Irritated today by a radio interview I heard about the stupid Rihanna/Brown thing.
I can’t stand them, and am disappointed by how so many people are talking about them as though they matter…
But what really got my goat was the discussion NOT mentioning that Chris Brown is mentally ill.
The ‘expert’ went on about his “unfortunate lack of contrition”…
It sounded inane…like observing the lack of contrition of a schizophrenic.
And in the same vein…battered women are ILL TOO!
Why is this not more commonly observed?
Sane women, when punched in the face the first time…LEAVE.
CALL THE COPS.
SHOOT A GUN.
Do something, and seek recourse…take umbrage.
Insane women, seek that masochistic thrill over and over and over.
It’s been studied and reported on so many times in my life.
I am surprised that this whole episode is being discussed as though it were the 1950s or 1550s and not 2012, when we KNOW that..both parties to (chronic) Domestic Abuse are basically insane.
[And here, of course I am not looking to 'blame the victim', by any means...but observe a scientific reality]
I am not surprised, and am saddened that I am even babbling over this in this post.
I do not expect them, these “stars” to behave normally, nor do I expect people we may know, who are not celebrities, to behave normally .
Women who find themselves in a series of abusive relationships NEED HELP.
It is not easy, actually, to find the men who WILL actually punch you in the face, kick you when you’re down, and bruise you so it isn’t publicly visible…jesus.
You have to hunt for them.
This is the same reason I get infuriated when Honour Killing is quickly labelled, without thought, ‘Domestic Abuse’.
Honour Killing is Socially Sanctioned. It is a COMMUNITY CONSPIRACY.
Domestic Abuse, on the other hand involves the insanity of one, and more than usually, two.
INSANITY.
We can not analyze behaviours to seek normal reactions of (victim) escape, (perpetrator) contrition, etc.
The expert on the radio actually compared Brown with Michael Virk–the dude who abused DOGS (and is now apparently very contrite and making public service appearances).
Hurting a DOG is obviously different from hurting a human life partner. (and I never like placing animals as lesser than humans, but in domestic abuse situations, I must–you don’t have sex with your dog, you don’t have children with your dog, you don’t have the complexities of an adult human relationship with a dog)
C’mon people.
I hate when the media fails to spread knowledge, but merely perpetuates further ignorance.
I don’t have high expectations of the likes of Oprah, but this was CBC Radio.
______________________
I think in almost all circumstances both partners ought to be held on mental health legislation, for professional intervention and addressing underlying causal conditions.
I really enjoyed this film. Having been recently ruminating once more on the sociological pathology of Honour Killings and the necessity to control the chastity of young females in most patriarchical societies, this film made me wonder whether it was indeed the birth of the Austrian-’Jewish’ school of psychoanalysis which led to the advent of the liberation of female sexuality in Western society. This may be obvious to some, but I find the potential of this quite intriguing. Especially in light of my introduction to Otto Gross from this movie. He actually deserves a separate post on his own (soon). I think psychoanalysis may be owed a great debt by the Western Society generally, a society which today is quite distinct from its Victorian Era incarnation, having had so many taboos and inter-related psychic truths brought out of closets into the public to be acknowledged and dealt with.The writing in this film is quite erudite, making one almost want to take notes at times. Such as the questioning of WHY humans, while such sexual animals, have this overwhelming need to repress this sexuality at the same time. This of course, is what the foundation of psychoanalysis was all about–the search for an understanding of this unfortunate duality…which inevitably leads to emotional baggage in a great number of humanoids.This film is recommended for neurotic uber-ruminators. Perhaps as a elementary introduction to the history of psychoanalysis. Also do readThe Interpretation of Murder.
-rudhro
Keira Knightley in ‘A Dangerous Method’ — Oscar-Worthy or Laughable?
By Sharon Knolle
Sep 2nd 2011
Keira Knightley’s bold performance in David Cronenberg’s ‘A Dangerous Method’ is splitting critics at the Venice Film Festival, who are finding her role as an uninhibited mental patient “fabulous” or laughable. Either way, those who’ve seen the film agree that her approach is extreme. (more…)
After moving into my new tiny abode in a 1920s apartment buildingin Downtown Toronto last summer, I discovered a table in the basement laundry room where people were leaving one or two books to exchange. The first book I picked up and flipped to the first paragraph left me awestruck. I proceeded upstairs and did not put it down for the next several hours, perhaps days (i’m a slow reader). It begins in reality—-the historical reality, of Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud arriving in New York City in 1909 for the first time, by ship. This actually happened. But after this trip, they had a incredible cleavage in their professional and personal relationship. This novel weaves an intriguing, spellbinding tale of what occurred during their time in America and evokes fascinating aspects of psycho-analytical thought in the process. Not to ruin the surprise (oops)…but after the whole tale is told, the author –who happens to be Mr. Amy Chua (another favorite thinker of mine, World on Fire etc), reveals that the dialogue between these psychoanalytic titans throughout this fictional tale was in fact faithful to their actual correspondence at the time, via mail etc., all documented in history.
I had until then never read such a wickedly captivating tale. Although a fictional murder mystery, it leaves you not only entertained and thrilled, but educated as well. I really enjoyed this read, although I’ve noticed online that it has not been received as enthusiastically as I myself would recommend it.
-rudhro
__________
“A puritan society should ban us,” Freud observes about America. “It will ban you,” Jung replies, “as soon as it figures out what we are saying.”
Victoria Montenegro was abducted as a newborn by a military colonel. She testified last spring in the trial over baby thefts.
By ALEXEI BARRIONUEVO
October 8, 2011
BUENOS AIRES — Victoria Montenegro recalls a childhood filled with chilling dinnertime discussions. Lt. Col. Hernán Tetzlaff, the head of the family, would recount military operations he had taken part in where “subversives” had been tortured or killed. The discussions often ended with his “slamming his gun on the table,” she said.
It took an incessant search by a human rights group, a DNA match and almost a decade of overcoming denial for Ms. Montenegro, 35, to realize that Colonel Tetzlaff was, in fact, not her father — nor the hero he portrayed himself to be.
Instead, he was the man responsible for murdering her real parents and illegally taking her as his own child, she said. (more…)
This lecture was given at the Royal Society of Arts in London (The RSA) and was commissioned by them as part of their “RSAnimation” series of videos.
Why don’t we get the best out of people? Sir Ken Robinson argues that it’s because we’ve been educated to become good workers, rather than creative thinkers. Students with restless minds and bodies — far from being cultivated for their energy and curiosity — are ignored or even stigmatized, with terrible consequences. “We are educating people out of their creativity,” Robinson says. It’s a message with deep resonance. Robinson’s TEDTalk has been distributed widely around the Web since its release in June 2006. The most popular words framing blog posts on his talk? “Everyone should watch this.”
A visionary cultural leader, Sir Ken led the British government’s 1998 advisory committee on creative and cultural education, a massive inquiry into the significance of creativity in the educational system and the economy, and was knighted in 2003 for his achievements. His latest book, The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything, a deep look at human creativity and education, was published in January 2009.
“Ken’s vision and expertise is sought by public and commercial organizations throughout the world.”
“Red Cloud (Lakota: Maȟpíya Lúta), (1822 – December 10, 1909) was a war leader and the head Chief of the Oglala Lakota (Sioux). His reign was from 1868 to 1909. One of the most capable Native American opponents the United States Army faced, he led a successful conflict in 1866–1868 known as Red Cloud’s War over control of the Powder River Country in northwestern Wyoming and southern Montana. After the Treaty of Fort Laramie (1868), he led his people in the important transition to reservation life. Some of his US opponents thought of him as overall leader of the Sioux, but this was mistaken. The large tribe had several major divisions and was highly decentralized. Bands among the Oglala and other divisions operated independently, even though some individual leaders such as Red Cloud were renowned as warriors.” –wikipedia
A grieving couple retreat to ’Eden’, their isolated cabin in the woods, where they hope to repair their broken hearts and troubled marriage. But nature takes its course and things go from bad to worse… (more…)
Cultural pluralism is fine, writes Tristan Ewins, but it does not expunge the need for moral judgment.
In Australia, multiculturalism has risen to the point where it is now perceived as a symbol of our maturation as a diverse, cosmopolitan liberal society. Having broken decisively with that Eurocentric orientation which derived identity from the old ties of Empire, and with old reactionary notions of ‘racial purity’, Australia has emerged as one of the most culturally pluralist communities on the planet.
Countless Diaspora communities now call Australia home: African, Jewish, Kurdish, Greek, Serbian, Croatian, Turkish – Australia is a veritable patchwork of ethnic identities. As many commentators have suggested, the benefits of this process have been innumerable, emerging as a complex process of cross cultural fertilization that, at times, has worked to develop cross cultural understanding, sensitivity and rich cultural diversity.
And yet the multicultural phenomenon, which has been interpreted by many as comprising a policy of ‘cultural relativism’ and ‘anything goes’, could never have emerged were it not for the liberal political foundations upon which it was built. (more…)
Enrolled as I am in a course of the Multicultural City, for my Urban Planning Masters degree, I’ve been experiencing a niggling cognitive dissonance with the political perspectives, let’s say ‘slant’ of much of our classroom readings and discussions, of late. This dissonance, I found, I was not able to articulate to a fairly sophisticated, well-rounded argument until I came across this piece by Stanley Fish, who I am more familiar with as an occasional contributor to the NYT.
I have noted that in (my humble opinion) our Blind, Knee-jerk Leftish Canadian discourse of the trials and tribulations of nurturing the Multicultural Mosaic that is Canada–Yesterday, Today as well as Tomorrow–we lack some indeed very fundamental aspects, and gloss over those that perhaps may be found to be too sensitive or easily categorized as ‘politically incorrect’ lenses of analysis.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I am by no means a conservative, I am a socially conscious Canadian. I am the proud, progeny of immigrants to Canada. What I am though, and perhaps arrogantly (?) I perceive others around me as not, is a nuanced thinker. I like to ask questions. At times even meta-questions. I do not merely toe dogmatic lines of handed-down interpretation. Even “post-modern” analysis can somehow be turned into a dogmatic protocol, it seems to me.
From my perspective, discussions of Multiculturalism in Canada require depicting immigrants as zoo creatures, to be kept in captive enclosures of almost sacred respect and purity. Do visualize this metaphor, I cannot merely refer to this as ‘treated as children’, and it is key to see the zoo-like elements inherent in not involving a bi- if not multi- lateral interchange in that which is the “old” Canadian versus “new” Canadian interaction. (more…)
Milos MR, Macris DR. Circumcision: male – effects upon human sexuality. In: Human Sexuality: an Encyclopedia Vern L. Bullough and Bonnie Bullough. (eds.) New York: Garland Publishers, 1994:pp. 119-122
Circumcision, once accepted as the norm in the United States, has become controversial. Technically, circumcision is the surgical removal of the skin that normally covers and protects the head, or glans, of the penis. At birth, the penis is covered with a continuous layer of skin extending from the pubis to the tip of the penis where the foreskin (prepuce) folds inward upon itself, creating a double protective layer of skin over the glans penis. The inner lining of the prepuce is mucous membrane and serves to keep the surface of the glans penis (also mucous membrane) soft, moist, and sensitive. The prepuce is often erroneously referred to as “redundant” tissue, which allows the medical community and society-at-large to consider the foreskin an optional part of the male sex organ and, therefore, to condone its routine removal in a variety of procedures collectively known as “circumcision.”
Circumcision, however, was also a part of religious ritual, including Judaism and Islam as well as others. However, 85 percent of the world’s male population is not circumcised. Circumcision in 1992 was still the most commonly performed surgical procedure in America, where 59 percent of newborn males underwent this operation. Circumcision reached its peak of 85 to 90 percent during the 1960s and 1970s. The surgery, usually performed on baby boys within the first few days of life, is often considered “routine.” The most popular methods, the Gomcoclamp and the Plastibell procedures, differ somewhat in technique and instrumentation but the effects on the penis and the baby are basically the same. Most of the American circumcisions are not done for religious reasons, but rather, for hygienic ones. (more…)
by Phyllis Chesler Middle East Quarterly
Spring 2009, pp. 61-6
On February 12, 2009, Muzzammil Hassan informed police that he had beheaded his wife. Hassan had emigrated to the United States 30 years ago and, after a successful banking career, had founded Bridges TV, a Muslim-interest network which aims, according to its website, “to foster a greater understanding among many cultures and diverse populations.” Erie County District Attorney Frank A. Sedita III told The Buffalo News that “this is the worst form of domestic violence possible,” and Khalid Qazi, president of the Muslim Public Affairs Council of Western New York, told the New York Post that Islam forbids such domestic violence. While Muslim advocacy organizations argue that honor killings are a misnomer stigmatizing Muslims for what is simply domestic violence, a problem that has nothing to do with religion, Phyllis Chesler, who just completed a study of more than 50 instances of North American honor killings, says the evidence suggests otherwise. — The Editors
Amina Said (L), 18, and her sister Sarah, 17, were shot dead by their father Yaser at their home in Irving, Texas, in January 2008. Said was upset by his daughters’ “Western ways” and was assisted in the killing by his wife, the girls’ mother. The victims of honor killings are largely teenage daughters or young women. Unlike ordinary domestic violence, honor killings often involve multiple family members as perpetrators.
