We need a giant cultural condom

From Sunny Hundal at the New Statesman:

The left cannot remain silent over "honour killings"

We have become complicit in this epidemic of abuse and violence by not doing more to challenge it.

The murder of the teenager Shafilea Ahmed is likely to stand out in British history as a particularly gruesome example of what we now refer to as "honour killings". Shafilea had warned that her parents were trying to marry her off to Pakistan; others knew she had sustained injuries from beatings by her parents; she had even tried to commit suicide in Pakistan. But right until the end, her own life was fated to be out of her control - she went missing in 2003 and her dismembered body was found a year later.
Shafilea's case wasn't a one-off. It took eight years for the murderers of the Sikh woman Surjit Athwal - her own husband and mother-in-law - to be brought to justice in 2007. It took ten years for Mehmet Goren to be jailed, in 2009, for murdering his daughter Tulay, because she fell in love with an older man of a different Muslim sect. Last year Gurmeet Singh Ubhi was found guilty of murdering his 24 year old daughter Amrit because the Sikh girl was dating a white man. There are others too - Heshu Yones, Banaz Mahmod, Nuziat Khan - the list of women murdered in the UK over their "honour" is depressingly long. 

Any decent person would be angry and sad when presented with these names. But it isn't enough to be sad: we have become complicit in this epidemic of abuse and violence by not doing more to challenge it. This should be a left-wing cause célèbre but instead there is an embarrassed silence. Left-wing activists robustly challenge racism and homophobia - so why isn't more being done to stand up to this social evil?...

There is a patronising attitude at work here, too: well-meaning liberals have been known to assume forced marriages and such abuse are an inherent part of Asian culture and therefore must be left alone. A few months ago, activist Jasvinder Sanghera's charity Karma Nirvana convinced a teacher in East London to put up posters at the school that said: "Forced Marriage is Abuse Not Cultural". But the posters were taken down and the charity was told the head was concerned they would upset Muslim parents.

Honor killings are the penultimate war on women (femicide by abortion and female infanticide is the ultimate war).

Note that both both honor killings and femicide are treated by the left with virtual silence, and in fact in important ways are abetted by the left. China's totalitarian One-Child Policy-- which, along with communism, is the most egregious crime against humanity since the Holocaust-- has been championed by the left, and much of the rationale for it was advanced in the 1970's by prominent scientists and population-control fanatics. John Holdren, President Obama's senior science advisor, is the most powerful scientist in the United States, and has in extensive writings in the past advocated forced abortions and mass involuntary sterilizations.

Although Holdren now claims to not support coercive population control measures, he has been virtually silent on the abuse of science to justify totalitarian population-control schemes. In fact, leftist scientists like Holdren have been instrumental in laying the theoretical groundwork that is used to justify such policies. The Catholic News Service notes:

Coercive population control measures, including forced sterilizations and abortions, have been used in China’s one-child policy. In Peru in the 1990s, the U.S. Agency for International Development and the United Nations Population Fund provided support for what became an involuntary sterilization program which victimized an estimated 300,000 women.

On honor-killings, the left has been notably unwilling to criticize the religious and cultural practices of the primary cause of honor killings in the West-- Islam.  When was the last time you heard a leftist refer to honor killings as a "war on women"? When was the last time you heard a leftie mayor at a ground-breaking ceremony for a government-funded mosque excoriate Muslims for their degradation and violence against women? Against gays?

Birds chirping.

The double-standard of the left regarding Islam and Christianity is breath-taking. As I have noted before, Islam represents a very serious threat to the West. It has a very poor record on human rights.

The left is an even more serious threat. It has not a shred of genuine morality. It is the ideology of power, abetted by relativism. Leftism (and its metaphysical correlate-- atheism) is like AIDS, inflicted on a society. It stirs racial hate for naked political reasons, and it is largely responsible for the disintegration of the family in many parts of our society. The left is almost wholly responsible for gun violence in the United States. Nearly all gun violence in the U.S. is committed by people in leftist-Democrat municipalities-- violence committed by leftist Democrats against leftist Democrats in municipalities governed by leftist Democrats.

The left kills by weakening a culture's resistance to diseases like violence and family disintegration.

We need a giant cultural condom to protect us from the left.