PANTHER -> Islamists -> How multiculturalism is betraying women
by Ysabel Howard - Saturday, 21 March 2009, 11:29 PM
  Johann Hari: How multiculturalism is betraying women Independent It would be easy to congratulate ourselves on our tolerance of the fanatically intolerant
Published: 30 April 1007
Do you believe in the rights of women, or do you believe in multiculturalism? A series of verdicts in the German courts in the past month, have shown with hot, hard logic that you can't back both. You have to choose. The crux case centres on a woman called Nishal, a 26-year-old Moroccan immigrant to Germany with two kids and a psychotic husband. Since their wedding night, this husband beat the hell out of her. She crawled to the police covered in wounds, and they ordered the husband to stay away from her. He refused. He terrorised her with death threats. So Nishal went to the courts to request an early divorce, hoping that once they were no longer married he would leave her alone. A judge who believed in the rights of women would find it very easy to make a judgement: you're free from this man, case dismissed. But Judge Christa Datz-Winter followed the logic of multiculturalism instead. She said she would not grant an early divorce because - despite the police documentation of extreme violence and continued threats - there was no "unreasonable hardship" here. Why? Because the woman, as a Muslim, should have "expected" it, the judge explained. She read out passages from the Koran to show that Muslim husbands have the "right to use corporal punishment". Look at Sura 4, verse 34, she said to Nishal, where the Koran says he can hammer you. That's your culture. Goodbye, and enjoy your beatings. This is not a freakish exception. Germany's only state-level Minister for Integration, Armin Laschet, says this is only "the last link, for the time being, in a chain of horrific rulings handed down by the German courts". The German magazine Der Spiegel has documented a long list of these multicultural verdicts. Here are just a few: A Lebanese-German who strangled his daughter Ibthahale and then beat her unconscious with a bludgeon because she didn't want to marry the man he had picked out for her was sentenced to mere probation. His "cultural background" was cited by the judge as a mitigating factor. A Turkish-German who stabbed his wife Zeynep to death in Frankfurt was given the lowest possible sentence, because, the judge said, the murdered woman had violated his "male honour, derived from his Anatolian moral concepts". The bitch. A Lebanese-German who raped his wife Fatima while whipping her with a belt was sentenced to probation, with the judge citing his ... you get the idea. Their victims are forced to ask - like Soujourner Truth, the female slave who famously challenged early women's rights activists to consider black women as their sisters - "Ain't I a woman?" In Germany today, Muslim women have been reduced to third-class citizens stripped of core legal protections - because of the doctrine of multiculturalism, which says a society should be divided into separate cultures with different norms according to ethnic origin. Too often this issue is mixed up with other debates and gets waved through for the sake of politeness. The right loves mashing "mass immigration and multiculturalism" into one sound-bite. Well, I think Britain should take more immigrants and refugees, not fewer - but multiculturalism is a disastrous way to greet them. These German cases highlight the flaw at the core of multiculturalism. It assumes that immigrants have one homogenous culture which they should all follow - and it allows the most reactionary and revolting men in their midst to define what that culture is. Across Europe, many imams are offering advice to Muslim men on how to beat Muslim women. For example, in Spain, the popular Imam Mohammed Kamal Mustafa warns that you shouldn't use "whips that are too thick" because they leave scars that can be detected by the "infidels". That might be Mustafa's culture - but it isn't Nishal's. It isn't the culture of the women who scream and weep as they are beaten. And yes, we should admit that this is disproportionately a problem among Muslim, Sikh and Hindu immigrants who arrive from countries which have not had women's rights movements. Listen to Jasvinder Sanghera, who founded the best British charity helping Asian women after her sister was beaten and beaten and then burned herself to death. She says: "It's a betrayal of these women to be PC about this. Look at the figures. Asian women in Britain are three times more likely to commit suicide than their white friends. That's because of all this." Yet the brave campaigners who have tried to help these women - like the Labour MP Ann Cryer - have been smeared as racist. In fact, the real racists are the people who vehemently condemn misogyny and homophobia when it comes from white people but mysteriously fall silent when it comes from black and Asian men. Indeed, in the name of this