What is multiculturalism? It is the belief that different cultures have different values and that it is “ethnocentric” to judge another culture by one’s own, necessarily limited, cultural values. Here in the West, we may think that people should be free to marry whomever they like. But that is only our Western custom. Elsewhere, people believe that young women can be killed by their fathers or brothers should they display too much independence in the matters of the heart. Elsewhere? Well, multiculturalism is a portable commodity: what had been the custom in Africa or Pakistan can easily be transplanted. The New York Post reports on a successful transplant to the state of Georgia:
On July 6, police say, a Pakistani named Chaudhry Rashid strangled his 25-year-old daughter San-deela Kanwal with a Bungee cord in her bedroom because she wanted to end her arranged marriage. This “honor killing” came not in Pakistan, but in Jonesboro, Ga. - a suburb 16 miles outside Atlanta.
“Honor killing”? Where, pray tell, is the honor? And where, as the Post’s reporter asks, is the outrage?
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11 Comments
LSD:The honor killing is a perfect example of something we should NOT try to understand. Clearly, our civilization has a better way of dealing with family issues; and when we are faced with a choice, it is best to choose the better over the worse. It’s that simple. The idea of multiculturalism suggests that a person is capable of having more than a single point of view and somehow we westerners ought to be able to see things from all sides. -Folks in rural Brazil are not expected to understand Korean motivations. Ironically, this suggestion that we, of all people are capable of the burden, while others are merely to be studied, is a racist idea. Actually, we are just like everyone else.
-Typical left-think.
Jul 24, 2008 - 6:58 am LSD:The point being that we are just like everyone else in that everyone is limited to a point of view. Clearly, there are differences; the acceptance of honor-killing is a good example.
Jul 24, 2008 - 7:08 am J.J. Sefton:Outrage?! I’m outraged you want outrage! Can you say “relativism?” That’s why the women’s libbers in the US of A will rip the co-jones off of anyone for calling a woman a chick or a dame. But forced female circumcisions, making rape victims the criminals and other hideous mass crimes against women in the Muslim world… (crickets chirping). Gloria Steinem? Hello?
Jul 24, 2008 - 9:54 am wkg:We should understand that in certain cultures, honor killing is accepted. Those same cultures should accept, that as part of our culture, Mr. Rashid will stand trial and be executed for his crimes.
Jul 24, 2008 - 1:07 pm Peter:wkg
You are quite right. We should remeber Lord Napier’s comment when told that suttee was a local custom: “We too have a custom. When a man burns a woman alive, we hang him.” He then invited the Indians to carry out their custom the British would then carry out theirs.
Jul 24, 2008 - 6:50 pm Lefroy:wkg says:
“We should understand that in certain cultures, honor killing is accepted.”
Quite right. We should be diffident about the practice of honour killing. We should look on respectfully and say “I have no right to censure the strangling recalcitrant girls who refuse to enter into arranged marriages, because that is their culture”?
And I’m quite sure the victim, as she struggled for her last breath, would have been outraged to think that westerners like us were presuming to criticise her own culture in this way.
As Dr Johnson said, “Don’t cant, Sir, about savages”.
Jul 25, 2008 - 1:00 am Tina Trent:The Atlanta Journal Constitution has responded to this story by publishing one cultural apologetic after another, the latest being by three Pakistani sisters living in America who detail the many rights women possess in their culture when they aren’t being killed for disobeying men. Fair enough, but the aftermath of a culturally-sanctioned, gender-based murder is precisely not the time to turn away from the subject of culturally-sanctioned, gender-based murder to “celebrate” the advances made by elite women in business and in medicine and in America. Alarmingly, the Akhar sisters acknowledge that the gender violence endemic in their home country is on the rise in immigrant communities in America. It’s brave of them to say so, but it is a fact lost in the louder insistence that it’s simply tasteless to object to honor killings because feelings might be hurt.
Jul 25, 2008 - 6:06 am Virgil:In what way was this honor killing “successful”? Was Rashid not arrested and charged with murder?
Jul 27, 2008 - 9:07 pm Lefroy:Quote:
“In what way was this honor killing “successful”? Was Rashid not arrested and charged with murder?”
In this way: the girl’s life was snuffed out by her father.
Don’t cant, Sir, about savages.
Jul 30, 2008 - 3:16 pm Lefroy:Actually the correct quote, now that I remind myself of it, is even better:
“Don’t cant in defence of savages”.
Jul 30, 2008 - 3:28 pm