When a husband murders a wife or daughter in the United States and Canada, too often law enforcement chalks the matter up to domestic violence. Murder is murder; religion is irrelevant. Honor killings are, however, distinct from wife battering and child abuse. Analysis of more than fifty reported honor killings shows they differ significantly from more common domestic violence.[1] The frequent argument made by Muslim advocacy organizations that honor killings have nothing to do with Islam and that it is discriminatory to differentiate between honor killings and domestic violence is wrong.
Background and Denial
Families that kill for honor will threaten girls and women if they refuse to cover their hair, their faces, or their bodies or act as their family’s domestic servant; wear makeup or Western clothing; choose friends from another religion; date; seek to obtain an advanced education; refuse an arranged marriage; seek a divorce from a violent husband; marry against their parents’ wishes; or behave in ways that are considered too independent, which might mean anything from driving a car to spending time or living away from home or family. Fundamentalists of many religions may expect their women to meet some but not all of these expectations. But when women refuse to do so, Jews, Christians, and Buddhists are far more likely to shun rather than murder them. Muslims, however, do kill for honor, as do, to a lesser extent, Hindus and Sikhs.
The United Nations Population Fund estimates that 5,000 women are killed each year for dishonoring their families.[2] This may be an underestimate. Aamir Latif, a correspondent for the Islamist website Islam Online who writes frequently on the issue, reported that in 2007 in the Punjab province of Pakistan alone, there were 1,261 honor murders.[3] The Aurat Foundation, a Pakistani nongovernmental organization focusing on women’s empowerment, found that the rate of honor killings was on track to be in the hundreds in 2008.[4]
There are very few studies of honor killing, however, as the motivation for such killings is cleansing alleged dishonor and the families do not wish to bring further attention to their shame, so do not cooperate with researchers. Often, they deny honor crimes completely and say the victim simply went missing or committed suicide. Nevertheless, honor crimes are increasingly visible in the media. Police, politicians, and feminist activists in Europe and in some Muslim countries are beginning to treat them as a serious social problem.[5]
Willingness to address the problem of honor killing, however, does not extend to many Muslim advocacy groups in North America. The well-publicized denials of U.S.-based advocacy groups are ironic given the debate in the Middle East. While the religious establishment in Jordan, for example, says that honor killing is a relic of pre-Islamic Arab culture, Muslim Brotherhood groups in Jordan have publicly disagreed to argue the Islamic religious imperative to protect honor.[6]
Yotam Feldner, a researcher at the Middle East Media Research Institute, quotes a psychiatrist in Gaza who describes the honor killing culture as one in which a man who refrains from “washing shame with blood” is a “coward who is not worthy of living … as less than a man.” Therefore, it is no surprise that the Jordanian penal code is quite lenient towards honor killers. While honor killing may be a custom that originated in the pagan, pre-Islamic past, contemporary Islamist interpretations of religious law prevail. As Feldner puts it: “Some important Islamic scholars in Jordan have even gone further by declaring honor crimes an Islamic imperative that derives from the ‘values of virility advocated by Islam.’”[7]
Islamist advocacy organizations, however, argue that such killings have nothing to do with Islam or Muslims, that domestic violence cuts across all faiths, and that the phrase “honor killing” stigmatizes Muslims whose behavior is no different than that of non-Muslims. For example, in response to a well-publicized 2000 honor killing, SoundVision.com, an Islamic information and products site, published an article that argued,
Four other women were killed in Chicago in the same month … They were white, African-American, Hispanic, and Asian … Islam is not responsible for [the Muslim woman's] death. Nor is Christianity responsible for the deaths of the other women.[8]
In 2007, after Aqsa Parvez was murdered by her father in Toronto for not wearing hijab (a head covering), Sheila Musaji wrote in the American Muslim, “Although this certainly is a case of domestic violence … ‘honor’ killings are not only a Muslim problem, and there is no ‘honor’ involved.”[9] Mohammed Elmasry, of the Canadian Islamic Congress, also dismissed the problem. “I don’t want the public to think that this is an Islamic issue or an immigrant issue. It is a teenager issue,” he said.[10]
Indeed, denial is rife. In 2008, after Kandeela Sandal was murdered for honor by her father in Atlanta because she wanted a divorce, Ajay Nair, associate dean of multicultural affairs at Columbia University, told the media that “most South Asian communities in the United States” enjoy “wonderful” relationships within their families and said, “This isn’t a rampant problem within South Asian communities. What is a problem, I think, is domestic violence, and that cuts across all communities.”[11]In October 2008, Mustafaa Carroll, executive director of the Dallas branch of the Council of American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), dismissed any Islamic connection to a prominent Dallas honor killing, labeled as such by the FBI, arguing, “As far as we’re concerned, until the motive is proven in a court of law, this is [just] a homicide.” He continued, “We [Muslims] don’t have the market on jealous husbands … or domestic violence … This is not Islamic culture.” [12]
Case studies suggest otherwise.
Domestic Violence versus Honor Killing
Domestic violence is a significant problem in the United States. Between 1989 and 2004, 21,124 women died at the hands of an intimate; 8,997 men died in domestic violence during the same time period.[13] Because the U.S. Department of Justice does not catalogue the victim’s or murderer’s age, religion, ethnic background, or immigration status, it is not possible to know what proportion of these killings are honor-related.
Unni Wikan, a social anthropologist and professor at the University of Oslo, defines honor killing as “a murder carried out as a commission from the extended family, to restore honor after the family has been dishonored. As a rule, the basic cause is a rumor that any female family member has behaved in an immoral way.”[14] While honor killings are just a minority of total domestic violence in the United States and Canada, they constitute a distinct phenomenon. (See Table 1.) A 2008 Massachusetts-based study found that “although immigrants make up an estimated 14 percent of the state’s population, [they, nevertheless,] accounted for 26 percent of the 180 domestic violence deaths from 1997-2006.”[15]
Lenore Walker, author of The Battered Woman Syndrome,[16] agreed that fundamentalist immigrants control and patrol their women very closely. “Given the strict rules, there are a lot of things to kill them for,” she said. Walker confirmed the difference between the victim-perpetrator in honor killings and ordinary domestic violence:
In ordinary domestic violence involving Westerners, it is rare for brothers to kill sisters or for male cousins to kill female cousins. And while child abuse occurs in which fathers may kill infants and children, it is very rare for Western fathers to kill teenage daughters.[17]
Other discrepancies exist. Walker observed that Western men are more apt to kill little boys than girls in their family. “Women with postpartum depression kill their babies, and men may kill babies by shaken baby syndrome,” she explained. She did not “know of any batterers who are helped to commit the murders by their brothers or cousins or other family members. Occasionally, the man’s relatives may be in the house when the murder goes down, but that is quite rare in my experience.”[18]
The press has reported a number of honor killings in the United States, Canada, and Europe. These cases show the killings to be primarily a Muslim-on-Muslim crime. (See Table 2 and Table 3.) The victims are largely teenage daughters or young women. Wives are victims but to a lesser extent. And, unlike most Western domestic violence, honor killings are carefully planned. The perpetrator’s family may warn the victim repeatedly over a period of years that she will be killed if she dishonors her family by refusing to veil, rebuffing an arranged marriage, or becoming too Westernized. Most important, only honor killings involve multiple family members. Fathers, mothers, brothers, male cousins, uncles, and sometimes even grandfathers commit the murder, but mothers and sisters may lobby for the killing. Some mothers collaborate in the murder in a hands-on way and may assist in the getaway. In some cases, taxi drivers, neighbors, and mosque members prevent the targeted woman from fleeing, report her whereabouts to her family, and subsequently conspire to thwart police investigations.[19] Very old relatives or minors may be chosen to conduct the murder in order to limit jail time if caught.
Seldom is domestic violence celebrated, even by its perpetrators. In the West, wife batterers are ostracized. Here, there is an important difference in honor crimes. Muslims who commit or assist in the commission of honor killings view these killings as heroic and even view the murder as the fulfillment of a religious obligation. A Turkish study of prisoners found no social stigma attached to honor murderers.[20] While advocacy organizations such as CAIR denounce any link between honor killings and Islam, many sheikhs still preach that disobedient women should be punished. Few sheikhs condemn honor killings as anti-Islamic. Honor killings are not stigmatized.
Table 1: Differing Characteristics of Honor Killings and Domestic Violence
Honor Killings
Domestic Violence
Committed mainly by Muslims against Muslim girls/young adult women.
Committed by men of all faiths usually against adult women.
Committed mainly by fathers against their teenage daughtersand daughters in their early twenties. Wives and older-age daughters may also be victims, but to a lesser extent.
Committed by an adult male spouse against an adult female spouse or intimate partner.
Carefully planned. Death threats are often used as a means of control.
The murder is often unplanned and spontaneous.
The planning and execution involve multiple family members and can include mothers, sisters, brothers, male cousins, uncles, grandfathers, etc. If the girl escapes, the extended family will continue to search for her to kill her.
The murder is carried out by one man with no family complicity.
The reason given for the honor killing is that the girl or young woman has “dishonored” the family.
The batterer-murderer does not claim any family concept of “honor.” The reasons may range from a poorly cooked meal to suspected infidelity to the woman’s trying to protect the children from his abuse or turning to the authorities for help.
At least half the time, the killings are carried out with barbaric ferocity. The female victim is often raped, burned alive, stoned or beaten to death, cut at the throat, decapitated, stabbed numerous times, suffocated slowly, etc.
While some men do beat a spouse to death, they often simply shoot or stab them.
The extended family and community valorize the honor killing. They do not condemn the perpetrators in the name of Islam. Mainly, honor killings are seen as normative.
The batterer-murderer is seen as a criminal; no one defends him as a hero. Such men are often viewed as sociopaths, mentally ill, or evil.
The murderer(s) do not show remorse. Instead, they experience themselves as “victims,” defending themselves from the girl’s actions and trying to restore their lost family honor.
Sometimes, remorse or regret is exhibited.
Table 2: North American Honor Killings, Successful and Attempted
Victim Name (age)
Year, Location
Perpetrators’ Name, Origin
Motive
Method
Palestina Isa (16)
1989
St. Louis, MO
Maria & Zein Isa, parents, sisters also encouraged it / West Bank. (M)
“Too American,” refused to travel with her father, a member of the Abu Nidal Palestinian terrorist group, as “cover.”
Stabbed 13 times by father as her mother held her down.
Methal Dayem (22)
1999
Cleveland, OH
Yezen Dayem, Musa Saleh, cousins / West Bank. (M)
Refused to marry her cousin; attended college; sought independent career as elementary school teacher; drove her own car; too independent; turned back on her culture.
Two cousins allegedly shot her, choked on own blood.
Lubaina Bhatti Ahmed (39)
1999
St. Clairsville, OH
Nawaz Ahmed, estranged husband / Pakistan (M)
Filed for divorce.
Throat cut; her father, sister and sister’s young child’s throat also cut.
Farah Khan (5)
1999
Toronto, Canada
Muhammed Khan, father, and Kaneez Fatma, stepmother / unknown region. (M)
Suspected child was not his biologically.
Father and step-mother cut her throat, dismembered her body.
Jawinder “Jassi” Kaur (25)
2000
Pakistan
Gang of men hired by Malkiat Kaur, mother, and Surjit Sing Badesha, uncle / Canada/Pakistan (S)
Against her wealthy, farming parents’ wishes, married a man who was of inferior financial status, a Pakistani rickshaw driver.
Kidnapped, throat slashed
Shahpara Sayeed (33)
2000
Chicago, IL
Mohammad Harroon, husband / Pakistan(M)
Motive is unclear. But they had been fighting for months.
