Honour amongst Backward Camel-fucking Wastes of Semen

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/may/11/iraq.humanrights

This article raises a number of interesting questions, about Iraqi Shi'ite society, about women's rights in Arab countries, about cultural relativity and about how news becomes news.

But most of all, it raises an atavistic anger in me. It makes me want to tie Abdel-Qadir Ali's genitals to a truck and to floor the accelerator. It makes me want to use a barbed wire rope.

I suspect I'm not alone in this. If you believe in free love, if you believe in unconditional love of child, if you reject a parent's ownership of a child, even if you reject private justice, then there's no way you can feel that Abdel-Qadir is a sympathetic character. This is an act so self-evidently and disgustingly wrong that it's hard not to feel a violent revulsion for it.

Yet the Iraqi police felt he'd done the right thing and apparently congratulated him. His employers haven't fired him. There's no indication that he's done anything wrong.

To remind you, this is a man who choked, suffocated and stabbed his seventeen-year old daughter to death. Because she'd fallen in love - just fallen in love, she hadn't even become involved in a physical relationship - with a British soldier.

What kind of society accepts this? Sad to say, and without wanting to come over all Christopher Hitchens on you, it's an Islamic society.

I haven't read the Koran and am in no particular hurry to do so. I don't consider it particularly relevant what exactly it says about honour killings. What's relevant is that Abdel-Qadir Ali thinks it legitimises him murdering his daughter for having emotions he doesn't like.

Worse, he's proud.

'I have only two boys from now on. That girl was a mistake in my life. I know God is blessing me for what I did,' he said, his voice swelling with pride. 'My sons are by my side, and they were men enough to help me finish the life of someone who just brought shame to ours.'

I don't know about you, but I don't consider it to be a manly act to kill a defenceless woman because she embarassed you. I'd tend to consider that a sign that you have an emotional age of around six. And I tend to think that if your imaginary bearded figure in the sky approves of this, then it's probably a good job he doesn't exist.

Of course, it's unfair to blame Allah for this. Deities aren't real - you're welcome to disagree, but unless you produce proof of the existence of one or a rational reason to suppose that one exists, I'm just going to look at you pityingly just long enough to irritate you, then I'm going to ignore you - and they don't kill people. But they certainly provide an easy excuse for people to kill people.

And of course, it's not like Islam is supremely bad in this respect. Christianity has a significant amount of blood on its hands, Hindus have killed their fair share, Sikhs have killed significantly more than their fair share, the Shinto faith isn't exactly blameless (kamikazes etc.) and whilst neo-paganism hasn't killed many people, it is supremely retarded and the belief systems it thinks it is based upon didn't condemn brutal sprees of violence in any noticeable way.

Right, now I've established my credentials as an atheist dickhead and equal-opportunity hater, let's talk about the Islamic attitude to the rights of women.

Or rather, let's talk about the absence of such rights. Let's hear from Abdel-Qadir again:

'People from western countries might be shocked, but our girls are not like their daughters that can sleep with any man they want and sometimes even get pregnant without marrying. Our girls should respect their religion, their family and their bodies.'

Notice the pride in not being like the decadent west. I'm going to take a brief pause to take pride in my decadent morality, which rejects the idea of killing women because one can't cope with people who don't subject themselves entirely to one's will. You may want to do the same.

Now let's look at exactly what he says. "their religion", "their family" and "their bodies". Notice how Abdel-Qadir Ali is full of shit and incorrect pronoun use. He doesn't for a minute believe that a daughter of his has the right to do what she wishes with her body. If he did, he'd still have a daughter.

All this outrage may be cathartic, but sadly it doesn't accomplish much. The question is what can be done about it. And unfortunately, I suspect the answer is not much. We're talking about a deeply misogynistic society, perhaps only rivalled in the Horn of Africa. We're also talking about a fundamentally anti-western society. We can't tell them to stop being dicks on this, because being a dick on this is part of their culture and they aren't about to change because a group of people they don't like tell them to.

Perhaps we could have some impact in a stable Iraq, where armed militias propagating reactionary social norms didn't control the streets, but even then there wouldn't be much change. And plenty would still yearn for the old days. Hell, there's a substantial body of opinion that still yearns for outdated gender roles here in Britain. The only difference is that our Overton window isn't stuck in the seventh century. And besides, a stable Iraq is a pipe dream for at least a decade.

