Dr. Phyllis Chesler is a leader in the field of research into some of the “cultural” practices that harm (mostly) Muslim women who are forced to live with Damocles’ sword hanging over their young heads. In this report she mentions other sects, Yazidis in Iraq, Sikhs in India, etc., but might one not consider these outliers simply to be cases of cultural contamination? In other words, where Islam is the dominant culture it could well be that some of its more deleterious views of the world and woman’s place in it eventually skew other religions and cultures living cheek-by-jowl with overbearing Islam. Whatever the cause, women in these cultures are at risk in ways that Christian and Jewish women don’t face within their communities (though some ultra-Orthodox Jews and Christians have similar views on the inferiority of women. However, that’s not the common practice for the majority and it’s not aligned with so-called “honor” and its subsequent murders of family members).
What follows is an excerpt of Dr. Chesler’s latest report with some of my own interpolations. I eliminated both the footnotes and the charts, but they are available at the original site. All the emphases in these excerpts are mine; they do not appear in the original work.
Dr. Chesler’s latest findings, published in the current edition of The Middle East Forum, are an unblinking, updated gaze into the reality of butchery before after perceived dishonor for the victims caught in the snares of this primitive barbarity.
Dr. Chesler says:
Female-on-female violence has been minimized because male-on-female violence is far more visible, dramatic, and epidemic. However, women sometimes kill infants, spouses, and adult strangers, including other women. Indeed, as this study shows, women play a very active role in honor-based femicide, both by spreading the gossip underlying such murders and by acting as conspirator-accomplices and/or hands-on-killers in the honor killing of female relatives.
A Deeper Look
In order to explore this phenomenon, this author conducted an original, non-random, qualitative study of 31 honor killings (26 cases) in North America, Europe, India, and Muslim-majority countries, where women were named as hands-on killers and/or conspirator-accomplices in the media.
All of these honor killings took place between 1989 and 2013. Eighty-seven per-cent were Muslim-on-Muslim crimes; the remaining 13 percent were committed by Hindus, Sikhs, and Yazidis. Women were hands-on killers in 39 percent of these cases and served as conspirator-accomplices 61 percent of the time.In India, women were hands-on killers 100 percent of the time.
One case she cites is notable for the numbers of female family members who died at the hands of just one “Canadian” matriarch. Under an image of this woman and her male accomplices is the legend:
Female perpetrators and accomplices in honor killings, like their male counterparts, can be calculating, brutal, and without remorse. Tooba Yahya Shafia (center) of Canada was directly involved with her husband and son in the murder of three of her daughters and her husband’s first wife.
Even if you’re numbed by the years of more generalized reports we’ve been posting, that vignette chills the heart.
Dr. Chesler notes some geographical differences underneath the similar motives for these barbarities:
Hands-on killers and conspirator-accomplices killed for the same reasons: They saw their victims as “too Western” or as “sexually inappropriate.” Motive varied as a function of region. Both hands-on killers and conspirator-accomplices viewed their victims as “too Western” 77 percent of the time. Sixty-seven percent of female hands-on killers and 84 percent of conspirator-accomplices perceived their victims this way. (See Charts 2 and 3 below [at the ME Forum url]) In Muslim-majority countries, only 43 percent of victims were killed for this reason.
However, in the West, the mainly Muslim victims in North America were viewed as “too Western” 91 percent of the time and 100 percent of the time in Europe. (See Chart 1 [at the ME Forum url above] for definitions of “too Western.”)
Twenty-three percent of victims were killed for committing an act of “sexual impropriety.” However, in Muslim-majority countries, 57 percent of victims, and, in predominantly Muslim areas of India, 33 percent of victims, were killed for this reason as compared to only 9 percent in North America; there were no honor killings for this reason in Europe.
The Narratives behind the Facts
The above statistics tell only part of the story. What emerges from the narratives of these cases is that the majority of both hands-on killers and conspirator-accomplices blamed their victims for their gruesome fate and are calculating, cold, and self-righteous women. Both female hands-on killers and conspirator-accomplices physically and verbally abused, monitored, and stalked their victims, warning them of dire consequences if they failed to obey the rules. Some issued clear death threats.
One example here; there are others at the site:
Shafilea Ahmed was a 17-year-old Pakistani-Muslim-British girl. Her parents carried out her slow suffocation murder in front of their other young children, warning them that they “would be killed if they ever revealed the truth.” Almost a decade later, perhaps fearing for her own life, Shafilea’s sister Alesha approached the police. She said their mother “began the attack with the words ‘Just finish it here.’” During the murder, the mother said to one of her younger daughters, “You will be next” and “Shut up, or you are dead.”
I don’t have the heart to cut and paste the other stories Dr. Chesler collected, but there is one which stands out to me as a possible case of envy rather than “honor”;…
…a raging jealousy by the ageing woman facing the fact of her young daughter’s liveliness. There is a compelling image of a woman whose grim visage makes her a candidate for concentration camp commandant. Looking at her picture, you can’t help but wonder if she tortured and murdered her daughter from less “pure” motives than “honor”. That is, was her daughter young, lively and beautiful? Was her existence a painful reminder to an aging mamma that any attractiveness she herself had once possessed was long gone?
The ugly story:
Seventeen-year-old Rofayda Qaoud was raped and impregnated in her West Bank home by her two brothers. According to news reports, “Relatives and friends refused to speak to her family. Her elder daughters’ husbands wouldn’t allow them to visit [the family] because [Rofayda] had returned home.” Finally, her mother Amira perpetrated a torture-murder and then “purged her home of all pictures of her older children.”
Obviously, not all women possess in equal amounts whatever it is that sparks the maternal heart.