Burned alive
Marlyn Hassan (29)
2002
Jersey City, NJ
Alim Hassan, husband / Guyana (Hindu wife)(M)
His wife refused to convert from Hinduism to Islam.
Husband, an auto mechanic, stabbed wife (and the twins in her womb), the wife’s sister, and the wife’s mother.
Amandeep Singh Atwal (17)
2003
British Columbia, Canada
Rajinder Singh Atwal, father / East Indies (S)
Wanted daughter to end relationship with non-Sikh classmate, Todd McIsaac
Father stabbed daughter 11 times.
Hatice Peltek (39)
2004
Scottsville, NY
Ismail Peltek, husband / Turkey (M)
Had been molested by brother-in-law
Stabbed, bludgeoned with hammer along with daughters.
Aqsa Parvez (16)
2007
Toronto, Canada
Muhammad Parvez. father, Waqas Parvez, brother (M) / unknown region
Refusing to wear hijab.
Strangled
Amina Said (17)
2008
Irving, TX
Yaser Said, father; mother assisted / Egypt(M)
Upset by her “Western” ways.
Shot
Sarah Said (18)
2008
Irving, TX
Yaser Said, father; mother assisted / Egypt(M)
Upset by her “Western” ways
Shot
Fauzia Mohammed (19)
2008
Henriettta, NY
Goaded by mother, Waheed Allah Mohammed, brother / Afghanistan (M)
Too “Western,” immodest clothing, planned to attend college in New York City
Stabbed
Sandeela Kanwal (25)
2008
Atlanta, GA
Chaudry Rashid, father / Pakistan (M)
Filed for divorce after arranged marriage
Strangled
Legend: M = Muslim; S=Sikh
In these cases, the average age of the victims was 21.5, and 10 of the 14 were daughters. Importantly, more than half the cases involved multiple perpetrators. Nor is there a significant difference between honor killings in North America and Europe. Neither the average age (20) nor the percentage of daughters as victims in the European cases is significantly different from those in the North American cases. (See Table 3.)
Table 3: European Honor Killings
Victim Name
Year, Location
Perpetrators’ Name, Origin
Motive
Method
Surjit Athwal (27)
1998
lured to India from England
Bachan Athwal, grandmother-in-law, her son and another relative / India (S)
Having an affair, planning to divorce.
Lured to India for ‘family wedding’ and strangled.
Rukhsana Naz (19)
1999
England
Brother and mother / Pakistan (M)
Refused arranged marriage; pregnant with boyfriend’s baby.
Strangled by brother while held down by mother
Fadime Sahindal (32)
2002
Sweden
Father and brother / Kurds from Turkey (M)
Rejected arranged marriage; dated non-Muslim; sought higher education; sought legal remedy against father and brother.
Shot
Heshu Yones (16)
2002
England
Abdalla Yones, father / Iraq (M)
Dating a Christian; too Western.
Stabbed, throat cut
Sohane Benziane (17)
2002
France
Jamal Derrar, ex-boyfriend and schoolmates / Algeria(M)
Too Western
Raped, tortured, and burned alive
Anooshe Sediq Ghulam (22)
2002
Norway
Nasruddin Shamsi, husband / Afghanistan(M)
Failure to listen to her husband, divorce.
Shot
Maja Bradaric (16)
2003
The Netherlands
Nephew and 3 others / Bosnia (M)
Using Internet to find a boyfriend
Burned to death
Sahjda Bibi (21)
2003
England
Rafaqat Hussain, cousin / Pakistan (M)
Refused arranged marriage
Stabbed 22 times
Anita Gindha (22)
2003
Scotland
Relative suspected / Pakistan (S)
Married non-Sikh.
Strangled
Shafilea Ahmed (16)
2003
England
Parents suspected / Pakistan (M)
Opposed her parents’ plans for an arranged marriage
Strangled or smothered
“Gul” (32)
2004
The Netherlands
Husband/Afghanistan(M)
Sought divorce
Shot
Hatin Surucu (23)
2005
Germany
Three brothers / Turkey(M)
Fled forced marriage; did not wear scarf.
Shot
Rudina Qinami (16)
2005
Albania
Father / Albania (M)
Accepted ride by male, non-relative.
Shot
Banaz Mahmod (20)
2006
England
Mahmod Mahmod, father, her uncle Ari Mahmod / Kurds from Iraq (M)
Having an “affair”.
Raped, strangled
Samaira Nazir (25)
2006
England
Azhar Nazir, brother and cousin / Pakistan(M)
Fell in love with Afghan refugee; refused to consider arranged marriage in Pakistan
Stabbing, throat cut
Sazan Bajez-Abdullah (24)
2006
Germany
Kazim Mahmud, husband / Iraq (M)
Acting in an “immodest “way.
Stabbed, set on fire
Sabia Rani (19)
2006
England
Shazad Khan, husband and in-laws / Pakistan(M)
Wanted divorce
Beaten
Ghazala Khan (18)
2006
Denmark
Brother, father and other family members / Pakistan (M)
Family did not approve of husband
Shot
Caneze Riaz (39)
2006
England
Mohammed Riaz, husband / Pakistan(M)
Too westernized
Immolated
Sayrah Riaz (16)
2006
England
Mohammed Riaz, father / Pakistan (M)
Too westernized
Immolated
Sophia Riaz (15)
2006
England
Mohammed Riaz, father / Pakistan (M)
Too westernized
Immolated
Alicia Riaz (10)
2006
England
Mohammed Riaz, father / Pakistan (M)
Too westernized
Immolated
Hannah Riaz (3)
2006
England
Mohammed Riaz, father / Pakistan (M)
Too westernized
Immolated
Hina Saleem (21)
2006
Italy
Father and brother-in-law / Pakistan (M)
Did not respect Pakistani culture, divorced, wore clothing that showed her midriff
Stabbed
Sana Ali (17)
2007
England
Husband / Pakistan(M)
Not known, but detectives consider honor motive
Stabbed
Morsal Obeidi (16)
2008
Germany
Ahmad Obeidi, brother, and cousin / Afghanistan (M)
Wanted too much freedom; did not appreciate Muslim values
Stabbed
Legend: M = Muslim; S=Sikh
In both North America and Europe, family members conducted honor killings with excessive violence—repeatedly stabbing, raping, setting aflame, and bludgeoning—in more than half the cases. Only in serial-killing-type scenarios are Western women targeted with similar violence; in these cases, the perpetrators are seldom family members, and their victims are often strangers. Despite the obfuscation of Muslim advocacy groups, these case studies show that honor killings are quite distinct from domestic violence. Not all honor killings are perpetrated by Muslims, but the overwhelming majority are. Ninety percent of the honor killers shown in Tables 2 and 3 were Muslim. In every case, perpetrators view their victims as violating rules of religious conduct and act without remorse.
While the sample size is small, this study suggests that honor killing is accelerating in North America and may correlate with the numbers of first generation immigrants. The problem is diverse but originates with immigration from majority Muslim countries and regions—the Palestinian territories, the Kurdish regions of Turkey and Iraq, majority Muslim countries in the Balkans, Bangladesh, Egypt, and Afghanistan. Pakistanis accounts for the plurality. The common denominator in each case is not culture but religion.
Conflict of Cultural Moralities
The problem the West faces is complex. Muslims, Sikhs, and Hindus view honor and morality as a collective family matter. Rights are collective, not individual. Family, clan, and tribal rights supplant individual human rights.[21]
In these groups, intellectuals and elites handicap the absorption of immigrants arriving from countries where honor is a communal virtue. For example, accusations of Islamophobia stymie discussion and policy formulation when policymakers seek to address problems occurring among Muslim immigrants. Still, there are legal interventions underway in Europe, home to between twenty and thirty million Muslim immigrants and their descendents, as opposed to perhaps four million in the United States and Canada.[22] Honor-related violence is, therefore, more visible in Europe than in North America. In 2004, Sweden held an international conference on honor killing, calling for “international cooperation” on the issue. Conference participants concluded:
Violence in the name of honor must be combated as an obstacle to women’s enjoyment of human rights. Interpretations of honor as strongly connected with female chastity must be challenged. It can never be accepted that customs, traditions, or religious considerations are invoked to avoid obligations to eradicate violence against women and girls, including violence in the name of honor. Violence against women must be addressed from a rights-based perspective. … Measures should be taken in the areas of legislation, employment, education, and sexual and reproductive health and rights. Respect for women’s enjoyment of human rights is intrinsically linked to democracy. International conventions must be incorporated into national legislation.[23]
There have since been local conferences in England, France, and Germany. British law enforcement has begun to hide women in a program equivalent to the U.S. Federal witness protection program.[24] Great Britain has passed legislation to empower police to rescue British female citizens whose families have kidnapped and forcibly married them against their will, usually in Pakistan; the police will return them to Britain if the brides request it. There is a special police unit that deals with the forced, arranged marriages of children.[25] A new movement has also arisen in England, “One Law for All. A Campaign against Shari’a Law in Britain,” launched by Maryam Namazie, an advocate opposed to honor killing and other honor-related violence. She has launched this movement to oppose the use of Shari’a courts because they discriminate against women.[26] Additionally, schools in the Netherlands have been asked to be “more alert to honor violence,”[27] following research conducted for the Ministry of Integration.
U.S. law enforcement has made tremendous progress over the last forty years on issues related to violence against women. However, there are not yet any shelters for battered Muslim, Hindu, or Sikh girls or women who fear that they will be murdered for honor. A regular shelter for battered women does not specialize in honor killings, nor are there any provisions for foster families—Muslim or otherwise—who can protect girls targeted for murder by their biological families. Critics would oppose any such intervention, however, as a form of cultural oppression, for many victims may have to forfeit their identities in order to remain alive.
It will be more difficult to save adult Muslim women from honor killing because an adult immigrant may not have any regular contact with people outside her immediate family. Only if she survives injuries that require medical attention will she have contact with strangers who may try to help her rescue herself.
Religious education may also be necessary. According to this study, 90 percent of honor murders in the West are committed by Muslims against Muslims. The perpetrators may interpret the Qur’an and Islam incorrectly, either for malicious reasons or simply because they are ignorant of more tolerant Muslim exegesis or conflate local customs with religion.
Here, Muslim-American and Muslim-Canadian associations might play a role so long as they cease obfuscation and recognize the religious roots of the problem. Now is the time for sheikhs in the United States and Canada to state without qualification that killing daughters, sisters, wives, and cousins is against Islam. A number of feminist lawyers who work with battered women have credited pro-women sheikhs with helping them enormously. Sheikhs should publicly identify, condemn, and shame honor killers. Those sheikhs who resist doing so should be challenged.
As with issues relating to terrorism, law enforcement and civil servants must be mindful of which Muslim community activists they seek to engage. Many self-described civil rights organizations—CAIR or the Islamic Society of North America, for example—lean towards more radical interpretations of Islam. Groups such as the American Islamic Congress and the American Islamic Forum for Democracy advocate for gender equality and human rights, [28] but because their efforts against radicalism antagonize Saudi Arabia and other sources of funding, they often lack resources. Given alternative funding, they might be willing to assist in an effort to educate Muslims against honor murder.
U.S. and Canadian immigration authorities should also be aware of the issue. They should inform potential Muslim immigrants and new Muslim citizens that it is against the law to beat girls and women, that honor killings are crimes, and that both the murderers and their accomplices can and will be charged. Cultural equivalency will provide no excuse as it sometimes does in more permissive societies such as Great Britain and the Netherlands. As long as Islamist advocacy groups continue to obfuscate the problem, and government and police officials accept their inaccurate versions of reality, women will continue to be killed for honor in the West; such murders may even accelerate. Unchecked by Western law, their blood will be on society’s hands.
Phyllis Chesler is emerita professor of psychology and women’s studies at the Richmond College of the City University of New York and co-founder of the Association for Women in Psychology and the National Women’s Health Network.
