Multiculturalism v. womens' rights, take 56
There is a very good article in The Independent today which basically sums up my views of the ‘multiculturalism v. womens' rights’ debate. Have a read of it below:
Johann Hari: How multiculturalism is betraying women
It would be easy to congratulate ourselves on our tolerance of the fanatically intolerant
Published: 30 April 2007
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.
What the article is pointing out is the inherent racism in the belief that women’s rights and feminism is a ‘Western’ concept, and that tolerance of others includes tolerance of the oppression of others. In other words, instead of our legal system acknowledging different backgrounds as motivation, yet still acknowledging that the law has been broken and acting accordingly, a significant number of people are being put outside of the law through the excuse of ‘multiculturalism’. This is not the aim of the proponents of multiculturalism, but is the result of the high-jacking of this phrase by the PC brigade. Multiculturalism does not mean that UK law does not apply, or that certain people within UK territories are not entitled to their human rights. It means that the UK legal system should be flexible when dealing with the background and beliefs of the citizenry it is supposed to server - all of them.
What Hari is missing in his commentary is some of the reasons why these verdicts - and this view - are on the increase. Firstly, ‘sexism’ is a lesser thing to be tarred with than ‘racism’, and judges may err on the side of caution. Secondly, the topic of domestic violence has long since been a hot potato for those inside the legal system, due to its wide-ranging implications.
The argument goes as follows:
To qualify as a political refugee or asylum seeker under the Refugee Convention, you have to be part of a distinct group that is suffering from the denial of your rights. Your rights are defined by whatever conventions your home country has signed, or the human rights act of whatever country you end up in as your first ‘safe zone’. These rights are political in nature: the right to vote, to appear in public, etc. They are centred on the public sphere: the things you do out in the open. The home - the private sphere - is not covered by your political rights. The way of dealing with domestic abuse is to report it to the authorities, and then wait for them to investigate. You cannot ask for asylum based on domestic abuse, as it is the home country’s duty to intercede on your behalf.
Here’s where it gets tricky. Your home country doesn’t have to protect you. It only has to show that it has followed the proper process. The authorities have to demonstrate due diligence on the part of protecting its citizenry. So, if you turn up and say you’ve been raped, they have the duty to actually file a report etc, but not to bring a conviction. You can argue that governments not policing certain areas are failings in due diligence in protecting the residents of those areas - but these must be public areas that the government would have normal access to.
So. In asking for asylum due to domestic violence, you are denied this status because:
1. [when applying as part of a group] Domestic violence victims have been ruled to not be part of a discrete group. There is no way of putting a fence around them, basically.
2. [when applying as an individual] The government of the home country often does not have access to the home, and therefore it does not have due diligence failures in not intervening. The difficulties of reporting and bringing a case of domestic violence to court are not a significant factor here.
The problem of saying that domestic violence is something that all women must be protected from - that the right to not beaten half to death supersedes the right to privacy and government intervention - is that it makes reason 2 fall down on its head. Suddenly, if this right is judged higher than the right to the political right of a lack of government influence, then a large group of women can band together, call themselves “Women of Village X” and claim under reason 2, and they will have to be granted asylum. This is the real problem: it opens up a VERY broad category under which asylum must, according to international law, be granted.
A case like this was brought to the Canadian court (I think it was Canadian…) where women from another developed country (Australia?) asked for asylum based on domestic violence. The women argued that by leaving their country, they would be protected from their abusers, and that their home country had failed in its duty to protect them. The case failed: the judge argued that Canada was no better equipped to protect these women from domestic violence than the originating country. This is another issue: in saying that domestic violence is illegal, above the considerations of religious freedom etc, and it is grounds for asylum, we are making a statement that this country is better equipped to deal with victims of domestic violence than any other country. This is (arguably) not the case, and we are more or less in the same boat. In recognising domestic violence as grounds for asylum, however, it recognises it as a failure of due diligence - which opens up the domestic government to accusations of human rights failures, right here at home.
I understand why these judges ruled as they did. The right to religious freedom is held to be one of our highest rights. The issue is not a confrontation between multiculturalism and women’s rights but, rather, that public rights - the right to religious and political freedom - are judged to be higher than personal rights. The ICESCR is largely ignored where it concerns individuals. Protecting individuals is a difficult business for governments, who find it a lot easier to protect groups. Groups can be defined, and can be protected by law. The protection of individuals has somehow been pushed to the domain of NGOs and special interest groups, who will fight on behalf of a single individual, and will shelter those the government can’t or won’t protect. The problem here is where legal protection is not only denied to these individuals, but it is actively stripped away. These last few rulings will serve as precedent: the religious right of the man is a higher right than the individual’s right to not be beaten.
Interestingly, the right to religious freedom does not appear to extend to terror suspects. If you beat or kill a single person, your religious views grant you leniency. If you try to blow up a bus or train, your religious views are used to impose a stiffer sentence. Proponents of multiculturalism never advocated creating enclaves with their own internal laws, created and enforced by the strongest and most brutal members. That nightmare has been our very own invention.
