreconcilable cultural differences between traditional Kurdish values and the values of Western society'. An organisation called Kurdish Women Action Against Honour Killing wrote to him and rejected the possible logic of his words. The group demanded 'the recognition and insistence that universal human rights must be a redeemable promissory note for all ... With the turning of a 'blind eye', the notion of human rights loses meaning as a set of principles that govern all.'

Do we agree with this? And if we agree with it here, why would we not agree with it in Iraq or anywhere else? True, an easy assumption of superior virtue can blind you to what is good about others and what is bad about yourself. But do we really believe that it is the same thing accidentally to kill a civilian with a bomb as it is to cut off his head on camera? Or that a society and polity that is rightly horrified by prisoner abuse is to be compared with the one presided over by Stalin?

Posted by damian at May 17, 2004 06:25 AM