warm, welcoming multiculturalism, the German courts have explicitly compared Muslim women to the brain-damaged. The highest administrative court in North Rhine-Westphalia has agreed that Muslim parents have the "right" to forbid their daughter from going on a school trip unless she was accompanied by a male family member at all times. The judges said the girl was like "a partially mentally impaired person who, because of her disability, can only travel with a companion". As the Iranian author Azar Nafisi puts it: "I very much resent it when people - maybe with good intentions or from a progressive point of view - keep telling me, 'It's their culture' ... It's like saying the culture of Massachusetts is burning witches." She is horrified by the moves in Canada to introduce shariah courts to enforce family law for Muslims. Multiculturalists believe that they are defending immigrants. But in reality, they are betraying at least 55 per cent of them - the women and the gays. It is multiculturalists, for example, who are the biggest champions of the Government's massive expansion of "faith" schools, where children will be segregated according to parental superstition and often taught the most literalist and cruel strain of a "faith". What will girls and gay pupils be taught there? Will they have Sura 4, verse 34 drilled into them, along with the passages from the hadith where Mohammed calls for gay people to be executed? We know Catholic schools often push the most vile aspects of their faith at children; why should Muslim schools be different? We desperately need to empower Muslim women to reinterpret the Koran in less literalist and vicious ways, or to leave their religion all together, as they wish. But multiculturalism hobbles them before they even begin, by saying they should stick to the "authentic" culture represented by the imams. Yes, it would be easy to keep our heads down, go with this multicultural drift, and congratulate ourselves on our tolerance of the fanatically intolerant. But I can give you a few good reasons not to. Their names are Nishal and Ibthahale and Zeynep and Fatima, and, yes, they were women. (whaddya mean, it's 2007?)
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PANTHER -> Islamists -> 'What they did to my sister was devilish, disgusting and despicable.' The murder of Banaz Mahmod
by Ysabel Howard - Saturday, 21 March 2009, 11:07 PM
  'Honour killing' sister breaks her silence - By HELEN WEATHERS - Britain was appalled by the horrific 'honour killing' of a girl murdered by her father for daring to kiss the man she loved. Here, her sister, who narrowly escaped death herself and now lives in fear of her life, breaks her silence. Every time Bekhal Mahmod leaves the safety of her home, she wears the hijab with a black veil covering her face - even though she would give anything for the freedom not to have to. Scroll down for more More by this author » Last updated at 01:18am on 16th June 2007
Under cover: Bekhal Mahmood says her father has tried to kill her She has no family to turn to, few friends, and has to lie to new acquaintances about who she is and where she is from. She is constantly looking over her shoulder. "My life will always be at risk," says 22-year-old Bekhal. "There are people in my community who want to see me dead, and they will not rest until I am. I will never be safe. I wear the veil so no one can recognise me." It is a desperately lonely and isolated existence, but at least she is alive - unlike her younger sister Banaz. Both young women brought "shame" on their strict Muslim Iraqi Kurdish family by disobeying their father Mahmod. Bekhal, 22, ran away aged 16 rather than agree to an arranged marriage to a cousin in Iraq. She survived an attempted killing by her brother, but her sister Banaz, 20, paid the ultimate price for leaving her own arranged marriage and then falling in love with an "unsuitable man" of her own choice. On the orders of her 52-year-old father and uncle, Ari Mahmod, 50, she was strangled with a bootlace by Kurdish assassins, her body stuffed in a suitcase and buried six feet down in the garden of a house belonging to an associate in Birmingham. Scroll down for more
Strangled: Banaz Mahmood Two of the murderers, who fled back to Iraq after this horrific so-called "honour killing", have since boasted of raping Banaz before she died in January 2006. "Honour killing?" cries Bekhal. "Where is the honour in a father putting his status in the community before the life of his own flesh and blood? "They should be disgusted with themselves. Honour in our community is about men having the upper hand, having the ruling power. "Banaz was the most beautiful, loving, caring, easy-going girl you could ever hope to meet. Her only crime was to want to have some say in her life. Where is the shame in that? "After I refused an arranged marriage, I knew I had two choices; stay and be killed, or leave and live. I chose to live but I had to leave everything behind." Bekhal was one of the key prosecution