Those of us women who were abused in our young adult years by once-loving husbands who turn to control of their wives and children to compensate for their own failures can empathize with these unfortunate girls. However awful our lives were, they couldn’t compare with the victims in Dr. Chesler’s report. We may not have been able to leave safely — often due to cultural constraints — and some of us were killed for not leaving soon enough, or not finding a safe exit, but our suffering can’t compare to the toxicity of Islam’s propensity for killing its young.
That is a perversion Westerners will never comprehend.
Surely, as long as muslims follow the senseless, perverted, murderous teachings of mohammed, they can never advance themselves, never be other than savages.
God, this is depressing; “Stockholm syndrome” writ large. How t0 help those who won’t help themselves? How to liberate those who don’t consider themselves oppressed?
The least we can do is to try to prevent such abuses among immigrant communities in the West; I’ll be forwarding Phyllis Chesler’s original article to a couple of female friends who regard themselves as feminists (and standing well back!)
That is a perversion Westerners will never comprehend.
Muslims have a name for that intangible invisible “stuff” they MUST conserve even if it means killing their daughters and sisters – THAR. We counter jihadists mostly are still unaware of their term, which I find very odd at this point. Especially since we’ve taken must pains to learn so many other terms connected to jihad.
Here is a good article explaining THAR – the principle driving woman control and daughter slaughter:
http://www.uwgb.edu/dutchs/pseudosc/toxicval.htm
What you call “thar” is a neologism from the page you linked to. He was explaining how Islamic “honor” differs from what the West considers honorable.
He cited the actual Arab understanding: blood libel is the only recourse for violations of honor. Within the family is supposed to be the male elder who metes out this punishment. It is NOT justice in our sense of the word, but rather a balancing out of wrongs. Thus, the only balance for dishonoring a family honor is payment via blood.
Counterjihadists well understand the difference btwn this desert tribal primitive “reparation” via blood-letting and normative Western justice.
If you would *really* understand it, study their own comprehensive rule book:
Reliance of the Traveller: A Classic Manual of Islamic Sacred Law
That’s Sunni law of course, but they are the larger, more influential group (if you don’t count Shi’ite Iran).
When I finished up my post by calling it a “perversion” I am speaking to a civilized Western audience, obviously. And for us the blood libel laws contained in sharia law pervert everything we understand about justice.
Islam is a tribal religion. Christianity and Judaism, on which the West was largely founded, are world views that hold individuals responsible. Their families are not blamed or punished…
…as any culture is likely to do, we have perverted individual liberty into something with no context, i.e., there is no longer any balance of individual responsibility…and that has allowed the perversion of political correctness to run amuck.
His essay is interesting, but ‘thar’ in place of blood libel doesn’t cover the subject.
The word “Thar” in Arabic means blood vengeance, retaliation, and vendetta. It appears, on rereading, that this author coined his own term “Thar Mentality” in his worthy attempt to encapsulate the Islamic logic we kafirs find so hard to apprehend.
I think his attempt makes distinctly helpful headway in illuminating that enshadowed terrain. I believe his explanation of these islamic patterns – via this term – can make it easier for Westerners to comprehend. At least it did for this one.
As someone who has studied Islam intensely for many years now, I am always fascinated to read anything that explains the mindset of Muslims & people of other cultures touched by Islam over the centuries. The article linked to here is extremely enlightening & I urge everyone to take the trouble to read it, or perhaps for GoV to reproduce it as an article in its own right on this site. In light of the depressing (welcoming) attitude of so many in Europe now towards this Islamic invasion, & the desperation to be so’ humane’ in their response, this article clearly shows how destructive is the culture the invaders are bringing with them, how it can & will ruin Western culture & civilization. This attitude of ‘cultural suicide’ due to Westerners complete misunderstanding of the way Middle Easterners & many from Africa think, i.e. no knowledge whatsoever of “Thar”, is very apparent in Mr Wilders opponents during the debate shown in the previous article. The West needs to be educated about “Thar”.
I don’t mean to be dismissive of Dr. Chesler’s informative yet disturbing article.
I do mean to suggest that Islam makes people insane. The murderous pathologies rampant among Muslims speaks to that. Islam permits of no corrective to this insanity: no Bibles, no apostasy, no escape. And that’s in addition to its already bellicose dogma.
(GWB — because he was best buddies with the bin Laden family and was himself theologically confused, as in Islam worships the same God as Christians, assured us of its peaceful nature. It is a lie he will die regretting having made).
Islam is the foulest plague upon mankind I can think of, eclipsing even Nazism and Communism for its sheer blood lust. I may be wrong. But that’s the way I see it.
It helps little, too, that there is so much inbreeding among Muslims.
An ophthalmologist friend of mine, way back in the mid-eighties, spent a year in Riyadh (with his wife [poor woman: on their anniversary they ate at McDonalds and were forbidden to sit together, being separated by gender — the news of which was my very first taste of Muslim perversity]). He was studying the affects of in-breeding which distilled opthalmic disorders in the gene-pool.
In-breeding tends also to diminish intelligence over time. And low-intelligence people are more prone to violence and aggression than are others; read that, more prone.
Taken together, we see the sparks that ignite violent behavior among Muslim women.
“As long as they cry a little bit on TV and look miserable…” like this one:
http://rtl.hu/rtlklub/hirek/vagatlan-vegso-elkeseredeseben-fekudt-a-sinekre-csaladjaval
?
And here the tsunami on his way to Europe:
http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=e18_1442704082
This is unsurprising. Women are often more cruel to each other than men are to women. Besides, women tend to have a more totalitarian approach to life (feminists are an excellent illustration of that).