July 19, 2010
Exclusive: Honor Killings On the Increase?

The Editor

The Calgary Herald recently reported on a trial that has come to a conclusion. Aset Magomadova had been accused of killing her 14-year old daughter Aminat. On February 26, 2007, Magomadova had strangled her daughter to death, using her hijab.

Magomadova, a refugee from Chechnya, had admitted second degree murder, and on Thursday last week, she was given an astonishing sentence – a three year suspended jail term, during which Mrs. Magomadova would have to abide by terms of probation or return to court.

Magomadova had argued that on the morning of the murder, Aminat (pictured) had threatened her with a knife and attacked her with a chair The mother claimed she was acting in self-defense. In her “self-defense” Magomadova had tied a headscarf around her daughter’s neck and then pulled it for 150 seconds, until Aminat’s body went limp. However, though a knife was found in the room, Aminat Magomadova’s fingerprints were not on the alleged “weapon”. Court of Queen’s Bench Justice Sal LoVecchio rejected a plea of self-defense.

He stated: “This was a family in crisis with events spiralling out of control. It cannot be reduced to simply a case of mom choosing to kill her daughter as a form of discipline because she misbehaved. Quite simply, the events of that morning cannot be seen as a single isolated event.”

On the morning of the murder, Aminat was due to go to court for assaulting a teacher, and had refused to go.

The circumstances of Magomadova’s life are bizarre. She has only two children, Aminat and a younger brother who suffers from a disease that will waste away his body and eventually kill him. There is no father, as he was killed in a bomb blast, and Aset Magomadova has only part of one foot left after a bomb attack. She herself had been imprisoned for several months, suspected by Russian authorities of being a terrorist.

The circumstances of the case have been heard by a judge. The prosecutor thought that the mother should receive a 12-year jail term, and Mrs. Magomadova (pictured above) will have to undergo grief, anger and bereavement counseling as part of her probation.

The case is bizarre, and the mother obviously lied about the self-defense issues. This particular case does not appear to be an honor killing, but it does mirror some other cases of honor violence, where the life of a girl or young woman is seen to be worth less than that of a boy.

In Chechnya, where the Magomadova family had lived before arriving in Canada, the culture places little value upon the life of a girl. In February last year, according to Russsia’s St Petersburg Times, the Putin-sponsored leader of the region defended honor killings. The Chechen president, Ramzan Kadyrov ,was speaking in Grozny, the capital, after seven young women had been found shot through the head.

Kadyrov stated that the women had “loose morals” and for that they had deserved to die at the hands of their male relatives. He argued that women were the property of their husbands. He is imposing Islamic customs such as polygamy, and most Chechen women are now expected to wear Islamic headscarfs.

Human rights activists estimate that every year, dozens of women are killed in Chechnya.

Gistam Sakayeva, a women’s rights activist in the region, said: “What the president says is law. Because the president said this, many will try to gain his favor by killing someone, even if there is no reason.”

Kadyrov suggested that the women were going to be leaving the country to work as prostitutes, which is why they were killed. As in so many cases of “honor killings”, there is enough evidence to suggest that some, if not all, of these the Chechen women were innocent.

Other countries

Honor killings do happen with remarkable frequency in traditional Muslim communities, even though Muslims always blame such incidents upon local “culture” and deny that Islam has any relation to the killings.

In Palestinian communities, such killings have been steadily on the increase. And the murders do not always involve male relatives killing women who were thought to have “transgressed.” On January 27, 2002, a Palestinian woman, Amira Abu Hanhan Qaoud, murdered her daughter Rofayada. First she tried to get her daughter Rofayda to slash her own wrists, but the girl refused. Then she wrapped a plastic bag around her daughter’s head, and slashed her wrists. She then clubbed her daughter’s head with a stick, killing her. Rofayda’s crime had been to have got pregnant. She had become pregnant because her two older brothers had raped her in their shared bedroom in Ramle. Amira Abu Hannan Qaoud made no attempt to kill her sons. Only the girl, an innocent victim of rape, was seen to merit punishment.