witnesses at the three-month trial of her father and uncle, which this week resulted in their convictions at the Old Bailey for murder. They have yet to be sentenced. A third man, Mohamad Hama, 30, of South Norwood, London, had already admitted the killing. The other key witness was Banaz's boyfriend Rahmat Sulemani, 29, whose own life was threatened because he was considered an unsuitable match for Banaz, despite also being Iraqi. Bekhal and Rahmat now face a future of secret addresses and identities under police protection. "When I stared into the eyes of my father in court, there wasn't even a twitch of guilt," says Bekhal. "No emotion at all. I still love him because he is my father, but I can never forgive nor understand what he did. "Why, if he didn't want us to be influenced by Western ways, did he bring us to Britain? You cannot expect your children to follow the same traditions as back in Iraq. "It is an impossible expectation. This would never have happened back there because we would have known no different." Bekhal has shown incredible bravery in giving evidence against her father and speaking out now in her first major interview, for the threat of reprisals is very real. She is believed by British police to be the first female family member ever to give evidence in an "honour killing" trial. Indeed, her mother and three other sisters refused to cooperate with the police for fear of upsetting the community. "Why should we have to die for wanting no more than for our voices to be heard, to have a say in our lives?" Bekhal says. For it seems that it is women who are the main casualties when some ultra-traditional immigrants are determined to protect their own culture, even if it means operating above the law. According to Bekhal, integration was the very last thing on her father's mind, although she says he seemed happy to accept Britain's hospitality in the form of a council house and benefits. Despite being relatively well-off back in Iraq - his family were property owners and ran various businesses - he never worked here. His status in the community and the respect of Iraqi Kurds were all that mattered to him. Bekhal was 14 and Banaz 12 when they first arrived in England, as asylum seekers fleeing Saddam Hussein's Iraq, with their parents Mahmod and Behya, brother Bahman, now aged 28, and sisters Beza, 25, Payman, 20, and Giaband, 16. Having moved into a council house in Mitcham, South London, Mahmod's daughters, who couldn't speak a word of English, were enrolled at the local Bishopsford Community School. Inevitably problems started almost immediately as Bekhal began to learn the language and made friends with Western boys and girls. She started to envy their freedoms, to the evident fury of her father. The more Westernised his daughters tried to become, the more he tried to control them, often resorting to verbal abuse and violence. "We used to have to wear a headscarf and trousers to school, which was so hot," Bekhal recalls. "I didn't want to wear mini-skirts or makeup like some of the girls, but I longed to take my headscarf off. "One day I was walking home through the park and I'd taken my scarf off and my father saw me. He screamed at me: 'Who do you think you are? You are acting like a bitch.' "He pulled me inside the house, spat in my face and then picked up his slippers to beat me around the head as he shouted: 'Don't you ever disobey me.' In the two years before I ran away, I think he beat me more than 20 times. "It would be over silly things like undoing the top button of my school shirt, or using hair gel. Once, he picked up a metal soup ladle and hit me round the head repeatedly with it. "I didn't want to have boyfriends or go out at night or anything like that. I was respectful to my parents. "I just wanted to be able to have friends, to give my opinion, very small things that British girls take for granted." Bekhal left school after taking her GCSEs and took a part-time job working in a supermarket. All her earnings - around £300 a month - were taken by her father; she was given just £50 from it. "One day I was walking home from work and a male colleague was walking beside me, pushing his bike along," she says. "All of a sudden my father drove up. My friend leapt on his bike to cycle off and my father tried to run him over. Back home after that I was beaten again. "When I used to confide in friends what was happening to me, they used to accuse me of exaggerating. "They couldn't believe that such things could go on in today's society. They thought there were laws to prevent it, but they do happen and there are many other women still suffering. "It is not a cultural issue. It is criminal and people need to take it seriously." Bekhal first ran away when she was 16 and went to live with a schoolfriend. Her parents tracked her down and after countless threats she reluctantly agreed to return home. The second time, she ran away after she was locked for a week in a bedroom for refusing to accept an arranged marriage with a