Some might ask if it is right to try to intervene. Aren't all cultures of equal worth? The answer is simple: no. If your culture oppresses the powerless, if it makes some people second-class citizens due to circumstances of their birth, then on that your culture is wrong. That's not to say we should all have the same monoculture, that's just to say that those who indulge in cultural relativism over these issues are moral cowards legitimising abhorrent behaviour. I'm sorry if you find this attitude dismissive, but that's because I'm sorry that you think such a principle shouldn't be dismissed out of hand. There is right and there is wrong and if you aren't prepared to argue for your definition of right and wrong, then you don't really believe in it. And if Abdel-Qadir is going to argue for his morality, we damn well have to argue for ours and against his.

To return to my previous question, what can we do? We can't eliminate gender-bias in thinking or any other kind of discrimination, but we have to marginalise it. I could live with a separation of church and state, as in Turkey and the USA, but that's not enough. A more progressive form of Islam is needed, one that accepts that the world has changed since Heraclius was the Roman Emperor and that the morality within the Koran is not absolute.

Unfortunately, what I'm essentially arguing for is Islamic Anglicanism, and Anglicanism is the ideal religion for an atheist, since it doesn't really matter what you believe. So I'm at something of an impasse. Progress has been made in some areas - the Hudood Ordinance is no more - but not enough. When a sign of advance is the Saudi government considering allowing women to drive, you know the situation is bad.

In the end, I just find myself throwing up my arms in the air and praying that I'm wrong and there is a god, or at least a devil, and that Abdel-Qadir Ali will face a wailing and a gnashing of teeth. There's no obvious solution to this that I know of, only a feeling that there ought to be vengeance for this.

Crisis in Kurdistan - How a Parliamentary Resolution Could Harm Turkey and Iraq

This is very definitely a bad sign.

Turkey's Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, is reportedly planning to introduce legislation in parliament granting the Turkish military authority to launch sustained military operations into Iraqi Kurdistan against PKK training camps, in response to a series of attacks from that group, which amongst other things killed 13 Turkish soldiers in an ambush in Sirnak province.

Whether or not Erdogan uses this authorisation (and reports are that he may not, being less than sanguine about the chances of such operations succeeding) it would nevertheless do much to destabilise the only region of Iraq where a degree of stability is to be found, poison Turkish-U.S. and Turkish-Iraqi relations, complicate U.S. withdrawal from Iraq, present the Turkish military with the opportunity to start a war on their own initiative and endanger the (already somewhat threatened) democratic regime in Turkey.

Before we go any further, some background.

Turkey, unlike the other Muslim-majority states in the Middle East, is a secular democracy. It is also one of the few states in the area whose borders were not determined by early 20th century imperial power-politics.

Credit for this can largely be laid at the door of one Mustafa Kemal, better known to the world as Ataturk, who in the aftermath of World War I defeated enemies on all sides to create a new and resurgent nation, Turkey, from the ashes of the Ottoman Empire, 'the sick man of Europe'.

Ataturk was very much of his time, fiercely nationalistic but also envious of western modernisation and contemptous of what he viewed as Muslim backwardness. His ideology, Kemalism, continues to be the basis of modern day Turkey.

The trouble is that not everyone in Turkey supports Kemalism. Foremost amongst its opponents are the Kurds. The Kurds are a distinct ethnic group historically concentrated in south-eastern Anatolia and northern Mesopotamia. Nowadays, that are covers parts of Iran and Syria, the northern regions of Iraq and several provinces in south-eastern Turkey. The Kurds got a raw deal from Kemalism which, with its inherent emphasis on Turkish national identity, repressed them as a dissident group. Not unnaturally, they tended to respond to this in a dissident manner.

The most recent manifestation of this is the PKK, the Kurdistan Workers' Party. Founded in the late 1970s, since then it has waged a campaign of terrorism and guerilla warfare against the Turkish state, largely from bases in Syria, Iraq and Iran. It has declared ceasefires on several occasions, but as the Turkish government has always refused to negotiate with it or recognise that its aim of secession has any legitimacy whatsoever they have never lasted.