[1] Citation for honor murders drawn from Ellen Francis Harris, Guarding the Secret: Palestinian Terrorism and a Father’s Murder of his Too-American Daughter (New York: Scribner, 1995); James Brandon and Salam Hafez, Crimes of the Community: Honor-Based Violence in the U.K. (London: The Centre for Social Cohesion, Jan. 2008), p. 13, 44; The Cleveland Plain Dealer, July 22, 26, 2000; Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Sept. 13, 1999; CBC News, Apr. 22, 2004, Mar. 1, 2005; The Indian Express (New Delhi), Jan. 30, 2005; The Asian Pacific Post (Vancouver, B.C.), July 24, 2003; Soundvision.com, Sound Vision Foundation, Bridgeview, Ill., May 6, 2002; The New York Daily News, July 31, 2002; Stabroek News (Georgetown, Guyana), Dec. 3, 2003; Canwest News Service (Don Mills, Ont.), July 8, 2008; The Rochester Chronicle and Democrat, Apr. 25, 2004, July 17, 2008; The Washington Times, Jan. 3, 2008; The Dallas Morning News, Jan. 6, 9, 2008; The Chicago Tribune, July 8, 2008; CNN, July 7, 2008; The Daily Mail (London), May 2, June 12, 2007, Jan. 8, 2008; The Observer (London), Oct. 8, 2000, Nov. 21, 2004, June 20, 2006; The Daily Telegraph (London), Jan. 28, 2002, Feb. 27, 2005; CNN.com, Oct. 2, 2003; BBC News, Sept. 30, 2003, May 4, Nov. 19, 2004, Apr. 8, 2006, Jan. 8, 2008; TechCentralStation (TCS Daily), Feb. 2, 2005; Time(European ed.), Oct. 11, 2004; CULCOM: Cultural Complexity in the New Norway, Feb. 17, 2006; Expatica (Amsterdam), Dec. 1, 2003, Apr. 27, 2005; The Times (London), Nov. 18, Dec. 4, 2004, Jan. 21, 2007, Feb. 3, Mar. 29, 2008; HiA Report, Humanity in Action Foundation, Washington, D.C., June 29, 2006; Deutsche Welle Radio (Bonn), May 1, 2005; The Guardian(London), May 8, 2003, July 15, 2006, May 24, 2008; Stern Magazine (Hamburg), Oct. 4, 2007; Associated Press, June 27, 2006; The Independent (London), May 7, 2003, Feb. 21, 2007; The New York Times, Dec. 19, 2004, Dec. 4, 2005, Aug. 26, 2006; The Evening Standard (London), May 14, 2007; United Press International, July 3, 2003; The Sun (London), Jan. 23, 2008; FOX News, Jan. 5, 2007; International Herald Tribune (Paris), Dec. 1, 2005; The Daily Times (Lahore), July 3, 2004.
[2] “Chapter 3: Ending Violence against Women and Girls: ’Honor’ Killings,” The State of World Population, 2000, United Nations Population Fund.
[3] IslamOnline.net, Jan. 11, 2007.
[4] The Daily Times, Sept. 20, 2008.
[5] Brandon and Hafez, Crimes of the Community, pp. 143-6.
[6] Yotam Feldner, “‘Honor’ Murders—Why the Perps Get off Easy,” Middle East Quarterly, Dec. 2000, pp. 41-50.
[7] Ibid.
[8] SoundVision.com, Aug. 24, 2000.
[9] Sheila Musaji, “The Death of Aqsa Parvez Should Be an Interfaith Call to Action,” The American Muslim, Dec. 14, 2007.
[10] Fox News.com, Dec. 12, 2007.
[11] CNN.com, July 9, 2008.
[12] FoxNews.com, Oct. 14, 2008.
[13] “Homicide Trends in the U.S.: Intimate Homicide, 1976 -2005,” U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Bureau of Justice Statistics, July 11, 2007, accessed Oct. 2, 2008.
[14] Unni Wikan, “The Honor Culture,” Karl-Olov Arnstberg and Phil Holmes, trans., accessed Sept. 23, 2008, originally published as En Fraga Om Hedre (A question of honor), Cajsa Mitchell, trans. (Stockholm: Ordfront Forlag AB, 2005), accessed Dec. 12, 2008.
[15] The Boston Globe, Sept. 12, 2008.
[16] New York: Springer, 1984.
[17] Author e-mail interview with Lenore Walker, Sept. 27, 2008.
[18] Ibid.
[19] Brandon and Hafez, Crimes of the Community, p. 94.
[20] Today’s Zaman, July 12, 2008.
[21] Wikan, “The Honor Culture.”
[22] Daniel Pipes, “Which Has More Islamist Terrorism, Europe or America?” The Jerusalem Post, July 3, 2008.
[23] “Combating Patriarchal Violence against Women—Focusing on Violence in the Name of Honor,” The Swedish Ministry of Justice and The Swedish Ministry for Foreign Affairs, Stockholm, Dec. 7-8, 2004, p. 51.
[24] International Herald Tribune, Hong Kong ed., Oct. 20, 1997; The Observer, Nov. 21, 2004; “So-called Honor Crimes,” Committee on Equal Opportunities for Women and Men, Council of Europe, Paris and Brussels, Mar. 7, 2003.
[25] Brandon and Hafez, Crimes of the Community, pp. 13, 44.
[26] Author e-mail with Maryam Namazie, Dec. 1, 2008.
[27] Nederlands Dagblad (Barneveld), Nov. 19, 2008; Islam in Europe, Nov. 19, 2008.
[28] “Milestones,” American Islamic Congress website, accessed Dec. 10, 2008; “Founding Principles and Resolutions,” American Islamic Forum for Democracy website, accessed Dec. 10, 2008.
Montreal woman charged with attempted murder in stabbing of her teenage daughter
Montreal — The Canadian Press
Monday, Jun. 14, 2010
Police say it has all the hallmarks of a so-called honour crime.
A Montreal mother faces an attempted murder charge after her teenage daughter was stabbed in the head and chest last weekend.
Police say the mother — a 38-year-old native of Afghanistan — will appear in court Monday afternoon.
Her 19-year-old daughter is in stable condition in hospital.
“If there’s one good thing about this whole story, it’s that the victim will make it for sure,” said Montreal police Const. Olivier Lapointe.
“We have the confirmation from the doctors today. She has head, face, shoulder and arm injuries — but she will survive.”
The mother faces three charges: attempted murder, assault and possession of a weapon.
Const. Lapointe says the husband is not facing any charges in the case.
“From what we have so far we think he even tried to intervene to stop the assault,” Const. Lapointe said.
Three other daughters who were in the home at the time of the attack — aged 16, 14 and 10 — have been sheltered with youth protection.
Police were called to the West Island home at 8:15 a.m. on Sunday.
Cosnt. Lapointe said investigators quickly arrived at the conclusion that it was an “honour” crime after scanning evidence gathered from the home, from witnesses and from the victim herself.
Montreal mother to have psychiatric evaluation in alleged honour crime
Sidhartha Banerjee
Montreal — The Canadian Press
Tuesday, Jun. 15, 2010
A woman alleged to have stabbed her daughter in the head in a so-called “honour” crime – apparently because the 19-year-old arrived home late – will undergo a psychiatric evaluation to see whether she’s fit to stand trial.
Johra Kaleki, 38, was scheduled to be arraigned Monday but her lawyer argued successfully that she should be dispatched to a psychiatric hospital for a 30-day evaluation instead.
Lawyer Tom Pentefountas told Quebec court that an evaluation was necessary and, after grudgingly divulging some details of his case, he managed to convince Judge Serge Boisvert.
Police suspect the attack on the teen, who is now in hospital, was an “honour” crime. One expert says it’s the 13th case of its kind in Canada since 2002.
Mr. Pentefountas told the judge his client was normally a balanced individual – but that the Afghan-born woman took leave of her senses on Sunday morning.
“We have a situation where a mother was alleged to have stabbed her teenage daughter, the reason being alleged that she came home late,” Mr. Pentefountas told the judge.
“My colleague is raising in the file the idea of crimes of honour, and we think there was a temporary lapse in the mental capacity of Johra.”
The Crown said Ms. Kaleki was hysterical that morning and had to be calmed down.
Prosecutor Anne Gauvin said she wasn’t asking for an evaluation herself, but did not oppose the defence’s request for one. Ms. Gauvin wouldn’t go into any details about the case outside the courtroom.
The psychiatric report will show whether Ms. Kaleki is fit to stand trial and whether she can be held responsible for her actions.
Dressed in a grey T-shirt and track pants, Ms. Kaleki began sobbing quietly as her husband pleaded with the judge from his seat in the public gallery.
“Please, sir, my wife is innocent,” Ebrahim Ebrahimi told the judge as courthouse security tried to quiet him.
Ms. Kaleki is accused of three crimes, according to a charge sheet filed with the court: attempted murder, aggravated assault and assault with a weapon.
She returns to court July 12.
She is forbidden to communicate with any of her daughters, but the judge did not approve the Crown’s request that a communication ban extend to her husband.
The family are considered important witnesses in the Crown’s case, Ms. Gauvin said. “He’s one of the Crown’s witnesses and I believe his implication in the file is important and I don’t want him to be polluted by what she could tell him,” she told reporters.
“He’s also the father of four witnesses.”
The 19-year-old daughter is in stable condition in hospital. She is expected to survive.
“If there’s one good thing about this whole story, it’s that the victim will make it for sure,” said Montreal police Constable Olivier Lapointe.
“We have the confirmation from the doctors today. She has head, face, shoulder and arm injuries – but she will survive.”
Constable Lapointe says the husband is not facing any charges in the case.
“From what we have so far we think he even tried to intervene to stop the assault,” he said.
Three other daughters who were in the home at the time of the attack – aged 16, 14 and 10 – have been sheltered with youth protection.
Ms. Gauvin said they will remain there until the file is settled.
Police were called to the West Island home at 8:15 a.m. on Sunday.
Constable Lapointe said investigators quickly reached the conclusion that it was an “honour” crime after scanning evidence gathered from the home, from witnesses and from the victim herself.
One researcher who has done extensive studies on so-called “honour crimes” said this is the 13th case documented in Canada since 2002.
Amin Muhammad, a psychiatry professor at Newfoundland’s Memorial University, said this latest case is surprising because it’s not usually women who initiate the violence.
“Women are often the co-perpetrators,” Dr. Muhammad said. “Women don’t usually attack. So in this case, it’s a bit unusual.”
Dr. Muhammad said the Canadian government is becoming more aware of the problem, prevalent in many societies. Canadian immigration booklets make it clear that honour killings are considered barbaric and unacceptable.
But he said it has little impact in some cases.
Some people “don’t care actually because they are shunned by their community or ridiculed by other members,” Dr. Muhammad said.
“They feel dishonoured and when they do this kind of act, they feel their honour is back and they will be seen with respect.”
Dr. Muhammad said he’s preparing a position paper for the federal Justice Department on honour killings and hopes the courts begin to mete out tougher sentences.
He said in some cases, the accused have used plea bargains to avoid the severity of the sentence.
RESTINGA SÊCA, Brazil — Before setting out in a pink S.U.V. to comb the schoolyards and shopping malls of southern Brazil, Alisson Chornak studies books, maps and Web sites to understand how the towns were colonized and how European their residents might look today.
The goal, he and other model scouts say, is to find the right genetic cocktail of German and Italian ancestry, perhaps with some Russian or other Slavic blood thrown in. Such a mix, they say, helps produce the tall, thin girls with straight hair, fair skin and light eyes that Brazil exports to the runways of New York, Milan and Paris with stunning success.
Yet Brazil is not the same country it was in 1994, when Gisele Bündchen, the world’s top earning model, was discovered in a tiny town not far from here. Darker-skinned women have become more prominent in Brazilian society, challenging the notions of Brazilian beauty and success that Ms. Bündchen has come to represent here and abroad.
Taís Araújo just finished a run as the first black female lead in the coveted 8 p.m. soap opera slot. Marina Silva, a former government minister born in the Amazon, is running for president. And over the past decade, the income of black Brazilians rose by about 40 percent, more than double the rate of whites, as Brazil’s booming economy helped trim the inequality gap and create a more powerful black consumer class, said Marcelo Neri, an economist in Rio de Janeiro.
Even prosecutors have waded into the debate over what Brazilian society looks like — and how it should be represented. São Paulo Fashion Week, the nation’s most important fashion event, has been forced by local prosecutors to ensure that at least 10 percent of its models are of African or indigenous descent.
Despite those shifts, more than half of Brazil’s models continue to be found here among the tiny farms of Rio Grande do Sul, a state that has only one-twentieth of the nation’s population and was colonized predominantly by Germans and Italians.
Indeed, scouts say that more than 70 percent of the country’s models come from three southern states that hardly reflect the multiethnic melting pot that is Brazil, where more than half the population is nonwhite.
