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| Home Front: Culture Wars |
| ’Culture’ is no excuse |
| 2004-05-17 |
| A man from Maidstone had this letter published in the Independent last week. ’Why is it barbaric,’ he asked, ’to decapitate an innocent man with a knife but civilised to do it with a laser-guided bomb?’ Or to rephrase the question, is the video executioner of Nicholas Berg in any way morally deficient compared to the general or politician who gives an order that - whatever the intention - will almost certainly lead to the death of an innocent somewhere? Other, similar, relativities have been knocking around this week. Also in the Independent, former editor Andreas Whittam Smith - infuriated by the government response to the Iraqi prison scandal - contrasted the high language of exporting democracy with the accusation that ’the coalition appears to have created a gulag stretching from Afghanistan through Iraq and ending in Guantanamo Bay, where "undesirables" ... can be mistreated for as long as Stalin, sorry I mean Messrs Bush and Blair, decide.’ Mr Whittam Smith, I am sure, doesn’t really believe that Mr Blair is like Stalin. One of the most important characteristics of Stalin (as with his imitator, Saddam) was, after all, that no one got to say that he was a dictator and survive. But you know what is being said here. That if the coalition ever held the moral high ground it has forfeited it. And then there is something implied, as it has been implied in virtually every anti-war position which has ignored the question of what would have been happening in Abu Ghraib and elsewhere had the invasion not taken place. This something is the idea that, even if you were to forget about Fallujah and the abuse of detainees, ’our way’ is no better than ’their’ way. That what is going on is essentially, a collision of two cultures, with ours wrongly attempting to gain supremacy. Let’s see. The beheading of Nick Berg has now become probably the most public execution ever staged. This strangely guileless young man’s murder caused Acme Commerce of Malaysia to shut down the Ansar website, initially because of the volume of net users who wanted to see him die. Those viewers would have heard Berg’s self-identification, almost exactly like that of Daniel Pearl two years before, then heard him scream as his head was cut off with a large knife. The accompanying statement was all about retrieving honour and averting shame. So, the shame of Islam could be partly mitigated by the decapitation of any American that the killers could get their hands on. A week before the Berg killing I found myself in conversation with an Iranian man in his late thirties. He told me how he had run a family business in Tehran. There, five years ago, he met a girl, they had had an affair, and shortly afterwards he came to Europe. After his departure there was silence from his lover - she didn’t return letters and her phone was silent. A year or so later an aunt advised him to stop looking for the girl. ’She is dead,’ the woman said. ’She was pregnant and they executed her. So don’t ask any more.’ And this, the Iranian man said with contempt, in the 21st century. I was worried about this story so I began researching into judicial executions for sexual impropriety in Iran, and - because this was also possible - into extra-judicial honour killings. 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. Now, this is not a matter of Islam versus Western values per se. Those who have campaigned hardest against honour killings have been Muslims themselves, and the tribal values that are enshrined in the commodification of women precede Islam. In Jordan, Queen Rania has come out for tougher laws but until now she has been thwarted by Islamist parties in the Jordanian parliament, who complain about a possible breakdown of family values if men are punished for killing erring wives and daughters. 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? The other night I met a progressive American journalist - hated Bush, was, on balance, against the war in Iraq. Somehow we got to talking about capital punishment in the US, and he told me it didn’t bother him too much, though he knew the English didn’t like it. ’I guess it’s a cultural thing,’ he said. If that’s true, then what the hell is it all for? Why tell the Mississippi folk how to treat their ’nigras’? Ain’t that cultural? And wouldn’t it have been less imperialistic of Robinson Crusoe to tell Man Friday that he ought to go back to the cannibals because, on the whole, it would be better for him to be eaten? |
| Posted by:tipper |
| #4 Unfortunately, we in the West have far too many moral idiots. They will not get the point until they are beheaded or made into dhimmis. |
| Posted by: Craig 2004-05-17 4:38:32 PM |
| #3 Wankers is right! |
| Posted by: Mark Espinola 2004-05-17 12:13:52 PM |
| #2 Bomb, unfortunately the entire country is populated by a large number of these wankers. Just visit any 'peace protest' or democratic party event. Or just watch the Stepford-Anchors on the evening news. |
| Posted by: CrazyFool 2004-05-17 12:12:26 PM |
| #1 A man from Maidstone had this letter published in the Independent last week. ’Why is it barbaric,’ he asked, ’to decapitate an innocent man with a knife but civilised to do it with a laser-guided bomb?’ Or to rephrase the question, is the video executioner of Nicholas Berg in any way morally deficient compared to the general or politician who gives an order that - whatever the intention - will almost certainly lead to the death of an innocent somewhere? Clue: that taped beheading was directly aimed at an innocent individual. Can someone point out an instance where a house in Iraq was randomly picked out and a bomb dropped on it in retaliation for the killing of American soldiers? I sure hope that Maidstone isn't populated with more wankers like this individual. |
| Posted by: Bomb-a-rama 2004-05-17 12:02:48 PM |