In 2006, again in Ramle, 26-year old Basel Abu-Dahal stabbed his 24-year old sister Miriam 29 times in broad daylight. Passers-by ignored the girl’s screams, and allowed Abu-Dahel to kill his sister. Miriam’s crime, according to Abu-Dahal at his trial, was connected with “the improper way” in which she had raised her daughter.

In Jordan, legislation introduced in 1960 makes it easier to commit honor killings:

Article 340 of the Jordanian Penal Code states that “he who discovers his wife or one of his female relatives committing adultery with another, and he kills, wounds or injures one or both of them, is exempt from any penalty”.

It adds that “he who discovers his wife, or one of his female ascendants or descendants or sisters with another in an unlawful bed and he kills, wounds or injures one or both of them, benefits from a reduction of penalty.”

Yet this article contradicts Article 6 of the Jordanian Constitution that guarantees the rights of all Jordanian citizens regardless of their gender.

Article 98 is almost always cited alongside Article 340 in cases of honour killings. It has been a further deterrent for potential perpetrators. Article 98 stipulates that a reduced sentence is applied to a person who kills another person in a “fit of fury”.

In 2005, one campaigner against the frequent honor killings in Jordan, Rana Husseini, said that almost 70 per cent of all the girls who die in honor killings are virgins. The same researcher/campaigner claimed in 2009 that there were about 25 honor killings annually in Jordan, and 5,000 around the world.

Honor killings are common in Pakistan (where they are called Karo-kari) in Bangladesh, Jordan, Palestinian territories, in Turkey, particularly its southeastern region. Honor killings happen among groups who are not officially Muslim but who live in Muslim regions, such as the Yezidi and the Druze.

Du’a Khalil Aswad was a 17-year old Yezidi (Yazidi) girl who was brutally kicked, beaten and stoned to death, her agonized last moments captured on a mobile phone camera. This event took place on April 7, 2007, in Bashika, northern Iraq. In the five years between 2002, when a law prohibiting honor killings was introduced in the region, and 2007, 40 honor killings were recorded Du’a Khalil Aswad was accused of being seen with a Sunni man, but her autopsy proved she had been a virgin.

In March 2007, Doaa Fares, a finalist in a Miss Israel contest, had to withdraw from the beauty pageant. She was Druze, and two of her uncles, accompanied by two others from her village, threatened that they would kill her for bringing shame to her family. In 2006, a total of 17 women were killed in Palestinian territories in honor killings.

If Rana Husseini’s claim is true that globally 5,000 young women are killed in this manner, it would mean that 13 women die every day, somewhere in the world, on account of “honor”.

Phyllis Chester writing in the Spring 2009 edition of Middle East Forum, quoted a 2002 document (United Nations Population Fund, Chapter 3) in which the figure of 5,000 women being annually killed in honor killings. This document quotes a report by Asma Jahangir, who also heads the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan. In 2000 Jahangir made a report for the UN Commission of Human Rights.

On the order of clerics, an 18-year-old woman was flogged to death in Batsail, Bangladesh, for “immoral” behaviour, according to the report. In Egypt, a father paraded his daughter’s severed head through the streets shouting, “I avenged my honour.”

The [2000] report says that “honour” killings tend to be more prevalent in, but are not limited to, countries with a majority Muslim population. It adds, however, that Islamic leaders have condemned the practice and say it has no religious basis.

Phyllis Chester wrote of the denial by Muslim “representatives” when confronted by unpleasant facts about the rising cases of honor killings in North America:

In 2008, after Kandeela Sandal was murdered for honor by her father in Atlanta because she wanted a divorce, Ajay Nair, associate dean of multicultural affairs at Columbia University, told the media that “most South Asian communities in the United States” enjoy “wonderful” relationships within their families and said, “This isn’t a rampant problem within South Asian communities. What is a problem, I think, is domestic violence, and that cuts across all communities.” In October 2008, Mustafaa Carroll, executive director of the Dallas branch of the Council of American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), dismissed any Islamic connection to a prominent Dallas honor killing, labeled as such by the FBI, arguing, “As far as we’re concerned, until the motive is proven in a court of law, this is [just] a homicide.” He continued, “We [Muslims] don’t have the market on jealous husbands … or domestic violence … This is not Islamic culture.”

