Does a man’s honour really “lie between the legs of a woman”?

Millions of men believe and act on that, as a murder trial was recently told by an expert witness, a refugee from Iran. In a global society, we  need a philosophically coherent means of confronting cultures that  believe and act on such views, not an excuse for accommodating them.

The trial in question features a couple and their son, charged with killing four women (all but one are close relatives). The expert said,

In some cultures, women are considered the property of men; men are responsible for controlling their behaviour, particularly their sexuality; a woman even perceived to be out of control reflects on the man’s honour, and “the way to deal with the dishonouring is through the shedding of blood. . . . It’s a way of purifying the honour of the family and the community.”

The drowned Shafia sisters, Zainab 19, Sahar 17, Geeti 13, and their father’s “other” wife were all found in a black Nissan submerged at the Kingston Mills (Ontario) lock on June 30, 2009. The family’s inability to give a straightforward account of the dreadful incident first alerted the police.

In the same country, a young woman named Aqsa Parvez, who lived in very conventional suburb of a large city, was also murdered for acting like a normal North American teen. An interesting facet of the story is that the entire journalism establishment did its best to minimise what happened and to deprecate the term “honor killing” (a local journalist was accused of “hate” for even using the term).

As Ken Whyte, the editor of a national magazine, responded,

The Oxford English Dictionary just added honour killing to its word collection last year. And its definition—”the killing of a (usually female) relative perceived to have brought dishonour upon the family, associated especially with certain cultures in which familial honour is of paramount importance”—appears to fit the alleged circumstances of Aqsa’s murder. Like date rape, honour killing adds to our understanding of a situation where the generic term “domestic violence” does not.

One might say the same for “mob hit” and “going postal.” . . .  They offer a context . . . which some would like to prevent. Whyte himself had earlier faced “hate crime” charges for publishing an author who discussed the implications of mass immigration of people with value systems very different from the accepted ones.

We must be selective in assessing what we hear from legacy mainstream media. It is only sometimes possible to know how much of their coverage represents what is happening versus how much is intended to guide you in a “correct” direction.

Their guidance is intended to strongly convey the view that everyone values the same things. But, as we have seen, everyone doesn’t value the same things. Cultures differ in how much attention they give to each of the classical virtues.

A terrible battle has been fought and won in Ken Whyte’ country, for freedom of expression, so it is now possible for a journalist to safely and truthfully write:

In the past six weeks, the jury has heard not an iota of evidence that the Shafia women behaved wantonly or promiscuously. There’s been no indication that the three sisters—Zainab, Sahar and Geeti, respectively 19, 17 and 13—were anything other than virgins at death. The fourth victim, Rona Amir Mohammad, appears to have lived an utterly conventional Afghan life, even urging her husband to take a second wife when she was unable to bear children. Tooba Yahya, brought into the marriage as brood mare, obligingly popped out seven kids. One of them, 20-year-old Hamed, is sitting between mom and dad in the defendants’ box.

What did the females do that was so deplorable, so unendurable, in the eyes of their family accusers—if not to the point of homicide, which is for the jury to decide, but to engender the chronic mistreatment that made their existence a misery, as attested to by a slew of witnesses?

To acquire a good education through life, we must learn to assess, among other things, which virtues are valued in a given culture and which are not. And whatever else we must guard, we must guard our right to hear what really happened.