The Honor-Shame Paradigm

Amy Siskind, president and co-founder of women's right group The New Agenda, makes some good points about honor killing and domestic violence more generally:

...the progressive feminists, on the grounds of multicultural relativism, are trying to close down the whole discussion before it begins. The subtext here is that prior to September 11, 2001, it was uncontroversial to subscribe to the notion that many Islamic cultures were misogynistic. But while the right has voraciously spoken out against Islam since then, the progressives have worked just as hard to respect cultural and religious diversity, particularly with regard to Islam. As Violet Socks, co-founder of The New Agenda, wrote earlier this week: “For many commenters on the web, it is apparently impossible to condemn this nightmare without hastening to add that American culture has plenty of its own home-grown brand of misogyny, and it’s therefore ‘intolerant’ to notice the particular lethalness of the honor-shame paradigm in some non-Western cultures.”

Asra Nomani has more on the Aasiya Hassan case. Her husband may have been mentally disturbed, not merely a religious zealot:

In the days since the murder, some in the closely guarded local Muslim community are quietly talking about Hassan’s long battle with mental illnessat one time, they say, diagnosed as bipolar disorder, according to people who have spoken to Hassan’s family about his medical treatment. They don’t want to talk openly for fear Hassan will use the illness as a legal defense, but people familiar with his second and third marriage said that his mother would lament that he would act erratically and violently when he wasn’t taking his psychiatric medicines. Hassan’s family didn’t return calls seeking comment.