On the pages of its magazines, Brazil’s beauty spectrum is clearer. Nonwhite women, including celebrities of varying body types, are interspersed with white models. But on the runways, the proving ground for models hoping to go abroad, the diversity drops off precipitously. Prosecutors investigating discrimination complaints against São Paulo Fashion Week found that only 28 of the event’s 1,128 models were black in early 2008.
The pattern creates a disconnect between what many Brazilians consider beautiful and the beauty they export overseas. While darker-skinned actresses like Juliana Paes and Camila Pitanga are considered among Brazil’s sexiest, it is Ms. Bündchen and her fellow southerners who win fame abroad.
“I was always perplexed that Brazil was never able to export a Naomi Campbell, and it is definitely not because of a lack of pretty women,” said Erika Palomino, a fashion consultant in São Paulo. “It is embarrassing.”
Some scouts have begun tepid forays to less-white parts of Brazil. One Brazilian designer, Walter Rodrigues, recently opened Rio Fashion Week with 25 models, all of them black.
But here in the south scouts still spend most of their time hunting for the next Gisele, and offer few apologies for what they say sells.
Clóvis Pessoa studies facial traits that are successful on international runways and looks for towns in the south that mirror those genes.
“If a famous top model looks German with a Russian nose, I will do a scientific study and look for cities that were colonized by Germans and Russians in the south of Brazil in order to get a similar face down here,” Mr. Pessoa said.
Dilson Stein, who discovered Ms. Bündchen when she was 13, called Rio Grande do Sul a treasure trove of model-worthy girls. A year before discovering Ms. Bündchen, whose parents are of German ancestry, he found 12-year-old Alessandra Ambrosio, now famous for her Victoria’s Secret shoots.
Today, younger scouts like Mr. Chornak have taken up the mantle. With catlike quickness, he jumped from his chair and strode up behind a tall girl with a hooded sweatshirt. “Have you ever thought of being a model?” he asked a 13-year-old with light blue eyes and pimples.
The girl smiled, her metal braces glimmering.
Later, Mr. Chornak pulled up at a school where the director, Liliane Abrão Silva, showed off albums from school beauty contests. She allows scouts to visit during class breaks.
“Since I got to this school, five have left for São Paulo to become models,” she said. “The girls who do not have money to go to university will have to stay here and work in the fields.”
The next morning, Mr. Chornak studied the girls returning with red lollipops from recess. “There is nothing special here,” he declared.
At another stop, Mr. Chornak staked out a school in Paraíso do Sul (population 8,000) with the tools of his trade: business cards, camera, measuring tape and a notebook.
The bell rang and students streamed out. Mr. Chornak stopped a tall, skinny blond girl. Within seconds he was fluffing her hair and taking her measurements, directing her to pose against the wall.
Mr. Chornak also drove to Venâncio Aires, where a billboard heralded “the land of the Fantastic Girl,” alluding to a television show that featured a local girl.
At a small tobacco farm he visited Michele Meurer, a blue-eyed 16-year-old discovered while riding her bicycle to school. Timid and shy, she cried profusely the first time she went to São Paulo. The next time, she lasted six days before Mr. Chornak sent her home.
Her mother, who grew up speaking German, had never left the town until the São Paulo trip. They live in a four-room house with chickens and dogs. Michele keeps the freezer in her room for lack of space.
Mr. Chornak counsels Michele to use sunscreen while working in the fields and to watch her diet. Bursting with pride, her father enrolled her in English classes in case she went abroad.
“I want to give them a better life,” Michele said tearfully of her parents.
Recently, she went to São Paulo again, where Mr. Chornak put her in a three-bedroom apartment with 11 other girls. Two weeks before São Paulo Fashion Week, Michele packed up and left.
“I am very disappointed that Michele gave up,” Mr. Chornak said. “I invested a lot in her.”
Sakhina, 15, was sold into marriage to pay off her father’s debts when she was 12 or 13. She is one of four fugitive child brides at a shelter in a secret Kabul location.
By ROD NORDLAND and ALISSA J. RUBIN
May 30, 2010
KABUL, Afghanistan — The two Afghan girls had every reason to expect the law would be on their side when a policeman at a checkpoint stopped the bus they were in. Disguised in boys’ clothes, the girls, ages 13 and 14, had been fleeing for two days along rutted roads and over mountain passes to escape their illegal, forced marriages to much older men, and now they had made it to relatively liberal Herat Province.
Instead, the police officer spotted them as girls, ignored their pleas and promptly sent them back to their remote village in Ghor Province. There they were publicly and viciously flogged for daring to run away from their husbands.
Their tormentors, who videotaped the abuse, were not the Taliban, but local mullahs and the former warlord, now a pro-government figure who largely rules the district where the girls live.
Neither girl flinched visibly at the beatings, and afterward both walked away with their heads unbowed. Sympathizers of the victims smuggled out two video recordings of the floggings to the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission, which released them on Saturday after unsuccessfully lobbying for government action.
The ordeal of Afghanistan’s child brides illustrates an uncomfortable truth. What in most countries would be considered a criminal offense is in many parts of Afghanistan a cultural norm, one which the government has been either unable or unwilling to challenge effectively.
According to a Unicef study, from 2000 to 2008, the brides in 43 percent of Afghan marriages were under 18. Although the Afghan Constitution forbids the marriage of girls under the age of 16, tribal customs often condone marriage once puberty is reached, or even earlier.
Flogging is also illegal.
The case of Khadija Rasoul, 13, and Basgol Sakhi, 14, from the village of Gardan-i-Top, in the Dulina district of Ghor Province, central Afghanistan, was notable for the failure of the authorities to do anything to protect the girls, despite opportunities to do so.
Forced into a so-called marriage exchange, where each girl was given to an elderly man in the other’s family, Khadija and Basgol later complained that their husbands beat them when they tried to resist consummating the unions. Dressed as boys, they escaped and got as far as western Herat Province, where their bus was stopped at a checkpoint and they were arrested.
Although Herat has shelters for battered and runaway women and girls, the police instead contacted the former warlord, Fazil Ahad Khan, whom Human Rights Commission workers describe as the self-appointed commander and morals enforcer in his district in Ghor Province, and returned the girls to his custody.
After a kangaroo trial by Mr. Khan and local religious leaders, according to the commission’s report on the episode, the girls were sentenced to 40 lashes each and flogged on Jan. 12.
In the video, the mullah, under Mr. Khan’s approving eye, administers the punishment with a leather strap, which he appears to wield with as much force as possible, striking each girl in turn on her legs and buttocks with a loud crack each time. Their heavy red winter chadors are pulled over their heads so only their skirts protect them from the blows.
The spectators are mostly armed men wearing camouflage uniforms, and at least three of them openly videotape the floggings. No women are present.
The mullah, whose name is not known, strikes the girls so hard that at one point he appears to have hurt his wrist and hands the strap to another man.
“Hold still,” the mullah admonishes the victims, who stand straight throughout. One of them can be seen in tears when her face is briefly exposed to view, but they remain silent.
When the second girl is flogged, an elderly man fills in for the mullah, but his blows appear less forceful and the mullah soon takes the strap back.
The spectators count the lashes out loud but several times seem to lose count and have to start over, or possibly they cannot count very high.
“Good job, mullah sir,” one of the men says as Mr. Khan leads them in prayer afterward.
“I was shocked when I watched the video,” said Mohammed Munir Khashi, an investigator with the commission. “I thought in the 21st century such a criminal incident could not happen in our country. It’s inhuman, anti-Islam and illegal.”
Fawzia Kofi, a prominent female member of Parliament, said the case may be shocking but is far from the only one. “I’m sure there are worse cases we don’t even know about,” she said. “Early marriage and forced marriage are the two most common forms of violent behavior against women and girls.”
The Human Rights Commission took the videotapes and the results of its investigation to the governor of Ghor Province, Sayed Iqbal Munib, who formed a commission to investigate it but took no action, saying the district was too insecure to send police there. A coalition of civic groups in the province called for his dismissal over the matter.
Nor has Afghanistan’s Interior Ministry replied to demands from the commission to take action in the case, according to the commission’s chairwoman, Sima Samar. A spokesman for the ministry did not respond to requests for comment.
Forced marriage of Afghan girls is not limited to remote rural areas. In Herat city, a Unicef-financed women’s shelter run by an Afghan group, the Voice of Women Organization, shelters as many as 60 girls who have fled child marriages.
A group called Women for Afghan Women runs shelters in the capital, Kabul, as well as in nearby Kapisa Province and in the city of Mazar-i-Sharif, all relatively liberal areas as Afghanistan goes, which have taken in 108 escaped child brides just since January, according to Executive Director Manizha Naderi.
Poverty is the motivation for many child marriages, either because a wealthy husband pays a large bride-price, or just because the father of the bride then has one less child to support. “Most of the time they are sold,” Ms. Naderi said. “And most of the time it’s a case where the husband is much, much older.”
She said it was also common practice among police officers who apprehend runaway child brides to return them to their families. “Most police don’t understand what’s in the law, or they’re just against it,” she said.
On Saturday, at the Women for Afghan Women shelter, at a secret location in Kabul, there were four fugitive child brides. All had been beaten, and most wept as they recounted their experiences.
Sakhina, a 15-year-old Hazara girl from Bamian, was sold into marriage to pay off her father’s debts when she was 12 or 13.
Her husband’s family used her as a domestic servant. “Every time they could, they found an excuse to beat me,” she said. “My brother-in-law, my sister-in-law, my husband, all of them beat me.”
Sumbol, 17, a Pashtun girl, said she was kidnapped and taken to Jalalabad, then given a choice: marry her tormentor, or become a suicide bomber. “He said, ‘If you don’t marry me I will put a bomb on your body and send you to the police station,’ ” Sumbol said.
Roshana, a Tajik who is now 18, does not even know why her family gave her in marriage to an older man in Parwan when she was 14. The beatings were bad enough, but finally, she said, her husband tried to feed her rat poison.
In some ways, the two girls from Ghor were among the luckier child brides. After the floggings, the mullah declared them divorced and returned them to their own families.
Two years earlier, in nearby Murhab district, two girls who had been sold into marriage to the same family fled after being abused, according to a report by the Human Rights Commission. But they lost their way, were captured and forcibly returned. Their fathers — one the village mullah — took them up the mountain and killed them.
It is hard to muster much sympathy over the implosion of the Catholic Church, traditional Protestant denominations or Jewish synagogues. These institutions were passive as the Christian right, which peddles magical thinking and a Jesus-as-warrior philosophy, hijacked the language and iconography of traditional Christianity.
They have busied themselves with the boutique activism of the culture wars. They have failed to unequivocally denounce unfettered capitalism, globalization and pre-emptive war. The obsession with personal piety and “How-is-it-with-me?” spirituality that permeates most congregations is narcissism.
And while the Protestant church and reformed Judaism have not replicated the perfidiousness of the Catholic bishops, who protect child-molesting priests, they have little to say in an age when we desperately need moral guidance.
I grew up in the church and graduated from a seminary. It is an institution whose cruelty, inflicted on my father, who was a Presbyterian minister, I know intimately. I do not attend church. The cloying, feel-your-pain language of the average clergy member makes me run for the door. The debates in most churches—whether revolving around homosexuality or biblical interpretation—are a waste of energy.
I have no desire to belong to any organization, religious or otherwise, which discriminates, nor will I spend my time trying to convince someone that the raw anti-Semitism in the Gospel of John might not be the word of God. It makes no difference to me if Jesus existed or not. There is no historical evidence that he did.
Fairy tales about heaven and hell, angels, miracles, saints, divine intervention and God’s beneficent plan for us are repeatedly mocked in the brutality and indiscriminate killing in war zones, where I witnessed children murdered for sport and psychopathic gangsters elevated to demigods. The Bible works only as metaphor.
The institutional church, when it does speak, mutters pious non-statements that mean nothing. “Given the complexity of factors involved, many of which understandably remain confidential, it is altogether appropriate for members of our armed forces to presume the integrity of our leadership and its judgments, and therefore to carry out their military duties in good conscience,” Archbishop Edwin F. O’Brien, head of the Archdiocese for the Military Services, wrote about the Iraq war. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, on the eve of the invasion, told believers that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein was a menace, and that reasonable people could disagree about the necessity of using force to overthrow him.
