The killings of Katie Summers and Tulay Goren
Posted on Friday 18 December, 2009
Filed Under Society
SEXUAL jealousy, personal insecurity, the pain of rejection, mental illness, twisted religious belief, and oh so many other reasons few of us could ever begin to comprehend; men murder women in a huge range of circumstances, as illustrated by two stories in the media this week.
Greater Manchester Police finds itself having to explain how it failed to stop Brian Taylor stabbing Katie Summers to death at the home she shared with their children, despite being called out 11 times in the 16 months before the fatality. Indeed, the Old Bill had contact with Ms Summers five times in the four days leading up to the crime.
Incidents such as this are by no means rare. On average, one or two women in this country are killed by partners or former partners every week.
Meanwhile, Londoner Mehmet Goren has been convicted of the premeditated murder of his 15-year-old daughter Tulay, because he was an Alevi Muslim and therefore disapproved of his daughter’s relationship with a Sunni Muslim twice her age. The part-time fish and chip shop worker drugged her with sleeping tablets prior to strangling her with a washing line.
The religious motivation qualifies the case as an ‘honour killing’, and there are on average 12 of them each year in England and Wales, the Home Office believes.
Compare and contrast what happened to Katie and what happened to Tulay, and we face some troubling and uncomfortable questions. Do we regard both under the generic heading of male murder of women, and thus no different in principle and so equally reprehensible?
Clearly domestic violence is a problem for all faiths and none, and it would be unfair to stigmatise Islam as somehow uniquely prone to its promotion. I’m uncomfortably aware that knocking the missus about a bit if the stupid cow gave you any lip was a feature of the white, nominally Christian, working class culture in which I grew up in 1960s Britain.
But to leave it at that implicitly sweeps the religiously specific nature of honour killings under the carpet. These murders very clearly justified on the back of a certain interpretation of Islam – and notice I say ‘one interpretation of Islam’, not Islam as such – and there are Muslim clerics in the Middle East who explicitly defend the practice.
Other Muslim leaders, including those feted by sections of the British left as ‘progressives’, limit themselves to preaching that it is permissible for a husband to admonish his wife ‘lightly with his hands, avoiding her face and other sensitive parts’.
But surely what happened to Tulay is an example of where divine sanction of even ‘mild’ violence against women can end up. The left wouldn’t consider that sort of talk acceptable from some cheap US televangelist huckster; why they find it any more acceptable from the mouth of Yusuf al Qaradawi is beyond me.
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Sorry the bloody cat got in the way, I meant to say, ‘that there was a young teenager executed in Somalia last week after being raped…’
John Palmer says: “That will not do Jim Denham and you know it”: I say I have condemned racism in every possible shape and form; when will you (JP) condemn Islamisism (*not* the same thing as Islam) for its contempt for 50 per cent of the population, and its fasistic hostility to the organised working class?
John Palmer said: “That will not do Jim Denham and you know it. If Ramadan were to intervene in this debate and obfuscate about any religious sanction for violence against women I would condemn that without hesitation.”
‘Anon’ says: “These early jurists ruled that it wasn’t adultery itself that was a crime but the sexual act itself and that four independent witnesses to the sexual act were required for a conviction. The death penalty was retained in theory to symbolise extreme social disapproval but the evidential requirements were raised so high that in practice it was impossible to convict anyone of the crime that carried that punishment.
“This is what Ramadan means when he summarises the views of traditionalist scholars who uphold the ruling as follows: “These penalties, therefore, are ‘almost never applicable’. The hudûd would, therefore, serve as a ‘deterrent’, the objective of which would be to stir the conscience of the believer to the gravity of an action warranting such a punishment.”
“In his proposal for a “moratorium”, Ramadan is trying to find a middle way between the majority of Islamic scholars who hold that traditionalist view and the minority who argue that the symbolic punishments should be scrapped completely.
“But all Islamic scholars are opposed to honour killings. What the traditionalists are upholding is, to repeat the point, a ruling designed to stop such killings taking place.”
