Ralf Goergens

Earlier this year, a young Turkish woman was killed by her brother, to ‘restore the family’s honor’. As it recently turned out during the trial of the 19-year-old boy, she had been raped by a family member five years before her killing:

He said he was deeply unhappy and that he could only be happy were he to free himself from an old burden. Something terrible had happened in his family when he was 14, he said, something involving his sister. Ayhan apparently told Melek [his former girlfriend – RG] that if she knew what he had been through and witnessed, she would understand hy he had to do something his older brothers should have done years ago: kill Hatin.

Investigators now believe that Hatin was once raped by one of the men in her family. She was a victim of incest, and under her community’s crude code of honor it was not the rapist but the victim who should be held responsible.

It is generally the case that many victims of ‘honor’ killings had previously been victims of sexual and/or physical violence. Not that it were surprising, the sexual abuse often is, directly or indirectly, the motive for the killing. Directly if family members feel that the abuse itself is an unbearable stain on their honor, or indirectly, if the abuse makes the victim flee her family, again besmirching the family’s honor, so …

Sexual abuse in immigrant families also happens more often than in German families, for the authorities usually have no clue what is going on in them, and fathers, uncles, brothers etc take advantage of that. That has nothing to do with them being immigrants or for that matter Muslims per se, but it is a simple fact of life that some people will abuse the power they have over dependents, if they don’t have to fear punishment. The longterm solution would be to integrate immigrants more closely into our society, but currently multicultural doctrine is getting into the way of that. Right now it is still generally considered taboo to demand that German culture should be dominant in Germany. This also means that policies in regard to immigrants are short-sighted and counterproductive. For example, it currently isn’t possible to make successfully concluded German language lessons a precondition for welfare benefits. Immigrants living among people from the same country in a kind of ghetto therefore have no incentive to overcome their phlegm and finally learn German. Some do so voluntarily, but not nearly enough of them. Many live for decades in this country, without ever getting around to it, with obvious consequences – their ability to find work is very limited, they are unable to help their children in school or get ahead in in general, and getting back to my original point, they are stuck in a way of living that remains opaque to the outside world, putting them and/or their children at the mercy of family members, co-religionists, or whoever else might want to harm them.

To be sure, the political climate is changing gradually, and multiculturalism has begun to fall out of favor, but it will be a while yet until the roots of the problem can be effectively attacked. In the meantime tragedies like the one described above will remain all too common.

James Joyner points out that the IAEA is receiving this year’s Nobel Peace Prize because of its opposition to the Bush Administration, while having failed in its stated mission to prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons. Hardly an improvement about past laureates like Jimmy Carter or Yasser Arafat.

Environmental groups aren’t happy either. Last month Greenpeace accused the IAEA of being a front group for the nuclear industry, downplaying the consequences of Chernobyl:

Greenpeace accused the International Atomic Energy Agency of deliberately trying to down play the death toll of the Chernobyl accident as part of the nuclear industry’s continued attempt to portray itself as an acceptable future energy source. During a two-day conference in Vienna, the Agency presented a report claiming that ultimately some 4,000 deaths can be expected as a result of the world’s worst nuclear accident at Chernobyl in 1986. According to the IAEA “fewer than 50 deaths had been directly attributed to radiation from the disaster,” to date. The IAEA study does not cover all of the populations affected by Chernobyl fall-out but merely considers those who received a high radiation dose in the immediate wake of the accident – namely those ‘liquidators’ drafted in to carry out the immediate clean up of the site.

…

“It is appalling that the IAEA is whitewashing the impacts of one of the most serious industrial accident in human history. It is a deliberate attempt to minimize the risks of nuclear power in order to free the way for new reactor construction,” said Jan Vande Putte, Greenpeace International nuclear campaigner.

I’m no fan of Greenpeace, nor am I opposed to the use of nuclear energy – strong doubts about breeder reactors aside – but this is a fair point. The IAEA isn’t so much a watchdog, but indeed a lobby for the use of nuclear energy. It would be highly unrealistic to expect that its members are unaffected by commercial considerations. This goes both for the investigation of nuclear accidents, and indeed the nonproliferation of nuclear weapons.

Keeping that in mind, reaction of Greenpeace to the Nobel Peace Prize for the IAEA isn’t exactly surprising:

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From the Washington Post:

Musharraf told The Washington Post last week [the article is from September 24th, RG] that claiming rape had become “a moneymaking concern” in Pakistan. “A lot of people say if you want to go abroad and get a visa for Canada or citizenship and be a millionaire, get yourself raped,” he said. He later denied making the comments.

Not prepared for the backlash, he is now trying to weasel out:

Faced with the protests over his remarks that rape claims had become a way to make money, Musharraf subsequently told a women’s group that he had been misquoted.

He also told that to CNN and stuck to this story while attending the UN General Assembly, but considering the evidence it is hopeless:

The Post has posted an audio link to that section of the interview on http://www.washingtonpost.com/ . The link includes the full nine-minute discussion with Musharraf on the problem of rape in his country.

…

In the interview, Musharraf referred to the case of Mukhtar Mai, an illiterate 33-year-old-woman who attracted worldwide attention after she spoke publicly about having been gang-raped on the orders of a village council in 2002.
…
The Pakistani government blocked her from traveling to the United States to publicize the case.

And by local standards, Musharraf is a moderate and all-around good guy. Just as this former Prime Minister of Malaysia is a modererate and paragon of sanity, relatively speaking.

From earlier this month:

Microsoft is on track to outsource more than 1,000 jobs a year to China, according to blistering evidence released yesterday in Microsoft’s increasingly nasty spat with Google over an employee who jumped ship in July.

In a revelation that highlights the complexity of China President Hu Jintao’s visit to Seattle and Microsoft on Monday, legal filings detailed claims of how Microsoft had offended the Chinese government by not outsourcing as many jobs as promised to Chinese technology vendors.

Chief Executive Steve Ballmer visited China in 2003 and promised to step up the pace, from $33 million worth of work a year to $55 million a year, according to a statement by Kai-Fu Lee, a former vice president who left to work for Google in July. Lee was charged with smoothing over relations with China and finding jobs that could be shifted to Chinese contract workers.

(Emphasis mine).

This puts things into perspective, but still…:

“We are growing our work force there and will continue to do so; however, that growth has not and will not replace jobs here in Redmond,” spokeswoman Stacy Drake said.

The Chinese leadership has learned from the fate of the late Soviet Union, they are determined to keep things under control, no matter how far along economic liberalization is coming. Of course, tactics like these are pushing all the wrong buttons in the West. If there ever is a (inevitably highly destructive, mostly to China) trade war with China over this, it will be mostly due to Beijing’s short-sighted behavior. Unfortunately the risk is still worthwhile for the communists, in an extremely selfish kind of way, for they’d rather rule over a ruined country than have an increasingly prosperous China they are unable to control anymore.