It assured those who supported the war that God would not object. B’nai B’rith supported a congressional resolution to authorize the 2003 attack on Iraq. The Union of American Hebrew Congregations, which represents Reform Judaism, agreed it would back unilateral action, as long as Congress approved and the president sought support from other nations.
The National Council of Churches, which represents 36 different faith groups, in a typical bromide, urged President George W. Bush to “do all possible” to avoid war with Iraq and to stop “demonizing adversaries or enemies” with good-versus-evil rhetoric, but, like the other liberal religious institutions, did not condemn the war.
A Gallup poll in 2006 found that “the more frequently an American attends church, the less likely he or she is to say the war was a mistake.” Given that Jesus was a pacifist, and given that all of us who graduated from seminary rigorously studied Just War doctrine, which was flagrantly violated by the invasion of Iraq, this is a rather startling statistic.
But I cannot rejoice in the collapse of these institutions. We are not going to be saved by faith in reason, science and technology, which the dead zone of oil forming in the Gulf of Mexico and our production of costly and redundant weapons systems illustrate. Frederick Nietzsche’s Übermensch, or “Superman”—our secular religion—is as fantasy-driven as religious magical thinking.
There remain, in spite of the leaders of these institutions, religiously motivated people toiling in the inner city and the slums of the developing world. They remain true to the core religious and moral values ignored by these institutions. The essential teachings of the monotheistic traditions are now lost in the muck of church dogma, hollow creeds and the banal bureaucracy of institutional religion.
These teachings helped create the concept of the individual. The belief that we can exist as distinct beings from the tribe, or the crowd, and that we are called on as individuals to make moral decisions that can defy the clamor of the nation is one of the gifts of religious thought. This call for individual responsibility is coupled with the constant injunctions in Islam, Judaism and Christianity for compassion, especially for the weak, the impoverished, the sick and the outcast.
We are rapidly losing the capacity for the moral life. We reject the anxiety of individual responsibility that laid the foundations for the open society. We are enjoined, after all, to love our neighbor, not our tribe. This empowerment of individual conscience was the starting point of the great ethical systems of all civilizations.
Those who championed this radical individualism, from Confucius to Socrates to Jesus, fostered not obedience and conformity, but dissent and self-criticism. They initiated the separation of individual responsibility from the demands of the state. They taught that culture and society were not the sole prerogative of the powerful, that freedom and indeed the religious and moral life required us to often oppose and challenge those in authority, even at great personal cost.
Immanuel Kant built his ethics upon this radical individualism. And Kant’s injunction to “always recognize that human individuals are ends, and do not use them as mere means” runs in a direct line from the Socratic ideal and the Christian Gospels.
The great religions set free the critical powers of humankind. They broke with the older Greek and Roman traditions that gods and Destiny ruled human fate—a belief that, when challenged by Socrates, saw him condemned to death. They challenged the power of the tribe, the closed society.
They offered up the possibility that human beings, although limited by circumstance and human weakness, could shape and give direction to society and their own lives. These religious thinkers were our first ethicists. And it is perhaps not accidental that the current pope, as well as the last one, drove out of the Catholic Church thousands of clergy and religious leaders who embodied these qualities, elevating the dregs to positions of leadership and leaving the pedophiles to run the Sunday schools.
These religious institutions are in irreversible decline. They are ruled by moral and intellectual trolls. They have become arrogant and self-absorbed. Their sins are many. They protected criminals. They pandered to the lowest common denominator and illusions of personal fulfillment and surrendered their moral authority. They did not fight the corporate tyrants who have impoverished us.
They refused to denounce a caste of Christian heretics embodied by the Christian right and have, for their cowardice, been usurped by bizarre proto-fascists clutching the Christian cross. They have nothing left to say. And their aging congregants, who are fleeing the church in droves, know it. But don’t think the world will be a better place for their demise.
As we devolve into a commodity culture, in which celebrity, power and money reign, the older, dimming values of another era are being replaced. We are becoming objects, consumer products and marketable commodities. We have no intrinsic value. We are obsessed with self-presentation. We must remain youthful. We must achieve notoriety and money or the illusion of it.
And it does not matter what we do to get there. Success, as Goldman Sachs illustrates, is its own morality. Other people’s humiliation, pain and weakness become the fodder for popular entertainment. Education, building community, honesty, transparency and sharing see contestants disappeared from any reality television show or laughed out of any Wall Street firm.
We live in the age of the Übermensch who rejects the sentimental tenets of traditional religion. The Übermensch creates his own morality based on human instincts, drive and will. We worship the “will to power” and think we have gone “beyond good and evil.”
We spurn virtue. We think we have the moral fortitude and wisdom to create our own moral code. The high priests of our new religion run Wall Street, the Pentagon and the corporate state. They flood our airwaves with the tawdry and the salacious. They, too, promise a utopia. They redefine truth, beauty, morality, desire and goodness. And we imbibe their poison as blind followers once imbibed the poison of the medieval church.
Nietzsche had his doubts. He suspected that this new secular faith might prefigure an endless middle-class charade. Nietzsche feared the deadening effects of the constant search for material possessions and personal hedonism.
Science and technology might rather bring about a new, distorted character Nietzsche called “the Last Man.” The Last Man, Nietzsche feared, would engage in the worst kinds of provincialism, believing he had nothing to learn from history.
The Last Man would wallow and revel in his ignorance and quest for personal fulfillment. He would be satisfied with everything that he had done and become, and would seek to become nothing more. He would be intellectually and morally stagnant, incapable of growth, and become part of an easily manipulated herd.
The Last Man would mistake cynicism for knowledge.
“The time is coming when man will give birth to no more stars,” Nietzsche wrote about the Last Man in the prologue of “Thus Spoke Zarathustra.” “Alas! The time of the most contemptible man is coming, the man who can no longer despise himself.”
“They are clever and know everything that has ever happened: so there is no end to their mockery.” The Last Men indulge in “their little pleasure for the day, and their little pleasure for the night.”
The consumer culture, as Nietzsche feared, has turned us into what Chalmers Johnson calls a “consumerist Sparta.” The immigrants and the poor, all but invisible to us, work as serfs in this new temple of greed and imperialism. Curtis White in “The Middle Mind” argues that most Americans are aware of the brutality and injustice used to maintain the excesses of their consumer society and empire. He suspects they do not care.
They don’t want to see what is done in their name. They do not want to look at the rows of flag-draped coffins or the horribly maimed bodies and faces of veterans or the human suffering in the blighted and deserted former manufacturing centers. It is too upsetting.
Government and corporate censorship is welcomed and appreciated. It ensures that we remain Last Men. And the death of religious institutions will only cement into place the new secular religion of the Last Man, the one that worships military power, personal advancement, hedonism and greed, the one that justifies our callousness toward the weak and the poor.
William Melvin “Bill” Hicks (December 16, 1961 – February 26, 1994) was an American stand-up comedian and satirist. His humor challenged mainstream beliefs, aiming to “enlighten people to think for themselves.”[1] Hicks used a ribald approach to express his material, describing himself as “Chomsky with dick jokes.”[1] His jokes included general discussions about society, religion, politics, philosophy and personal issues. Hicks’ material was often deliberately controversial and steeped in dark comedy. In both his stand-up performances, and during interviews, he often criticized consumerism, superficiality, mediocrity and banality within the media and popular culture, describing them as oppressive tools of the ruling class, meant to “keep people stupid and apathetic.”[2]
Hicks died of pancreatic cancer, which had spread to his liver, in 1994 at the age of 32. In the years after his death, his work and legacy achieved significant admiration and acclaim, of numerous comedians, writers, actors and musicians alike. He was listed as the 19th greatest stand-up comedian of all time by Comedy Central in 2004, and 6th greatest in 2007 and 4th greatest in 2010 by Channel 4.
Born in Valdosta, Georgia, Bill Hicks was the son of Jim and Mary (Reese) Hicks, and had two elder siblings, Steve and Lynn. The family lived in Florida, Alabama and New Jersey, before settling in Houston, Texas, when Hicks was seven. He was raised in the Southern Baptist faith, where he first began performing as a comedian to other children at Sunday School.[3]
He was drawn to comedy at an early age, emulating Woody Allen and Richard Pryor, and writing routines with his friend Dwight Slade. Worried about his behavior, his parents took him to a psychoanalyst at age 17 but, according to Hicks, after one session the psychoanalyst informed him that “…it’s them, not you.”[3]
In 1978, Hicks, along with friends Slade, Ben Dunn, John S. and Kevin Booth, began performing at the Comedy Workshop in Houston. At first, Hicks was unable to drive to venues independently and was so young that he needed a special work permit to perform. By the autumn of 1978 he had worked his way up to performing once every Tuesday night, while still attending Stratford High School. He was well-received and started developing his improvisational skills, although his act at the time was limited.
In 1986, Hicks found himself broke, but his career received another upturn as he appeared on Rodney Dangerfield’s Young Comedians Special, in 1987. The same year, he moved to New York City, and for the next five years he did about 300 performances a year. On the album Relentless, he jokes that he quit using drugs because “once you’ve been taken aboard a UFO, it’s kind of hard to top that”, although in his performances, he continued to extol the virtues of LSD, marijuana, and psychedelic mushrooms.[4] He fell back to chain-smoking,[5] a theme that would figure heavily in his performances from then on.
In 1988 Hicks signed on with his first professional business manager, Jack Mondrus. Throughout 1989, Mondrus worked to convince many clubs to book Hicks, promising that the wild drug- and alcohol-induced behavior was behind him. Among the club managers hiring the newly sober Hicks was Colleen McGarr, who would become his girlfriend and fiancée in later years.
In 1989 he released his first video, Sane Man.[6] It was reissued in 2006.
In 1990, Hicks released his first album, Dangerous, performed on the HBO special One Night Stand, and performed at Montreal’s Just for Laughs festival.[7] He was also part of a group of American stand-up comedians performing in London’s West End in November (or December[8]). Hicks was a huge hit in the UK and Ireland and continued touring there throughout 1991. That year, he returned to the Just for Laughs festival and recorded his second album, Relentless.
Hicks made a brief detour into musical recording with the Marble Head Johnson album in 1992. In November (or December[8]), he toured the UK, where he recorded the Revelations video for Channel 4. He closed the show with “It’s Just a Ride”, one of his most famous and life-affirming philosophies. Also in that tour he recorded the stand-up performance released in its entirety on a double CD titled Salvation. Hicks was voted “Hot Standup Comic” by Rolling Stone magazine. He moved to Los Angeles in early 1993.
Censorship and aftermath
Hicks was constantly facing problems with censorship. In 1984, Hicks was invited to appear on Late Night with David Letterman for the first time. He had a joke that he used frequently in comedy clubs about how he accidentally caused a fellow class-mate to become wheelchair bound. NBC had a policy that no handicapped jokes could be aired on the show, making his stand-up routine difficult to perform without mentioning words such as “wheelchair”. Hicks was disappointed that the TV audience didn’t get to experience the uncensored Bill Hicks that people saw in clubs.[9]
On October 1, 1993, about five months before his death, Hicks was scheduled to appear on Late Show with David Letterman, his twelfth appearance on a Letterman late night show but his entire performance was removed from the broadcast — then the only occasion where a comedian’s entire routine was cut after taping. Hicks’ stand-up routine was removed from the show allegedly because Letterman and his producer were nervous about Hicks’ religious jokes. Hicks said he believed it was due to a pro-life commercial aired during a commercial break.[10] Both the show’s producers and CBS denied responsibility. Hicks expressed his feelings of betrayal in a letter to John Lahr of The New Yorker.[11][12] Although Letterman later expressed regret at the way Hicks had been handled, Hicks did not appear on the show again. The full account of this incident was featured in a New Yorker profile by Lahr[11], which was later published as a chapter in Lahr’s book, Light Fantastic.[13]
Hicks’ mother, Mary, appeared on the January 30, 2009, episode of Late Show. Letterman played Hicks’ routine in its entirety. Letterman took full responsibility for the original censorship and apologized to Mrs. Hicks. Letterman also declared he did not know what he was thinking when he pulled the routine from the original show in 1993. Letterman said, “It says more about me as a guy than it says about Bill because there was absolutely nothing wrong with it.”
Cancer diagnosis and death
In April 1993, while touring in Australia, Hicks started complaining of pains in his side, and on June 16 of that year, he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer that had spread to his liver.[16] He started receiving weekly chemotherapy, while still touring and also recording his album, Arizona Bay, with Kevin Booth. He was also working with comedian Fallon Woodland on a pilot episode of a new talk show, titled Counts of the Netherworld for Channel 4 at the time of his death. The budget and concept had been approved, and a pilot was filmed. The Counts of the Netherworld pilot was shown at the various Tenth Anniversary Tribute Night events around the world on February 26, 2004.
