Saturday, July 10, 2010

On the subject of honor killings,

Six Feet pointed to a piece by Mark Steyn taking down- apart, rather- a piece by a dumbass who has a problem with what Steyn wrote on the subject. Part of his response:
In other words, Phyllis Chesler and I are writing about how "honor killings" have migrated from the distant horizon to The New York Times' backyard. All the examples she and I cite and link to are from North America. That's what we're writing about: Dead Muslim women in New York, Illinois, Texas, Quebec. Our neighbors.

Conor Friedersdorf demolishes our argument by pulling up yellowing Times thumbsuckers from ten years ago about "honor killings" in the Arab world, Turkey, Pakistan - and, eventually, Berlin.

I think Friedersdorf, in his usual pedantic way, has not refuted my point but reinforced it: The Times was more enthusiastic about covering "honor killings" when they were way out on the fringes of the map and could be used for a distant anthropological study of remote tribal cultures. Now they're happening down the block in Buffalo, Peoria and Kingston, Ontario, and raise complicating questions for the prevailing pieties on diversity, multiculturalism, immigration, assimilation et al, questions for which most of the liberal press has no stomach.
And, just for delight, I'll throw in one of the two updates:
[UPDATE: Friedersdorf's colleague, The Atlantic's Chief Obstetrician, thinks my post is evidence of "epistemic closure" on the right. Ah, yes. Because nothing says "closed-minded conservative bubble" like a right-wing racist sexist loon worrying about the murders of brown women.]
That's something I've noticed: the soft bigotry of these people. Take someone from a small town whose daughter has been raped; if the sheriff or police can't or won't do anything there's a serious chance of the rapist winding up in a hole, or left out as coyote food, which is decried by Times types as 'vigilante action by right-wing government-haters' and such. A girl from a muslim family is raped or she was dating a non-muslim or acting too western and her father/uncle/brother/combination thereof murder her to 'save the family honor' and these same Times types make excuses. Or try to overlook it entirely. And if they can't overlook it they'll do almost anything to keep from mentioning the 'muslim' part of the equation. It's like they don't expect 'those people' to be able to act in civilized fashion so it's just terribly unfeeling and non-PC to actually take notice of it.

7 comments:

Keith said...

Ayaan has some excellent instructions for Moslem women thinking about running away to save their existing thing that passes for a life, and getting the chance to build a proper life.

But then I suppose she would be classified as Right wing, racist, sexist, ignorant...

the insult menu at Maison Progressive is just so predictable and boring, there's not even enough variety to make a decent set of bingo cards out of it.

You could take them a little more seriously if some of them earned a fatwah or two.

Anonymous said...

We could use a little of this here:

"You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: when men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours."

General Sir Charles James Napier
Commander in Chief in India, speaking to a group of Hindus

Firehand said...

I've mentioned a certain admiration for Napier in the past, for just this reason: he had no doubt that that custom was bad and needed to be stopped. Some of that we damn well do need.

Anonymous said...

It ain't soft bigotry, it's their everyday hard bigotry. It's just that they used to be able to get it covered up by their whoring friends in the media.
Is it any wonder that the nitwh and his thugs want to get control of the interweb...
emdfl

Keith said...

Anon,
If "Nitwh" means what I think it means, then you yourself are probably a member of those cohorts showing hard bigotry.

If you are not one of them, then there are many legitimate targets for criticism in their policies, actions, statements and the lack of content of their characters.

You can also write that criticism out in full, so that no one needs to guess what your little abreviations might mean.

Firehand said...

I must confess ignorance, I thought he meant that as an abbreviation for 'nitwit'

Keith said...

I've seen it used a few times and assumed that it was "nitwit" too.

It just looked different today.

I guess we'll find out if he comes back to set the record straight.

Else, we can guess it was something nasty, and he's gone trolling elsewhere, before he settles down for the evening with a nice glass of koolaid and a copy of the turner diaries...