cousin, calling the police to rescue her after escaping her confines while the rest of the family were out. She was placed in foster care by social services, but again, reluctantly went home after a few months. "My parents again tracked me down and kept sending me audio tapes. At first they would be tearful, with my dad calling me his 'little rose'. "Then they became more menacing. My father told me that unless I went home he would kill all my sisters first, then my brother, then my mother, then himself, such was the shame I had brought on them. "I believed him, so I went back. Did I think he was capable of doing that? Absolutely." The beatings continued, as did the demands that she agree to marry her cousin. "I kept repeating 'I will not do it'. I could not agree to marry some stranger and live an unhappy life." It was when Bekhal ran away for a third time -returning to her foster mother - and found herself a Muslim boyfriend, who was not strict in his religion, that Mahmod decided he could not allow her to live. During Banaz's murder trial, the court heard how Mahmod dispatched his only son Bahman to restore the family's honour by killing Bekhal. Bekhal recalls how her brother lured her to meet him at a remote spot in South London, with promises of money, and then hit her round the head with a dumb-bell while her back was turned. "I felt this terrible pain in my head and collapsed," recalls Bekhal. "Blood was streaming down my face. "I felt dizzy and sick, but I looked up at him and said: 'What are you doing?' He was crying like a baby and kept repeating: 'I've got to do it, you have brought shame on the family. It is my duty.' "As he started to drag me across the gravel I was pleading: 'Please don't do this, I will do anything, just tell my father you killed me and let me go, you will never hear from me again.' "Thankfully for me, he couldn't go through with it. He put his hand in his pocket and gave me six £50 notes before telling me to go. I phoned my boyfriend, screaming hysterically: 'Please come and get me, my brother's trying to kill me.' Bekhal was taken to hospital where she received several stitches to her head, but she refused to inform the police or press charges, because - despite herself - she didn't want to shame her family by involving the authorities. From then on, she occasionally phoned her sisters in secret, careful not to tell them where she was living. Some months later, she learned that her younger sister Banaz, unlike her, had agreed to an arranged marriage when she was 17 to a Midlandsbased Kurdish man, then aged 28, whom her father described as "the David Beckham" of husbands. But the marriage was a disaster. Banaz, the court would later hear, fled home after two-and-a-half years complaining that her husband was violent, regularly beating her. "I remember going to see Banaz in secret when she was married and she was terribly unhappy," Bekhal recalls. "She finally understood why I had run away. I told her she could come and live with me, but she said she couldn't bring further shame on the family. She later told me she only put up with her husband for so long because she wanted to keep our father happy." What a bitter irony that this young girl continued to try to please the man who would later take her life. Back home with her family, Banaz was not yet divorced when she met Rahmat Sulemani, from South London, at a family party in 2005. For a long time they were just good friends before falling in love, but Mahmod did not approve. Rahmat - despite being a family friend - was not from the same village and not as religious as the Mahmods. He was warned off with threats to his life. Banaz, 20, was taken to a relative's house in Sheffield, where she was locked up for two weeks and beaten. When that did not work, a family meeting was called by Banaz's uncle, Ari Mahmod, a wealthy entrepreneur who ran a money transfer business, where it was decided to kill the couple unless they stopped seeing each other. But Banaz and Rahmat, whose occupation has never been revealed to protect him, and who now lives under an assumed name, continued to meet in secret. Their fate was sealed when a member of the Kurdish community pictured them kissing in the street in Brixton on his mobile phone. The first attempt on Banaz's life was on New Year's Eve 2005, when she was taken to her grandmother's house in Wimbledon and plied with brandy by her father, who then came towards her, arms outstretched wearing surgical gloves, as she fought off sleep. She ran out through the back door when her father briefly left the room, and broke a neighbour's window to try to raise the alarm, cutting her wrists in the process. The police were called, but the female officer who interviewed her, PC Angela Cornes, didn't believe her. She dismissed Banaz as an attention seeker and even considered charging her with criminal damage for breaking the window. It was left to Banaz's boyfriend Rahmat to record on his camera phone her chilling testimony, explaining - as she