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THE WEEK AT A GLANCE   

THE PRICE OF HONOR
By Avi Davis

The parallels between the five stories is chilling. In Berlin this week, 16 -year -old Morsal Obeidi, taking a casual walk with her cousin, is confronted by her 23- year -old brother Ahmed brandishing a knife. Over the course of the next five minutes, Ahmed proceeds to stab his sister 21 times. He flees, only to be confronted and captured by German police 20 hours later. She dies alone in a parking lot. Her crime: She had become too comfortable in the ways of the West, resented by her brother for her uncovered hair, her makeup and her short skirts.

Hatin Sucru, 23- years-old and a mother of a five- year-old boy, is enticed to leave her apartment in Berlin to meet with a family friend. In a freezing wind , at a bus stop , she is gunned down. Days after the crime, police arrest her three brothers, ages 25, 24 and 18. The youngest of the three allegedly bragged to his girlfriend about the killing. At her funeral, Hatin’s Turkish-Kurdish parents draped their only daughter's casket in verses from the Koran and buried her according to Muslim tradition. Absent of course, were the brothers, who were in jail. Hatin's crime, it appears, was the desire to lead a normal life in her family's adopted land. German raised, she divorced the Turkish cousin she was forced to marry at age 16. She also discarded her Islamic head scarf, enrolled in a technical school where she was training to become an electrician and began dating German men. For her family, such behavior represented the ultimate shame - the embrace of corrupt Western ways.

In Kurdistan , 19- year- old Swede Pela Atroshi, returning to visit her relatives in Iraq , is shot twice in the back in a second storey bedroom by her uncle. Blood soaked and stumbling down the stairs with the aid of her screaming mother and sister, she is confronted by her father and three uncles. The men pull the women apart and the youngest uncle then points a gun at Pela as she pleads for her life. The bullet goes through her fingers and into her brain. She dies instantly.

In Manchester , Fakir Mohammed, who had lived in the U.K. for thirty years, comes home from Friday prayers at the local mosque to discover his 17- year- old daughter Shahida in a bedroom with a boyfriend. After the boyfriend jumps out of the window, Mohammed grabs his daughter in a headlock and stabs her 19 times in the stomach with a knife. At his murder trial, Mohammed’s lawyer explains that his client is a strict Muslim who insists on returning all his daughters to Pakistan for arranged marriages.

In Birmingham , 21 -year -old Sahjda Bibi is killed by her distant cousin Rafqat Hussain on her wedding day. She is murdered because Hussain is incensed that she had refused to marry his own cousin and that her own ultimate choice of spouse – a divorced man with children – would dishonor the family.

Many of these tragic stories are gathered in a new study titled Crimes of the Community: Honour Based Violence in the UK., published by the Centre for Social Cohesion. The study reaches some startling conclusions. It points out that the rapid rise of honor based murders in Britain over the past decade, originates within South Asian Muslim communities who have immigrated to the U.K. from Pakistan and Bangladesh . Many of the killings, it reports, had been carried out by relatively successful immigrants who would usually be regarded as well integrated into British society. This suggests that socio-economic factors do not play much of a role in the rising toll of such murders. The killings are instead evidence of the lengths a Muslim family in Britain might go to defend its own traditions against any idea of female independence or individual freedom of thought. Such independence is regarded as “western” and therefore morally and ethnically inferior to their own cultural practices. Once a woman takes the decision to shrug off her narrow role within the life of the family and community, the family’s standing in the community is threatened and its honor compromised.

To many British Muslims, such honor can only be reclaimed by extirpation of the stain.

If this is not depressing enough, then the measures taken to address the rising epidemic in Western countries, is even more mind-numbing. In Germany , red tape and a lack of will on the part of officialdom puts many abused Muslim women in very dangerous positions. An unwillingness to interfere in the social and cultural dynamic of Muslim families, reduces the effectiveness of social workers and even the women’s shelters where many of these refugees flee. A number of regulations make it relatively easy for violent family members to discover where the threatened women are staying. And the procedures for entering into witness protection programs for the few who dare to testify against family members who commit battery or murder have proven to be overly complicated and bureaucratic. Instead of protecting these women from the threat of honor killings, German bureaucracy actually increases the risk.

In Britain , law enforcement officers complain that they are hamstrung by politically correct thinking and an overt desire to avoid harming sensitivities within the Muslim community. Many women’s groups report that local government is unwilling to involve itself in ‘minority issues’ for fear of appearing “Islamophobic.” Women who have recently arrived in the U.K. are often unable to escape violence from their husbands because the ‘No Recourse to Public Funds’ rule denies them the ability to claim benefits because they have not been resident in the U.K. for the required two years. The result is that many women are forced to stay in abusive relationships for fear of becoming destitute.

Government leaders are also complicit in the failures to protect the lives of these women. The British government and local councils seek to deal with the Muslim minority through intermediaries, who, they believe, can better manage the community of behalf of the state. The trouble with this arrangement is that it only strengthens the influence of elderly and conservative men who are more likely to reinforce communal notions of honor and patriarchy, affording women no further protection.

The absence of any serious attempt to deal with the problem ascends all the way to the highest ranks of the British Government. Baroness Patricia Scotland, Home Office Minister in the Blair Government ( and now Gordon Brown’s Attorney General) dropped a proposal to ban forced marriage in the U.K. , claiming that such a law could drive the practice further underground. She was quoted as urging more discreet intra-community measures to address the problem.

With such apparent governmental paralysis, the West is faced with a contradiction it cannot allow to continue. Either there is one law governing the human rights of individuals, no matter which community they belong to, or there is no law at all. The protection of human life should be the overriding concern of every Western democracy and the failures to protect citizens by an outright banning of forced marriages and honor killings will doom our governments to half measures that will, over time, only lead to more violence. In addition, treating these murderous acts as individual crimes, as most law enforcement officials in the West presently do, is a catastrophic sop to politically correct thinking and notions of multicultural sensitivity that will ultimately corrode social cohesion and respect for the law. Without legislation, backed by the power of enforcement, which directly addresses honor killings and forced marriages in the very communities in which they occur, then the Archbishop of Canterbury’s prediction earlier this year - that Shaaria Law will one day have a parallel jurisdiction with civil law - may prove more tragically prophetic than either he or any one else realizes.

Avi Davis is the Executive Director and Senior Fellow of the American Freedom Alliance.

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