John, ‘Anon’ may or may not be Ramadan or an apologist: but this is, surely an “obfuscat(ion) about … religious sanction for violence against women (that) I would condemn that without hesitation”…so do so, John.
Anon. Islam or its agents should not be making any rulings!
A teeny-weeny little bit of cross-reading on anyone’s part will confirm that the issue of the provision of guaranteed-Halal food in prisons and other places of detention is currently a standard demand of gimmie-gimmie-gimmie Muslim bodies in the entire Anglosphere plus Western Europe.
Muslims occupy a disproportionate amount of prison space in Britain, so Halal butchers and grocers have a ready market – a captive market, quite literally – and in La Belle France, where Muslims occupy fully HALF the cell space, supplying provisions for their co-religionists provides employment for literally thousands of Muslims.
Concerning Somali immigrants and the vibrant enrichment they have brought with them wherever they have settled, the facts speak for themselves. Whether in Maine, Minnesota, Finland, Australia or Blighty, they have made the lives of all around them far more exciting and – dare one say – challenging.
Again, John Palmer and other interested persons need only spend a few minutes doing some cross-reading. Try any search engine and see what show up.
This is from what John Palmer would call a doubleplusungoodthinkful site. Information of this sort is either untrue, distorted or so ungoodthinkful that it deserves to be suppressed whether it is true or not. This concerns Somalis in Ottowa:
http://www.amren.com/mtnews/archives/2008/12/no_jail_for_mot.php
However, most of the stuff on ‘American Renaissance’ is clipped from the MSM – up to and including the ever-dhimmitude-friendly ‘Grauniad’
The ongoing saga of Somalis in Lewiston, Maine, is a classic tale of its kind. Resettled as tragic “refugees from their war-torn homeland”* they were initially dumped in Atlanta but they found the attitudes of local blacks unwelcoming.
Word subsequently reached them that Catholic charities in Lewiston, Maine, were eager to show practical Christian kindness – and bask in some very enjoyable camera time – so many Somalis left Atlanta and duly headed for New England.
A handful of nasty locals – inevitably decribed as “white supremacists” – mounted a demonstration against the resettlement of Somalis but were easily shouted down by the Maine equivalent of ‘United Against Fascism’ and similar goodthinkful people, including the sort of senior pol;ice officers who have attended plenty of ‘diversity and inclusion’ courses at public expense and, of course, local politicians eager to advertise their own goodness and righteousness.
Most of the Maine-resident Somalis subsist on welfare or in marginal occupations; despite this, they have no trouble procreating in abundance. Four kids would be a small fam,ily; six or eight the norm.
It took a few years for the citizenry of Lewiston to catch on to the unpalatable fact that “swarmings” – fast muggings/beating perpetrated by a group – have become a feature of local life.
Again, John Palmer might spare a little time to check things out for himself instead of displaying a Dave Spart reaction to whatever displeases him.
JimD: See what I wrote above: I made it clear I condemn any clerical obfuscation about violence against women including any obfuscation by Ramadan. NOW – will you condemn the increasingly strident racism of “Bill Corr” – who is eagerly exploiting the space opened up by the Islamophobes on this thread. His last 2 posts signal quite clearly his political provenance. Why hesitate any further?
Who gives a toss what ‘Bill Corr’ thinks.
He’s clearly some Yank nutter.
And who gives a bleeding toss what that lot thinks.
John, I don’t recall much of your protests when a certain individual began Rwandan holocaust denial on the Red Pepper site.
I left myself because that *really* stank.
John Palmer. Still trying to figure out what this ficticious Islamaphobia is. Who made it up John!(perhaps some loon on the left). What is it! Who has fallen foul of this newly created phenomena! Can you name anyone that has been diagnosed!
Andrew – I have no responsibility for Red Pepper and did not see the article you refer to. So I am at a loss to know what your intervention is about. What I do know is that the paranoid campaign in France against the right of women to wear the Muslim veil has now been well and truly colonised by the right and the far right. Some achievement for the “secular left.”
