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Human rights in MLK’s time and ours

Posted in Irshaddering Thoughts on Apr 07, 2008

As we continue to remember the assassination of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. 40 years ago, there’s another murder to memorialize: that of an Iraqi Kurd named Du’a Khalil.

It’s been one year since the 17-year-old girl was stripped and stoned to death for seeing a Sunni boy, her body buried with the remains of a dog. Family members helped snuff her out, with a handful of relatives being arrested for their active involvement.

They weren’t alone: Her attackers number upwards of 1,000.
Equally sickening, bystanders recorded the assaults on their video phones. What I find evil is not they recorded it — I am, after all, linking to a snippet of the video — but that they stood by.

To be sure, hundreds of Iraqi citizens protested the killing of Du’a. Hundreds. Less than the number of individuals who butchered this young woman.

Still, for deadly silences to be shattered and public conversations to be sparked, all it ever takes is a handful of morally courageous individuals. Margaret Mead, the famed anthropologist, affirmed this of many societies when she observed that “a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”

So God bless the handful of global citizens at the International Campaign Against Honour Killings, who have announced April 7th a day to remember Du’a Khalil. It’s not just about Du’a; it’s about thousands more women in Arab and Muslim communities whose cultural puritans force them into shame, duplicity and, sometimes, pre-mature death.

If the perverse phenomenon of honor crimes is new to you, I strongly urge learning about it. Let me be your guide. To demystify the tribal concept of “honor,” I’ve blogged about the case of a Saudi gang-rape victim here and here.

Lest anyone assume that these indignities don’t happen in the West, check out my TV interview about Aqsa Parvez, the Muslim-Canadian teenager whose father has confessed to strangling her for the sake of his family’s reputation. In all but name, that’s an honor killing.

I’ve also blogged about how self-defined “progressive” non-Muslims contribute to such injustices by tolerating the intolerable for the sake of cultural “sensitivity.” Read this commentary.

Finally, for more analysis of cultural relativism, the ideology that states we can’t question abuses of power if they take place in societies other than our own, click here and here.

All of which brings me back to Martin Luther King Jr. I believe he would have openly supported the effort to end honor killings.

In his Letter from a Birmingham Jail, written 45 years ago this month, Rev. King warned that “we will have to repent in this generation not merely for the vitriolic words and actions of the bad people, but for the appalling silence of the good people.”

He added that the greatest barrier to equality is not the transparent bigot, but the “tepid liberal.” By that, MLK meant the person who fancies himself progressive but who prefers “negative peace,” or the absence of tension, over “positive peace,” or the presence of justice.

A life-and-death distinction in any struggle for human rights, in any generation.