After being diagnosed with cancer, Hicks would often joke openly at performances exclaiming it would be his last. Hicks performed the actual final show of his career at Caroline’s in New York on January 6, 1994. He moved back to his parents’ house in Little Rock, Arkansas, shortly thereafter. He called his friends to say goodbye, before he stopped speaking on February 14[citation needed], and re-read J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring.[17] He spent time with his parents, playing them the music he loved and showing them documentaries about his interests. He died of cancer in the presence of his parents at 11:20 p.m. on February 26, 1994. He was 32 years old.[18] Hicks was buried in the family plot in Leakesville, Mississippi.
On February 7, 1994, after his diagnosis with cancer, Hicks authored a short statement on his perspective, wishes and thanks of his of life, to be released after his death as his “last word”,[16] ending with the words:
“I left in love, in laughter, and in truth and wherever truth, love and laughter abide, I am there in spirit.”
Comic style
Hicks’s style was a play on his audience’s emotions. He expressed anger, disgust and apathy while addressing the audience in a casual and personal manner, which he likened to merely conversing with his friends, often making eye contact with individual audience members in smaller venues.
Hicks’s material was less focused on the everyday banalities of life and placed greater emphasis on philosophical themes of existence. He would invite his audiences to challenge authority and the existential nature of “accepted truth.” One such message, which he often used in his shows, was delivered in the style of a news report:
Today, a young man on acid realized that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration — that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively. There is no such thing as death; life is only a dream, and we are the imagination of ourselves… Here’s Tom with the weather! [19]
Another of Hicks’s most famous quotes was delivered during a gig in Chicago in 1989 (later released as the bootleg I’m Sorry, Folks). After a heckler repeatedly shouted “Free Bird”, Hicks screamed that “Hitler had the right idea, he was just an underachiever!” Hicks followed this remark with a misanthropic tirade calling for unbiased genocide against the whole of humanity.[20]
Much of Hicks’s routine involved direct attacks on mainstream society, religion, politics, and consumerism. Asked in a BBC interview why he cannot do a routine that appeals “to everyone”, he said that such an act was impossible. He responded by repeating a comment an audience member once made to him, “We don’t come to comedy to think!”, to which he replied, “Gee! Where do you go to think? I’ll meet you there!” In the same interview, he also said: “My way is half-way between: this is a night-club, and these are adults.” [21]
Hicks often discussed conspiracy theories in his performances, most notably the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. He mocked the Warren Report and the official version of Lee Harvey Oswald as a “lone nut assassin.” He also questioned the guilt of David Koresh and the Branch Davidian compound during the Waco Siege.
Hicks would end some of his shows — and especially those being recorded in front of larger audiences as albums — with a mock “assassination” of himself on stage, making gunshot sound effects into the microphone and falling to the ground.
Legacy
Arizona Bay and Rant in E-Minor were released posthumously in 1997 on the Voices imprint of the Rykodisc label. Dangerous and Relentless were also re-released by Rykodisc on the same date.
In a 2005 poll to find The Comedian’s Comedian, fellow comedians and comedy insiders voted Hicks #13 on their list of “The Top 20 Greatest Comedy Acts Ever”. Likewise, in “Comedy Central Presents: 100 Greatest Stand-ups of All Time” (2004), Hicks was ranked at #19. In March 2007, Channel 4 ran a poll, “The Top 100 Stand-Up Comedians of All Time,” in which Hicks was voted #6. Channel 4 renewed this list in April 2010, which saw Hicks move up 2 places to #4.[36]
Devotees of Hicks have incorporated his words, image, and attitude into their own creations. Because of audio sampling, fragments of Hicks’ rants, diatribes, social criticisms, and philosophies have found their way into many musical works, such as the live version of Super Furry Animals’ “Man Don’t Give A Fuck”. His influence on Tool is well documented; he “appears” on the Fila Brazillia album Maim That Tune (1996) and on SPA’s self titled album SPA (1997), which are both dedicated to Hicks; the British band Radiohead’s second album The Bends (1995) is also dedicated to his memory. Singer/songwriter Tom Waits listed Rant in E Minor as one of his 20 most cherished albums of all time.[37] The UK band Shack released an album in August 2003 quoting a Bill Hicks routine in the title: Here’s Tom With the Weather. The album also included other Bill Hicks quotes in the liner notes. English breakbeat artist Adam Freeland sampled Revelations for his track “We Want Your Soul.” Welsh punk rock band Mclusky reference a Hicks routine in the lyrics to their song “To Hell With Good Intentions”. Punk cabaret musician Amanda Palmer says, “I have my new Bill Hicks CD” in the song “Another Year” on her 2008 album Who Killed Amanda Palmer. The Swedish indie pop singer/songwriter Jens Lekman has written a song called “People who Hate People Come Together” after the same Hicks quote. The last track of The Kleptones album Yoshimi Battles the Hip-Hop Robots, Last Words (A Tribute), includes his “It’s just a ride” in its entirety.[citation needed]
Hamell on Trial’s 1999 album Choochtown includes the song “Bill Hicks,” featuring the lyric “I wish Billl Hicks was alive/I wish Bill Hicks had survived,” as well at the instrumental tribute “Bill Hicks (Ascension).”
Rappers Adil Omar and Vinnie Paz have also cited Hicks as an influence to their work; contemporary comedians David Cross and Russell Brand have stated that they were inspired by Hicks.[38][39] Irish Independent columnist Ian O’Doherty is also a great admirer of Hicks.
On their 2009 album There Is No Enemy, Built To Spill released the song “Planting Seeds” with the lyrics “I’ve heard that they’ll sell anything and I think they might…I think Bill Hicks was right…about what they should do.” referring to his stand up routine which asks marketers to kill themselves. The song title refers to a bit in the same routine when Bill explains, “Just planting seeds here, folks.”.
The British film Human Traffic referred to him as the “late prophet Bill Hicks,” and portrays the main character, Jip, watching Hicks’ stand-up before going out to “remind me not to take life too seriously”. Hicks even appears in the comic book Preacher, in which he is an important influence on the protagonist, Rev. Jesse Custer. His opening voice-over to the 1991 Revelations live show is also quoted in Preacher‘s last issue.[citation needed]
The British actor Chas Early portrayed Hicks in the one-man stage show Bill Hicks: Slight Return, which premiered in 2005.
On February 25, 2004, British MP Stephen Pound tabled an early day motion titled “Anniversary of the Death of Bill Hicks” (EDM 678 of the 2003-04 session), the text of which was as follows:
“
That this House notes with sadness the 10th anniversary of the death of Bill Hicks, on 26th February 1994, at the age of 32; recalls his assertion that his words would be a bullet in the heart of consumerism, capitalism and the American Dream; and mourns the passing of one of the few people who may be mentioned as being worth [sic] of inclusion with Lenny Bruce and George Carlin in any list of unflinching and painfully honest political philosophers.[40]
”
Film and documentary
A film about Hicks’ life and career, rumored to be directed by Ron Howard, is said to be in pre-production. Russell Crowe has been mentioned as one of the producers and may portray Hicks as well.[41]
A documentary entitled American: The Bill Hicks Story, based on interviews with his family and friends, premiered on March 12, 2010, at the South by Southwest Film Festival in Austin, Texas.[42] The film has gone on to screen at multiple festivals including SxSW, London Film Festival and Sheffield Doc/Fest.
To anyone who has been following First Amendment jurisprudence in the past 40 or 50 years, the recent Supreme Court decision (United States v. Stevens, April 20) striking down a statute criminalizing the production and sale of videos depicting animal cruelty in a manner intended to satisfy a particular “sexual fetish” will come as no surprise.
The proverbial ordinary citizen, however, may be surprised to learn that, according to Chief Justice John Roberts’ majority opinion, the First Amendment must be read to allow the production and dissemination of so called “crush videos,” videos (and I quote from Roberts’ opinion) that “feature the intentional torture and killing of helpless animals” often by women wearing high-heeled “spike” shoes who slowly “crush animals to death” while talking to them in “a kind of dominatrix patter” as they scream and squeal “in great pain.” How has it come to this?
Part of the answer can be found in the history of First Amendment theory. (What follows is the quick and dirty version.) At the beginning of the 20th century, the reigning theory was called “bad tendency.” Speech that was thought to have a tendency to undermine authority or corrupt morals could be regulated, even in the absence of any evidence that sedition or immorality had in fact been produced.
But then, in a series of cases, Justices Oliver Wendell Holmes and Louis D. Brandeis developed a theory, called the “clear and present danger” theory, that was more sensitive to actual patterns of cause and effect. It said that even speech advocating the overthrow of the government must be protected unless the danger is imminent. “The question in every case,” Holmes explained, “is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent” (Schenck v. United States, 1919).
This test was not without its problems: some feared that waiting until the danger was almost upon us would leave too little time to prevent it; others feared that the state could too easily decide that a particular instance of speech harbored a danger it had the right and duty to forestall. But all parties to these arguments agreed that the judicial task was to assess the likely consequences of various kinds of speech before determining whether they deserve constitutional protection.
In essence, speech was regarded in this period as a form of behavior (albeit a particularly favored one), and like any form of behavior speech could have both good and bad effects. The trick was to determine whether a particular effect was so bad that the cost to freedom of speech of regulating it was less than the cost of allowing it to flourish. The formula was given its definitive formulation by Judge Learned Hand: “In each case . . . ask whether the gravity of the evil . . . justifies such invasion of free speech as is necessary to avoid the danger.”
This balancing test, which measured effect, was joined (implicitly and sometimes explicitly) by a content test, which measured value. Some speech is an essential contribution to the marketplace of ideas; some speech contributes nothing to the marketplace and even pollutes it. Utterances of the latter kind, the Court said in Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire (1942), “have never been thought to raise any Constitutional problem,” for they are “of such slight social value as a step to truth that any benefit that may be derived from them is clearly outweighed by the social interest in order and morality.”
Put together speech that has deleterious effects with speech of no redeeming value and what do you have? You have videos depicting helpless kittens being tortured by leather-clad sadists. Case closed (if it ever got to the courts in the first place).
So what happened ? The short answer is that New York Times v. Sullivan (1964) happened. In that case (beloved by free-speech purists), the Court decided, in the context of a libel action brought against this newspaper for publishing an advertisement containing erroneous statements, that “neither factual nor defamatory content” removed the shield of constitutional protection” from speech even if it is false. The Court’s reasoning? “Debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust and wide open,” and therefore considerations of “truth” and “social utility” are no longer to the point. Nor, added Justice Arthur Goldberg in a concurrence, are considerations of effect, for the right the Court now declares — “to speak one’s mind about public officials and affairs” — must be upheld “despite the harm which may flow from excesses and abuses.”
This is still a long way from constitutionalizing “crush videos,” but the path to United States v. Stevens is now open because speech has been declared to be a value in and of itself, no matter what its content or effect. A new question is asked; not does this speech have any intrinsic worth or does it benefit or harm society, but is it speech? Is it “expressive activity”? And if the answer is yes, the presumption of constitutional protection is very strong and more often than not the court will find a way to save the speech in question, however meretricious it might be.
Thus, in Hustler Magazine v. Falwell (1988), the Court decided that Jerry Falwell could not recover damages for an “ad” depicting the evangelist having sex with his drunken mother in an outhouse. At the bottom of the ad, in small print, one could (barely) read, “ad-parody — not to be taken seriously,” an obvious legal strategy that was itself not to be taken seriously as Larry Flynt, Hustler’s publisher, demonstrated in an interview when he declared that it had been his intention to wound and indeed “kill” Falwell’s reputation. After noting that there was no libel involved because the ad was a piece of fiction and therefore asserted no facts (Philip Sidney lives), the Court declared that this “gross and repugnant” (its words) verbal production was nevertheless a contribution to “the free interchange of ideas and ascertainment of truth” and was a “distant cousin” of the political cartoons that exaggerated “Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “jutting jaw and cigarette holder.” (“Distant” is too weak a word unless one means the distance between galaxies.) So the ad asserts nothing and cannot be taken seriously, but it is a serious enough assertion to merit constitutional protection. Go figure.
