Time Immortal

…I know that a lot of the guys I worked with in restaurant kitchens would make a point of frying every last bit of this guy’s food in bacon grease.

A Pakistani man accused of killing his daughter five days after she filed for divorce to end her arranged marriage wept in court Tuesday, telling a Clayton County magistrate he is innocent.

“I have done nothing wrong,” Chaudhry Rashid told Chief Magistrate Daphne Walker through interpreter Younis Farhat. Farhat said Rashid speaks primarily Urdu and Punjabi.

But police say Rashid, 54, used a bungee cord to strangle Sandeela Kanwal, 25, early Sunday morning in the family’s Utah Drive home in Jonesboro.

Rashid, who is being held without bond, told the judge he wanted to observe his Muslim beliefs in the Clayton jail. He wants to follow a diet that forbids the consumption of pork in any form and requires other meats are prepared according to Islamic rules.

Sorry, Mr. Rashid, but you just brutally murdered your own daughter because she didn’t want to stay married to whatever man you sold her off to. About the last thing you get to do is dictate the menu that is served to you; indeed, what food you do receive is a courtesy.

One person was arrested in a search of the home of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Later-Day Saints, a group of “breakaway” former Mormons — led by one Warren Jeffs — who practice polygamy. Apparently, there was an investigation underway “related to the marriage of an underage girl.”

Somewhat less reported in the news, of course, are those missing British schoolchildren, a phenomenon that this blogger is almost certain can be found, albeit to a lesser extent, both in Canada and the U.S.

Just to be clear: in parts of the world, thousands of young girls are being effectively sold into arranged marriages at a very young age. No arrests seem to be emerging from what sparse investigation into such practices is being done. And the people behind the disappearing schoolgirls are members of what may now be the most populous religion in the world.

But a rogue group of ex-Mormons numbering only a few hundred are worth a full-on investigation complete with arrests, and all because one underage girl may have been married off?

I’m not trying to excuse what Jeffs et. al. were doing — polygamy disgusts me, as does the idea of underage marriage. And yes, O Reader, I realize that I’m discussing phenomena that have been reported in different nations, and so in a sense am comparing apples to kumquats. That acknowledged, can any of us say that we labour under the delusion that, were a rampant phenomenon of underage arranged marriages being reported in the American Muslim community, similar arrests would be made at the outcome of comprehensive police investigations? Or would police forces and federal agencies back down in the face of another lawsuit and media campaign by CAIR…not unlike how British police have similarly been cowed into looking the other way for fear of being branded as “racist” over across the Pond?

Update: Welcome, Steynians!

IT would seem that most end up essentially “sold into slavery” by familes that come from cultures that still believe in arranged/forced marriages.

But don’t worry, O Reader — Britain’s culture, like ours, is multicultural and tolerant, and all cultures are equal. We shouldn’t condemn. We should try and understand!

Update: Welcome, Steynians!

The Sunday Times points to medical research which finds that although British of Pakistani origins account for 3% of total births in Britain, they nonetheless account for one in three children born in Britain who suffer a genetic illness.

The Telegraph states that more than 55% of British Pakistanis are married to their first cousins. With the high incidence of shared recessive genes leading to birth defects and congenital illness, the only explanation for the rise of such conditions is through inbreeding, much of which has gone on for generations.

It is estimated that the chance of an unrelated couple having the same variant gene that causes such disorders is 1 in 100. Within first cousin marriages, these rise to one in eight. It stands to reason that if the parents of the couple themselves belong to a line of individuals who “traditionally” engage in cousin marriage, the odds of having a birth with recessive disorders would increase further still.

Bradford is said to have 75% of its Pakistani-origin marriages being between first cousins. The Telegraph mentions that Indian doctors last year published a study in Neurology Asia, which found that there was a “significantly higher rate” of epilepsy amongst the offspring of blood relatives. The study, entitled “Arranged marriage, Consanguinity and Epilepsy” by M. M. Mehndiratta, B. Paul and P. Mehndiratta, can be downloaded as a pdf document here.

arranged marriage, as I have repeatedly stressed, is closely connected to issues of forced marriage and honor violence. If Muslims who come to this country do not abandon this anti-libertarian custom for the sake of their future offspring, then perhaps it is time to outlaw arranged marriage or make it more difficult to achieve. There are plans by the government to make forced marriage easier to confront, though whether these will be successful will remain to be seen.

One one hand, we have the multiculturalist sentiment which teaches that all cultures are equal. On the other hand, we have sane people who can look at the idea of an arranged marriage to one’s cousin and say “that’s nuts, that is.”

In the past, such people would have been recognized as sane. Now we get branded as racists. Funnily, the problems we’d have had in mind when we denounced the practice didn’t go away simply because social pieties shifted.

Pace Chesterton, fallacies do indeed not cease to be fallacies, even when they become very long-lasting fads indeed.

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This one in England. Predictably, the suspected killer is…Muslim.

Yeah, yeah, I know…honour killing is not a part of Islam, it’s a cultural tradition that predates Islam. That’s all well and good in theory, but guess what…here’s another case where honour killing and Islam are directly partnered. Just like the last honour killings we heard about. And the one before that.

A Muslim teenager made a dramatic plea to be saved from her abusive parents a few months before she died in what police believe was an “honour killing”.

Shafilea Ahmed was seen with injuries on her neck, an inquest heard yesterday.

The westernised 17-year-old, who wanted to become a solicitor, was frightened her parents would send her to Pakistan and force her into an arranged marriage.

After running away from home, she told a local council housing officer: “There were regular incidents since I was 15 - one parent would hold me while the other would hit me.”

Which makes sense — she was, in her parents’ view — just property anyway. What else does one do with defective property, if not slap it around a bit? Good grief, what screwed-up traditions some people have.

In September [Shafilea] enrolled to continue her A-levels at Priestley College, Warrington, and made contact with Miss [Melissa Powner]. But before they could meet, Shafilea disappeared.

Her family did not raise the alarm, but police were called by a teacher after the teenager missed classes.

Her parents put their home on the market the same day, telling a potential buyer they were moving because their daughter had brought ’shame’ on the family.

It’s an honour killing, plain and simple. Her parents, orthodox Muslims both, murdered their own daughter because she had dared to want for a life of her own choosing, instead of being married off to some (likely much older) stranger in a country she probably felt no connection to. She wanted her own life…and her sentence for that crime was to be murdered and dumped by a river.

Of course, for those who insist that this is not an Islamic issue, there is still the alternative theory that it’s the fault of the taxi cabs. For, in addition to being Muslim, the suspected murderer in this latest case was a cab driver. Coincidence? Maybe…but I see that RightGirl has now had the same idea.

Yes, of course I’m being facetious.