The case labelled for the first time by the FBI as an American honor killing was that of sisters Sarah and Amina Said, who were apparently killed by their Egyptian-born father, His motives had apparently been that the two girls had acted in Western ways and had dated non-Muslims.

Canada

One of the first known honor killings in Canada occurred with a Sikh family. Sikhs’s ancestral homeland is the Punjab area of India and Sikhism evolved as a fusion of Islam and Hinduism. In 2000, a woman who was said to be a prominent figure in Vancouver’s Sikh community gave an order – via a cell phone – for her daughter, who at that time was in India, to be murdered. The girl, Jaswinder Kaur Sidhu, had her throat cut when her mother commanded it.

Amin Muhammad is a psychiatrist at the Memorial University in Newfoundland, Canada, who has been researching the growing trend in Canada of honor killings. He related three cases:

A 14-year-old female rape victim is strangled to death in March 2004 by her father and brother because she has supposedly tarnished the family name.
In April 2004, a man brutally kills his wife and daughter after finding out that his brother had previously molested them.

A teenage girl with a Turkish background has her throat cut by her father after he learns she has a Christian boyfriend.

He warned: “You will see, 10 years down the road, this will not be very new for even a society like Canada. A special watch is warranted from a legal point of view.”

In March 2005, a man from Kitimat, B.C., a man was found guilty of the second-degree murder of his daughter. Rajinder Singh Atwal had killed his 17-year old daughter Amandeep in July 2003. Her “crime” had been to have a live-in relationship with a man called Todd McIsaac. She then agreed to holiday with her family and her father stabbed her 11 times. He told a hospital that she had committed suicide.

In September 2006, Khatera Sadiqui and her fiancé, Feroz Mangal, were sitting together in a car parking lot in the Elmvale Acres Shopping Centre in Ottowa. They were shot. Khatera died from her wounds and Feroz Mangal was seriously injured. Khatera’s brother, Hasibullah Sadiqi, was the prime suspect. Feroz died shortly after the attack. On May 30, 2009, Hasibullah Sadiqui was found guilty of the “honor killing” murder.

In July 2009, three members of a Canadian Muslim family of Afghan origins were arrested. A car had submerged in the Rideau Canal in Kingston Ontario, drowning four people who were inside the vehicle. Those who died were three sisters aged 13, 17 and 19 and another woman, 52-year-old Rona Amir Mohammed. The family came from Montreal and had been on the return journey from a holiday at Niagara Falls.

Both the parents and a brother of the three girls were subsequently charged with murder. The older woman in the car was the first wife of the girls’ father. Mohammad Shafia, his wife Tooba, and their son Hamed were all charged. It was claimed that “”the daughters were beaten regularly, either by him or his son Hamed, because their behaviour was a disgrace to him in his eyes.”

Dr. Shahrzad Mojab of the University of Toronto claimed that: “The fathers and the brothers claim the act happened out of passion or love for the daughter or the sister. They argue she had to be sacrificed…. I’ve seen letters written from daughters to fathers who know what will happen. They are filled with references to love and how much they loved each other.”

Other Canadian academics have tried to explain honor killings. As reported in Canada’s National Post, Aysan Ms. Sev’er, a professor of sociology at University of Toronto Scarborough, tries to remove religion from the equation and place it all about “patriarchy”. Most monotheistic religions are patriarchal, and Islam is the most patriarchal of all monotheistic religions, but Sev’er would rather not mention the”Islamic” aspect of Islamic patriarchy.

She stated: “A few women are really sacrificed to terrorize all women, to push them into submission, where they are not in the position to defend themselves or even their daughters or sisters…. In Canada, we have been extremely culturally sensitive, and that’s a good thing. But in this particular case, we may have pushed the pendulum a little to the other side, in the sense that there are cultural components in these types of crimes which we cannot ignore.”

Last week, Rona Ambrose, Canadian minister for women’s affairs, warned members of the South Asian community in Mississauga, Toronto, that “honor killings” would not be tolerated in Canadian society.