As for Mr Glesga: your inability to understand obsessive Islamophobia may be just due to ignorance. But did you ever have the same problem with anti-semitism?
Bill Corr is really called Bill Corr and not ‘Bill Corr’ – yet these days there is a far better-known person of exactly the same name campaigning to keep youngies and ciggies far apart, a cause of which I half-heartedly approve, too. He’s now an Obama appointee.
It is many a year since I set foot in any part of the USA, or even the absurd Pacific territory of Guam. Nor was I ever an American.
However, while in Boston in the early nineties I was told, at some length, by the sort of bluecollar Bostonians – of the kind who think of themselves, absurdly, as ‘Boston Irish’ – about the great days of ROAR – ‘Restore Our Alienated Rights’ – and the bussing crisis; leaping out of bed in the dark, filling flasks of coffee, piling on tons of clothes and being on the picket lines with bullhorns to greet the buses coming from Roxbury.
“BUS THEM BACK TO AFRICA!”
Not at all the sort of activity of which John Palmer would approve.
Coates the Pabloite mentions Africa and the Rwandan population downsizing. An old NGO-er [disillusioned but not at all embittered] once told me that Gerneral Mikhael Kalashnikov had done far more for population control in Africa than all the WHO-approved condom distributors. In the case of Rwanda, the manufacturers of ‘Diamond’ brand machetes – made in Kunming in the Province of Yunnan in the People’s Republic of China – could probably say the same with equal justification.
Bill Corr strikes me as a bloke who’s been roun the block a few times and has observed how other soceties are organised. He’s probbly a disillusioned socialist. Can’t blame him for that. it’s very hard to keep the faith these days. Andrew Coates has informed me that John Palmer (former Guardian journalist) has some Euro-job in Brusssels. I don’t like to jump to conclusions, but it’s well known that ‘He who pays the piper, calls the tune.’.
Sue R.
No! No!
It is inconcievable even now in these debased and unlettered times that someone with an ill-informed fourteen-year-old YCL-er’s shallow opinions could have a Eurojob unless – sigh of relief here – it consists mainly of issuing press releases about the desired straighness, or crookedness, of EU bananas and about how saline [or not] the Baltic is becoming as a result of the horrific effects of Global Warming [or Global Cooling, depending on which terrifying scare is uppermost at any given time.]
If John Palmer lives in Brussels, is he acquainted with Jahjah, that esteemed Brussels resident of Lebanese provenance?
I’m sure he knows which Jahjah I mean:
“All asylum seekers tell lies …”
Dyab Abu Jahjah is the person whom I meant.
It is possible that he is enriching Antwerp rather than Brussels with his presence, providing political leadership to the Arabs of Belgium and urging them to reject assimilation.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyab_Abou_Jahjah#Controversies
Sue R you wrote:
“Can’t blame him for that. it’s very hard to keep the faith these days.”
What a terrible thread, instead of the keen, sharp debates of old, between socialists, what you’ve got is excuses for Bill Corr’s bigotry.
Not only that, you’ve got the silly notion of socialism as somehow a “faith”? ***
It beggars belief that these individuals once called themselves Marxists.
Once considered themselves to be radical, and could have even been frighteningly revolutionary, but now Daily Mailism takes over.
So instead of a global, internationalist view of the world, you’re left with little Englanders and their ingrained xenophobia.
What a terrible state of affairs.
They have become what they once rebelled against.
—
*** For those who manage to go through left-wing organisations for decades and didn’t grasp the point, socialism is not a faith, it is not an irrational belief in the hereafter or millenniumism.
Rather it is the view that capitalism is not the pinnacle of human development and a cooperative society can come about where profit, bigotry and alienation are not uppermost. It is a rational view that we are more than some material exchange, more than what we do for living, we are more than the money in our pocket (or lack of), and certainly, we are more than our political masters tell us, etc.,
So no, it is not a faith.