lay in hospital - what had happened and describing how she was "really scared" for her life. This was played to the jury during the murder trial. PC Cornes is one of five police officers under investigation in an internal review by Scotland Yard over the handling of the case, for it emerged during the trial that Banaz had told police on at least four occasions that her family was plotting to kill her. Yet, crucially, she declined the police offer of a place at a refuge, believing no harm would come to her while at home with her mother. Mahmod never reported his daughter missing to police after she suddenly vanished in January 2006. It was left to Rahmat Sulemani to do that. When the police first called at the family home on the day she was murdered - January 24 - Mahmod fobbed them off, saying she was out. Two days later they classed her as high-risk after the family refused to report her missing and launched a full-scale investigation. Bekhal describes the day she was told by police that her sister's body had been found buried half-naked in a garden - three months after her death - as the very worst of her life. "What they did to my sister was devilish, despicable and disgusting. Can a family's honour be worth more than a life? I can't bear to think of the way she must have suffered. I had no choice but to stand up in court and give evidence for her." Today, Bekhal has no contact with her mother, brother or sisters. She cannot risk any communication, in case her new whereabouts under police protection is inadvertently revealed. More importantly, however, she does not want to put them at risk from the Kurdish community for associating with her. "I would rather live like this than live in fear," says Bekhal. "I will never be able to tell people who my father is - not only because of the risk to my life but because I'm ashamed. He is the one who has brought dishonour to our family." Daily Mail, 16th June 2007
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PANTHER -> Islamists -> Let's hear it for Jasvinder Sanghera, Mr Brown
by Ysabel Howard - Saturday, 21 March 2009, 10:51 PM
  Rising toll of deaths before dishonour
The death threats drop through Jasvinder Sanghera's letter box at least twice a week. More often than not, when the notes are particularly vicious, they are accompanied by a smearing of filth across her windows. When she drives, Miss Sanghera constantly monitors the cars behind, frightened that she is being followed by a murderer. In such a terrifying situation, one would expect her to turn to her extended family for comfort. But for Miss Sanghera this is not an option: the harsh reality is that her family despise her just as much as those who threaten her life. Her "crime" was to defy the strict dictates of her Asian family and refuse a forced marriage. At 16, she ran away from home rather than marry a man she had seen only in a photograph. Since then, having witnessed the suicide of her sister, who poured paraffin over her body and set herself alight to escape a forced marriage, she has set up Karma Nirvana, a support group charity that helps women flee forced marriages and those who risk becoming victims of family "honour" killing. The shocking truth about the crime was thrown sharply into focus last week when Mahmod Mahmod, 52, and his brother, Ari Mahmod, 51, were convicted of the murder of Mahmod's daughter Banaz Mahmod, 20, for "dishonouring" the family by walking out of her arranged marriage and having a relationship with another man. A third man, Mohamad Hama, 30, earlier pleaded guilty to her murder. A Sunday Telegraph investigation has established that honour killings are increasing rapidly in Britain. Home Office statistics suggest that there are 12 such murders each year. However, according to research, the true figure is much higher. At a conference in Southampton last week, police chiefs revealed that they are re-examining 2,000 deaths and-murders between 1996 and 2006 to establish whether they involve honour killings. So far, 19 have now been found to be honour killings. A further 20 involved some element of "honour violence". The string of deaths is likely to include some that were previously deemed suicides but have been found to be forced suicides and murder disguised as suicide. To combat the escalating crime, dedicated teams of senior prosecutors will be deployed in Britain's honour killing hot spots this month in an effort to boost conviction rates and give victims more protection. At first, a pilot scheme involving 20 policemen will concentrate on four hot spots - London, the West Midlands, West Yorkshire and Lancashire. Chief constables across the country will work with the Home Office and voluntary agencies to try to identify women at risk from violence from their families. Plans to be published soon by the Association of Chief Police Officers will tell forces to follow new risk assessment models to ensure women are taken seriously if they complain of family violence. A special unit has been created by