Ms. Ambrose made her announcement shortly after a Sikh man, Kamikar Singh Dhillon, was convicted of murdering his daughter-in-law Amandeep Khaur Dillon on January 1, 2009. The father-in-law had tried to inflict stab wounds on himself, and had killed Amandeep with multiple stab wounds to the young woman’s face, head, throat and upper body. In June, the killer admitted that he had been worried that his daughter-in-law would leave his son. He alleged that Amandeep was maintaining an affair.

Europe

The reasons why Canada should have more recorded honor killings than the United States is probably as a result of a more “multicultural” approach to housing and community cohesion in Canada. Whereas American migrants are expected to integrate or at least aspire to the values and aims of the country at large, in Canada, ghetto communities are developing, particularly around Toronto and Montreal. These ghettoes are not dissimilar to those which now exist in most European countries.

In Britain, honor killings happen in Turkish, Kurdish and other communities, but the vast majority of such cases seem to take place in Pakistani and Bangladeshi communities. The Pakistani communities have existed since the 1960s as countries apart from mainstream Britain, where there is no integration with people from outside of the community, the predominant spoken languages tend to be Urdu or Bangla, and there are no moves by government or local authorities to encourage assimilation or integration.

The rates of honor killings happening in Britain are estimated to be as high as one a month. Pakistani and Bangladesh communities not only resist integration with the indigenous British communities, they prefer to involve their offspring in arranged marriages, involving potential spouses from “home” villages in the old country, often first cousins. As well as literally encouraging a rise in certain medical conditions due to inbreeding, these arranged marriages often involve compulsion.

Multiculturalists downplay the significance of forced marriages, and expect all people to accept the notion of parents choosing their offspring’s marriage partners. Forced marriages are sometimes hard to distinguish from arranged marriages, and non-compliance with a family’s choice of marriage partner is known to have caused honor killings in Britain and other European countries. The London Times of July 24, 2006, stated:

Between 2003 and 2005, 518 forced marriages were recorded in London, and in 2005 more than 140 in Bradford. Campaigners say those are merely the tip of the iceberg.

Most cases in Britain involve Muslim families, although the practice is not restricted to any particular religious or ethnic group. Most victims are aged between 16 and 20 and many suffer physical assault, death threats and false imprisonment, usually at the hands of close family members.

Suicide rates among young Asian women are more than three times the national average and about 12 women every year die as a result of so-called “honour killings”.

America Next?

Honor killings will continue to thrive in places like Italy, Sweden, France, Britain, Germany Turkey, Canada, etc, as these nations have a poor sense of their own national identity. Migrants are not truly expected to assimilate, and in such an environment, it becomes almost a tabu for authorities to enter ghetto communities and insist that vulnerable women are protected.

Political correctness and multiculturalism are allowing such unassimilated ghetto communities to thrive, and tacitly allowing women to become victims within these patriarchal and backward communities. Yes – I used the word “backward,” knowing how un-PC a term it is. However, it is an accurate term. When communities attempt to maintain rural village systems, traditions and values of an undeveloped country hundreds or more miles away, while living in large sprawling conurbations, the rural village attitudes will always collide with those of the larger urban environment. Within that larger environment lie temptations and expectations that would never exist in a rural community.

America has some communities like Dearborn, Michigan, that are becoming Islamic ghettoes, and there are South Asian communities developing in most American cities. The key to preventing honor killings in America is to ignore multiculturalism altogether and insist that all migrants prove their commitment to integration. If a person would not let his daughter marry an American girl, then that person obviously has no respect for American values or American life, and should not be deemed fit to become a naturalized citizen.

Until very recently, America held on tight to its own values and traditions. With its new elite of “progressives”, there is a danger that multiculturalism – a process that has been discredited by its appalling and divisive examples in Europe and Canada – will prevail. And then, for a young girl growing up in any of the patriarchal and backwards ghettoes that multiculturalism creates – a girl who wants to live like other Americans, dress like other Americans, date like other Americans – she will find that her opportunities and her future will become increasingly bleak.

The Editor, FamilySecurityMatters.org

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.6783/pub_detail.asp

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