Johann Hari: How multiculturalism is betraying women
It would be easy to congratulate ourselves on our tolerance of the fanatically intolerant
Published: 30 April 2007
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.
What the article is pointing out is the inherent racism in the belief that women’s rights and feminism is a ‘Western’ concept, and that tolerance of others includes tolerance of the oppression of others. In other words, instead of our legal system acknowledging different backgrounds as motivation, yet still acknowledging that the law has been broken and acting accordingly, a significant number of people are being put outside of the law through the excuse of ‘multiculturalism’. This is not the aim of the proponents of multiculturalism, but is the result of the high-jacking of this phrase by the PC brigade. Multiculturalism does not mean that UK law does not apply, or that certain people within UK territories are not entitled to their human rights. It means that the UK legal system should be flexible when dealing with the background and beliefs of the citizenry it is supposed to server - all of them.
What Hari is missing in his commentary is some of the reasons why these verdicts - and this view - are on the increase. Firstly, ‘sexism’ is a lesser thing to be tarred with than ‘racism’, and judges may err on the side of caution. Secondly, the topic of domestic violence has long since been a hot potato for those inside the legal system, due to its wide-ranging implications.
The argument goes as follows:
To qualify as a political refugee or asylum seeker under the Refugee Convention, you have to be part of a distinct group that is suffering from the denial of your rights. Your rights are defined by whatever conventions your home country has signed, or the human rights act of whatever country you end up in as your first ‘safe zone’. These rights are political in nature: the right to vote, to appear in public, etc. They are centred on the public sphere: the things you do out in the open. The home - the private sphere - is not covered by your political rights. The way of dealing with domestic abuse is to report it to the authorities, and then wait for them to investigate. You cannot ask for asylum based on domestic abuse, as it is the home country’s duty to intercede on your behalf.
Here’s where it gets tricky. Your home country doesn’t have to protect you. It only has to show that it has followed the proper process. The authorities have to demonstrate due diligence on the part of protecting its citizenry. So, if you turn up and say you’ve been raped, they have the duty to actually file a report etc, but not to bring a conviction. You can argue that governments not policing certain areas are failings in due diligence in protecting the residents of those areas - but these must be public areas that the government would have normal access to.
So. In asking for asylum due to domestic violence, you are denied this status because:
1. [when applying as part of a group] Domestic violence victims have been ruled to not be part of a discrete group. There is no way of putting a fence around them, basically.
2. [when applying as an individual] The government of the home country often does not have access to the home, and therefore it does not have due diligence failures in not intervening. The difficulties of reporting and bringing a case of domestic violence to court are not a significant factor here.
The problem of saying that domestic violence is something that all women must be protected from - that the right to not beaten half to death supersedes the right to privacy and government intervention - is that it makes reason 2 fall down on its head. Suddenly, if this right is judged higher than the right to the political right of a lack of government influence, then a large group of women can band together, call themselves “Women of Village X” and claim under reason 2, and they will have to be granted asylum. This is the real problem: it opens up a VERY broad category under which asylum must, according to international law, be granted.
A case like this was brought to the Canadian court (I think it was Canadian…) where women from another developed country (Australia?) asked for asylum based on domestic violence. The women argued that by leaving their country, they would be protected from their abusers, and that their home country had failed in its duty to protect them. The case failed: the judge argued that Canada was no better equipped to protect these women from domestic violence than the originating country. This is another issue: in saying that domestic violence is illegal, above the considerations of religious freedom etc, and it is grounds for asylum, we are making a statement that this country is better equipped to deal with victims of domestic violence than any other country. This is (arguably) not the case, and we are more or less in the same boat. In recognising domestic violence as grounds for asylum, however, it recognises it as a failure of due diligence - which opens up the domestic government to accusations of human rights failures, right here at home.
I understand why these judges ruled as they did. The right to religious freedom is held to be one of our highest rights. The issue is not a confrontation between multiculturalism and women’s rights but, rather, that public rights - the right to religious and political freedom - are judged to be higher than personal rights. The ICESCR is largely ignored where it concerns individuals. Protecting individuals is a difficult business for governments, who find it a lot easier to protect groups. Groups can be defined, and can be protected by law. The protection of individuals has somehow been pushed to the domain of NGOs and special interest groups, who will fight on behalf of a single individual, and will shelter those the government can’t or won’t protect. The problem here is where legal protection is not only denied to these individuals, but it is actively stripped away. These last few rulings will serve as precedent: the religious right of the man is a higher right than the individual’s right to not be beaten.
Interestingly, the right to religious freedom does not appear to extend to terror suspects. If you beat or kill a single person, your religious views grant you leniency. If you try to blow up a bus or train, your religious views are used to impose a stiffer sentence. Proponents of multiculturalism never advocated creating enclaves with their own internal laws, created and enforced by the strongest and most brutal members. That nightmare has been our very own invention.