Decisions like Hustler v. Falwell exhibit a pattern. Before coming down on the side of the speech the government tries to regulate, the Court declares its distaste and even revulsion in the face of what it must, according to its lights, permit, as if to say, “we are on the right moral side, we regret having to do this, but, hey, it’s the First Amendment.”
This “rhetoric of regret” is on display in spades in the famous Skokie case (Smith v. Collin, 1978), in which a 7th circuit court declares that a march by a band of neo-Nazis through a neighborhood populated by Holocaust survivors must be allowed even though, as the Court concedes, emotional and mental distress would be inflicted upon elderly people who had already suffered more than enough. The Court even acknowledges that the ideas put forward by the would-be-marchers threaten to tear away the “thin coating” of civilization, and it feels “compelled” to express “repugnance at the doctrine which the appellees wish to profess.” (Hardly a consolation.)
In another 7th circuit case (American Booksellers v. Hudnut, 1986), the speech at issue is pornography and the Court assents to the description of pornography as “an aspect of dominance,” which, by putting certain images of women into the world, is more than an “idea” and is in fact an “injury.” Nevertheless, the Court rules against a city anti-pornography ordinance not despite its injurious effects but because of them, for “if the fact that speech plays a role in a process of conditioning were enough to permit governmental regulation, that would be the end of freedom of speech.” No, that would be the end of freedom of speech as an all-purpose get-out-of-jail card. It would not be the end of freedom of speech if forms of speech that were part of a benign “conditioning” were protected while malign forms were treated with the negative caution they deserve.
How malign or benign is flag burning? What is its value? In Texas v. Johnson (1989), the Supreme Court decides that the act of burning and spitting on the flag is valuable because by permitting it we honor the history and tradition the flag symbolizes: “We do not consecrate the flag by punishing its desecration, for in so doing we dilute the freedom that this cherished emblem represents.” Get it? We cherish the emblem by burning and spitting on it.
There are dissents to some of these decisions and they tend to make the same point that Justices William H Rehnquist and John Paul Stevens make in their dissents to Texas v. Johnson: “Flag burning is the equivalent of an inarticulate grunt” (Rehnquist). It has nothing do with ideas, but is simply “disagreeable conduct” (Stevens). Obviously, this attempt to deny or downplay the “expressive element” of the act does not carry the day, as it does not in the crush video case where a version of it is put forward both by Solicitor General Elena Kagan in her brief for the government and by the lone dissenter, Justice Samuel Alito (the new odd couple).
In his majority opinion, Roberts acknowledges that in child pornography cases the argument that the market for the “product” was integrally related to the incidence of child abuse was found “persuasive.” Alito and Kagan try the same argument in response to the point that while the actions depicted in the crush videos are certainly illegal, depicting them is not because the portrayal of illegal acts is not itself an infringement of law.
Not true, Kagan and Alito reply: the illegal acts occur in large part because there is a market for the videos that depict them; take away the traffic in videos and you will reduce the number of crimes. Indeed, says Alito, those “criminal acts . . . cannot be prevented without targeting . . . the creation, sale, and possession for sale of depictions of animal torture.” Moreover, the effect of the ban “on trafficking in crush videos” would also help “to enforce the criminal laws and to ensure that criminals do not profit from their crimes.” Not to mention, Kagan adds, preventing “the harm to living animals occurring in the creation of the depictions, as well as associated harms arising from the acts of violence.”
But Roberts isn’t having any. He simply invokes the post-New York Times v. Sullivan mantra and flatly rejects any “balancing of relative social costs and benefits “when it comes to speech. “The First Amendment,” he declares, “reflects a judgment by the American people that the benefits of its restrictions . . . outweigh the costs,” a judgment that he insists can not be revised “simply on the basis that some speech is not worth it.” In short, the balancing Roberts rejects has already occurred in the empyrean of First Amendment theory and the conclusion, given in advance, is that, aside from a direct incitement to violence or an act of treason, no expressive activity can be worthless enough to forfeit its constitutional protection. So much for the kittens.
One often-heard objection to religion is that horrible acts are done in its name. It is an irony of history that the First Amendment, opposed by Justice Jackson in a famous passage to the establishment of any orthodoxy, has itself become an orthodoxy, a religion, a veritable deity, and one that demands an absolute fidelity. And, sure enough, in its name (and under the injunction that thou shalt have no other gods before me), any number of horrible “expressive” acts — depictions of torture, marches designed to intimidate not inform, false caricatures of someone’s mother, representations of women as the passive vessels of male needs — are performed and then declared constitutional. Glory be to God.
To Sinead O’Connor, the pope’s apology for sex abuse in Ireland seems hollow
By Sinead O’Connor
Sunday, March 28, 2010
When I was a child, Ireland was a Catholic theocracy. If a bishop came walking down the street, people would move to make a path for him. If a bishop attended a national sporting event, the team would kneel to kiss his ring. If someone made a mistake, instead of saying, “Nobody’s perfect,” we said, “Ah sure, it could happen to a bishop.”
The expression was more accurate than we knew. This month, Pope Benedict XVI wrote a pastoral letter of apology — of sorts — to Ireland to atone for decades of sexual abuse of minors by priests whom those children were supposed to trust. To many people in my homeland, the pope’s letter is an insult not only to our intelligence, but to our faith and to our country. To understand why, one must realize that we Irish endured a brutal brand of Catholicism that revolved around the humiliation of children.
I experienced this personally. When I was a young girl, my mother — an abusive, less-than-perfect parent — encouraged me to shoplift. After being caught once too often, I spent 18 months in An Grianán Training Centre, an institution in Dublin for girls with behavioral problems, at the recommendation of a social worker. An Grianán was one of the now-infamous church-sponsored “Magdalene laundries,” which housed pregnant teenagers and uncooperative young women. We worked in the basement, washing priests’ clothes in sinks with cold water and bars of soap. We studied math and typing. We had limited contact with our families. We earned no wages. One of the nuns, at least, was kind to me and gave me my first guitar.
An Grianán was a product of the Irish government’s relationship with the Vatican — the church had a “special position” codified in our constitution until 1972. As recently as 2007, 98 percent of Irish schools were run by the Catholic Church. But schools for troubled youth have been rife with barbaric corporal punishments, psychological abuse and sexual abuse. In October 2005, a report sponsored by the Irish government identified more than 100 allegations of sexual abuse by priests in Ferns, a small town 70 miles south of Dublin, between 1962 and 2002. Accused priests weren’t investigated by police; they were deemed to be suffering a “moral” problem. In 2009, a similar report implicated Dublin archbishops in hiding sexual abuse scandals between 1975 and 2004.
Why was such criminal behavior tolerated? The “very prominent role which the Church has played in Irish life is the very reason why abuses by a minority of its members were allowed to go unchecked,” the 2009 report said.
Despite the church’s long entanglement with the Irish government, Pope Benedict’s so-called apology takes no responsibility for the transgressions of Irish priests. His letter states that “the Church in Ireland must first acknowledge before the Lord and before others the serious sins committed against defenceless children.” What about the Vatican’s complicity in those sins?
Benedict’s apology gives the impression that he heard about abuse only recently, and it presents him as a fellow victim: “I can only share in the dismay and the sense of betrayal that so many of you have experienced on learning of these sinful and criminal acts and the way Church authorities in Ireland dealt with them.” But Benedict’s infamous 2001 letter to bishops around the world ordered them to keep sexual abuse allegations secret under threat of excommunication — updating a noxious church policy, expressed in a 1962 document, that both priests accused of sex crimes and their victims “observe the strictest secret” and be “restrained by a perpetual silence.”
Benedict, then known as Joseph Ratzinger, was a cardinal when he wrote that letter. Now that he sits in Saint Peter’s chair, are we to believe that his position has changed? And are we to take comfort in last week’s revelations that, in 1996, he declined to defrock a priest who may have molested as many as 200 deaf boys in Wisconsin?
Benedict’s apology states that his concern is “above all, to bring healing to the victims.” Yet he denies them the one thing that might bring them healing — a full confession from the Vatican that it has covered up abuse and is now trying to cover up the cover up. Astonishingly, he invites Catholics “to offer up your fasting, your prayer, your reading of Scripture and your works of mercy in order to obtain the grace of healing and renewal for the Church in Ireland.” Even more astonishing, he suggests that Ireland’s victims can find healing by getting closer to the church — the same church that has demanded oaths of silence from molested children, as occurred in 1975 in the case of Father Brendan Smyth, an Irish priest later jailed for repeated sexual offenses. After we stopped laughing, many of us in Ireland recognized the idea that we needed the church to get closer to Jesus as blasphemy.
To Irish Catholics, Benedict’s implication — Irish sexual abuse is an Irish problem — is both arrogant and blasphemous. The Vatican is acting as though it doesn’t believe in a God who watches. The very people who say they are the keepers of the Holy Spirit are stamping all over everything the Holy Spirit truly is. Benedict criminally misrepresents the God we adore. We all know in our bones that the Holy Spirit is truth. That’s how we can tell that Christ is not with these people who so frequently invoke Him.
Irish Catholics are in a dysfunctional relationship with an abusive organization. The pope must take responsibility for the actions of his subordinates. If Catholic priests are abusing children, it is Rome, not Dublin, that must answer for it with a full confession and in a criminal investigation. Until it does, all good Catholics — even little old ladies who go to church every Sunday, not just protest singers like me whom the Vatican can easily ignore — should avoid Mass. In Ireland, it is time we separated our God from our religion, and our faith from its alleged leaders.
Almost 18 years ago, I tore up a picture of Pope John Paul II on an episode of “Saturday Night Live.” Many people did not understand the protest — the next week, the show’s guest host, actor Joe Pesci, commented that, had he been there, “I would have gave her such a smack.” I knew my action would cause trouble, but I wanted to force a conversation where there was a need for one; that is part of being an artist. All I regretted was that people assumed I didn’t believe in God. That’s not the case at all. I’m Catholic by birth and culture and would be the first at the church door if the Vatican offered sincere reconciliation.
As Ireland withstands Rome’s offensive apology while an Irish bishop resigns, I ask Americans to understand why an Irish Catholic woman who survived child abuse would want to rip up the pope’s picture. And whether Irish Catholics, because we daren’t say “we deserve better,” should be treated as though we deserve less.
Sinead O’Connor, a musician and mother of four, lives in Dublin.
THIS IS WHAT RELIGIOSITY LOOKS LIKE! THIS IS WHAT RELIGIOSITY LOOKS LIKE! THIS IS WHAT RELIGIOSITY LOOKS LIKE!
And now for something completely, disturbing.
Good to know genes like these, were not perpetuated. What idiots.
They celebrate the murders at the airstrip, as deserving, and then say they are NOT committing suicide, but launching a revolution,
What the HELL is the difference, once you’re dead? Where is the rationality?
It sounds much like any church service I’ve witnessed….
This issue isn’t so much the dude’s insanity, by how and why so many are so willing to follow…
The addictive nature of mass delusion is such a sad fact of humanity. This is much like the Nazi hysteria that spread all throughout Europe in the 1930s. The Nazis came so far, at such an incredible pace…in less than 15 years they had physically and mentally reshaped so much history, understanding and thought. Whither humanity? –rudhro
Why don’t we get the best out of people? Sir Ken Robinson argues that it’s because we’ve been educated to become good workers, rather than creative thinkers. Students with restless minds and bodies — far from being cultivated for their energy and curiosity — are ignored or even stigmatized, with terrible consequences. “We are educating people out of their creativity,” Robinson says. It’s a message with deep resonance. Robinson’s TEDTalk has been distributed widely around the Web since its release in June 2006. The most popular words framing blog posts on his talk? “Everyone should watch this.”
Amina Said (L), 18, and her sister Sarah, 17, were shot dead by their father Yaser at their home in Irving, Texas, in January 2008. Said was upset by his daughters’ “Western ways” and was assisted in the killing by his wife, the girls’ mother. The victims of honor killings are largely teenage daughters or young women. Unlike ordinary domestic violence, honor killings often involve multiple family members as perpetrators.
And while the Protestant church and reformed Judaism have not replicated the perfidiousness of the Catholic bishops, who protect child-molesting priests, they have little to say in an age when we desperately need moral guidance.
To anyone who has been following First Amendment jurisprudence in the past 40 or 50 years, the recent Supreme Court decision (United States v. Stevens, April 20) striking down a statute criminalizing the production and sale of videos depicting animal cruelty in a manner intended to satisfy a particular “sexual fetish” will come as no surprise.