the Foreign Office to travel around the world seeking British-born Asian women who have been forced into marriage. It operates mainly in Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Kenya and Yemen. Officials from the local British embassy or consulate co-operate with police to identify these women and, if they are clearly being held against their will, bring them home to Britain. "The official figure of 12 [honour killings] is but the tip of a very big iceberg," says Miss Sanghera, who has written an autobiography, Shame, based on her own family experiences of "honour" violence. Her charity sees almost 1,000 women each year who have been threatened with death, beaten, starved, kidnapped and brutalised by their families for refusing or escaping forced marriages. "Often women are forced into committing suicide," she says. "Or they are murdered and the killing is made to look like suicide, which is the verdict recorded. "It's very significant that the numbers of young Asian women between the ages of 16 and 24 who take their own lives is three times higher than the national average. "But since the jailing of Banaz Mahmod's father and uncle for murder we are facing a major problem in that it is becoming increasingly difficult to convince Asian women that British police will take them seriously." In court, it was disclosed that Banaz, who was Kurdish, had told police on four occasions that her family was trying to kill her. However, instead of protecting her, they dismissed her claims as melodramatic and even told her family, in clear breach of police guidelines that state that the families of women threatened with death for "dishonouring" them should not be approached. The truth, she says, is that police are failing to protect young women at risk of being killed by their families, often for something as trivial as wearing western make-up. Although a high-profile prevention scheme was set up four years ago, senior officers say that a series of measures aimed at saving lives has been shelved, delayed or ignored by Scotland Yard. There has been widespread criticism of the Metropolitan Police Force for its handling of Banaz's case (five officers face an internal disciplinary inquiry). One senior police source admitted to The Sunday Telegraph that, if the scheme had been in place, Banaz might have been alive today. "We started to learn lessons," he said, "and then stopped learning them as a result of political correctness." One young woman, too scared to be identified, tells a shocking tale of brutality at the hands of her family. When she refused a forced marriage her three elder brothers lured her to a relative's home and beat her for an hour. "I was bleeding and my nose was broken," she says, "but even so my brother handed me lighter fuel and a box of matches and said, 'You know what you have to do. Do it or we will do it for you'." She was rescued by friends but knows that if her family ever find her she will be killed. Laura Richards, the senior behavioural analyst at the Met's homicide prevention unit, agrees that harsh lessons have still to learned. "We need to plug gaps," she said. "The detectives and specialist officers have training but we need to revise our front-line training to desk officers and 999 call-handlers." A recent survey among young Asian men has revealed that one in 10 believes honour killings can be justified which, says Miss Sanghera, makes it vital to outlaw forced marriages. Following a Government about-turn two months ago, all three major parties now support Lord Lester's Forced Marriage (Civil Protection) Bill. Such legislation would mean that young people at risk would be able to apply for court orders preventing them being forced into marriage, while those who have already become victims could sue for damages. ''Tragically, it will come too late for women such as Banaz,'' says Miss Sanghera. Her own story and that of her sister Robina makes horrific reading. Two of seven sisters from Derby, Miss Sanghera was shown a picture of her prospective husband when she was only 14. "I was terrified of being married so young and to a stranger," she says. "My older sisters were forced into marriages." Her parents locked her in her room for two days but she escaped. When she phoned home to say she was all right her mother screamed abuse at her, telling her: "In our eyes you are dead." Miss Sanghera withstood all the family pressure and threats but she was unable to save Robina. "She suffered 90 per cent burns," she says. "The pain must have been unimaginable. Yet even in her agony, and with only minutes to live, she told paramedics to cover her face as they carried her to the ambulance." Even then, she couldn't bear to bring shame to her family." Today, like every day, Miss Sanghera will open her mail with care. "I take precautions but I am not going to stop helping women caught up in this terrible circle of violence and death," she says. "I will fight until I die to free women from forced marriages." The Telegraph, 17 June 2007