In 1999 its erstwhile leader, Abdullah Ocalan, was arrested and sentenced to death (the sentence was later commuted to life without parole when Turkey abolished the death penalty). In captivity he renounced violence, just as he had largely abandoned communism when the Soviet Union fell. Without the support of Ocalan, their charismatic figurehead, for their violent campaign, the PKK soon found itself branded a terrorist organisation by those western governments that did not already consider it to be such already.

So far, so standard. Hopeless and violent secessionist movements by oppressed minorities denied their right to self-determination are not rare on this planet. The invasion of Iraq, however, threw a whole new element into the mix.

Since the end of the Gulf War, the No-Fly Zone in northern Iraq had effectively been an independent Kurdish state. This, combined with increasing Turkish pressure on the Assad government, led to a greater reliance on Iraq rather than Syria as a safe haven for the PKK. For this reason, as well as the potential trouble an independent Kurdish state could cause them, led Turkey to be unenthusiastic about the Iraq War and to seriously consider invading from the north as the regime collapsed in the south.

Calmer heads prevailed, but the situation has never been less than tense. Although there have been back-channel communications with Barzani, the leader of the Kurdish region in Iraq, relations are not good and even a threat to invade could lead to further deterioration of relations. It would also place the U.S. in a quandary - either publically force Turkey to back down, alienating a regional power that is one of the few countries in the Middle East that should be a strategic ally, or let it intervene in Iraq, potentially starting a regional conflict (and certainly precipitating an influx of Islamic fighters to combat any Turkish presence) and giving Iran free rein to intervene, on the grounds that Turkey would already be doing the same without repercussions.

I think we can all agree that would be a bad thing. Add to that the fact that most withdrawal plans from Iraq involve either leaving a force in the Kurdish areas or withdrawal to bases in Turkey and you have an added complication. But the problem goes wider than that. It threatens the long-term future of democracy in Turkey.

Turkey is currently governed by the AKP, the Truth and Justice Party. This is a party with Islamist roots which it claims it has renounced. It is pro-European, culturally conservative, denies it has any desire to remove Turkey's status as a secular state and draws much of its support from the poorer eastern regions of the country. Perhaps the best way of thinking of it is as an Islamic variant on the Christian Democrats. Following in its footsteps, similar parties have been gaining ground in other Muslim democracies, most recently in Algeria.

The Turkish establishment, however, remains sceptical of the party. Partly this is due to suspicions that it is really more radical than it lets on, partly this is because the establishment is much more urban and prosperous than the AKP's base voters, who have traditionally had their interests ignored by the Turkish state.

Tensions came to a head most recently with the presidential elections. In April the AKP, who held slightly fewer than the two thirds of MPs needed to elect the president, put forward Abdullah Gul as their candidate to replace the outgoing Ahmet Necdet Sezer. Opposition parties refused to vote, however, making it impossible for a quorum to be reached. Meanwhile, a statement appeared on the website of the Turkish Armed Forces which many viewed as a not very veiled threat of a coup. When no resolution could be found, a new general election was called.

Although the AKP ended up losing seats, it substantially increased its share of the vote and its primary opponent, the CHP, lost considerably more seats. This time a sufficiently large number of MPs participated, allowing Gul to be elected in the third round of voting.

The military was not terribly happy with this. Though it has remained silent, the Chief of the General Staff did not attend Gul's swearing in and there is a palpable tension in the air. The PKK's attack has strengthened the hand of the military, which is rigidly Kemalist and wants action against the PKK, whereas the AKP has suggested that Kemalism may need to be modified to take into account changed conditions in Turkey and is more inclined to attempt to find a peaceful settlement to the Kurdish issue.

Given that the Turkish military has a record of taking independent action and of toppling those governments it disapproves of, the fear has to be that they may attempt to use the coming parliamentary resolution to exacerbate the conflict with the PKK, either by launching an invasion off their own bat or by abusing the rules of 'hot pursuit'. Should Erdogan and Gul try to prevent this, then the army's stance suggests that the government in Ankara might find itself forcibly removed from power. And it's hard to see who that benefits aside from Islamists opposed to even trying to take a parliamentary route.

Be afraid. Things could get much worse.