[OT] 'Culture' is no excuse

'Culture' is no excuse

Savage executions in the Arab world must be condemned as wrong by
anyone's standards

David Aaronovitch, columnist of the year
Sunday May 16, 2004
The Observer

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?

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

- http://observer.guardian.co.uk/comme...217930,00.html

Eliminate SPAM wrote:
'Culture' is no excuse

Savage executions in the Arab world must be condemned as wrong by
anyone's standards

David Aaronovitch, columnist of the year
Sunday May 16, 2004
The Observer

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?


David Aaronovitch, columnist of the year must be a complete asshole not to know the difference.
And for you to post such horse**** does not say much for you.