Sunday, December 16, 2007

Newsletter 14 Borders, Archeology, Gillian Gibbons, Women

Terra Incognita
Issue 14
A Publication of Seth J. Frantzman
Jerusalem, Israel

Website: http://journalterraincognita.blogspot.com/

December 8th, 2007

Europeans and borders: The reason that Europeans always oppose the borders of Israel, and the reason they still claim Israel is the ‘occupying power’ of Gaza, is because European countries do not believe that non-Europeans have a right to determine their own borders. Since 1945 no country in the world has been allowed to re-draw its own borders without European consent, and those that have done so have not had their new borders recognized by the ‘international community’.

Archeology and Islam: A newly tenured professor at Bernard college named Nadia Abu el-Haj argues that when Palestinians destroy archeological finds they are conducting an act of ‘resistance’ against the Jewish attempt to create a ‘fake’ history of Jewish attachment to the Holy Land. It is no surprise that an academic would support the destruction of history, what is interesting is that Ms. Haj’s model is precisely the model of Islamic behavior towards non-Islamic historical sites.

Sympathy for Gillian Gibbons?: Gillian Gibbons, the English teacher arrested and subsequently pardoned in Sudan for naming a Teddy Bear ‘Mohammed’ does not deserve our sympathy. She knowingly went to a state that is committing genocide and gave a free education to the children of those who are leading the genocide. Furthermore she now tells us all how much she loved that country. Leftist Europeans have a strange habit of always supporting genocidal regimes because of their moral-relativist lenses.

A War on Women: The existence of Islam and countries run by Islamic law constitutes a veritable war on women. Whether it is ‘honor killing’ or whipping rape victims the Islamic religion is based on one concept: the control, suppression, enslavement and dehumanization of women. The fact that western women represent the greatest supporters of Islam today and constitute the bulk of the converts to Islam is no surprise given the perverse fact that western freedom ensures that westerners will desire only slavery.


Europeans and borders
Seth J. Frantzman
November 28th, 2007

Europeans and their allies at the U.N have constantly reminded Israel that her disengagement from the Gaza strip does not constitute the end of her ‘legal responsibility’ and ‘occupation’ of the Gaza strip. Therefore she is still the ‘responsible power’ for the strip and thus anything that goes wrong there, from power failures to sewage leaks, to Hamas murdering people, to kidnappings and famine, all are the fault of Israel. The message is clear: Israel cannot determine her borders without international, which is to say European, say so.

What is most fascinating, when one thinks about it, is that since 1945 no non-European country in the world has been allowed to determine their own borders. From the Balkans to East Timor to Israel Europeans have inserted themselves in some manner in every border dispute in the world. Even places where de-facto borders have been created, such as the India-Pakistan border or the India-China border or in the Western Sahara and Cyprus, none of these new borders have been recognized internationally since Europeans have not been allowed to play a role. In fact the Cyprus problem owes most of its history to the fact that Europeans would not help the Greeks expel the Turks, who have colonized half the island and ethnically cleansed it, or recognize Turkish Cyprus. From Transdnistria to Ngorno-Karabagh to Kurdistan to Northern Somalia, Chechnya and Abkhazia we can see that without European interference break-away republics receive no recognition in the world.

Two case studies of the European role in Israel and South Africa paint an even clearer picture of the European role in creating border disputes and then condemning their former colonies for daring to try to adjudicate them by themselves.

In Israel the British created the Palestine mandate. In 1920 part of that mandate was made into Jordan. In 1948 the mandate was split into two parts, one Arab and one Jewish. Nothing but conflict has followed. But since Europeans were not allowed to exercise their control over the creation of the borders of Israel or her Arab neighbors after 1948 they have spent their time criticizing and condemning rather than letting locals make their own borders. Thus what was allowed in 1948, the partition of a country, was not allowed again afterwards. It would be hard to not conclude that the fact that no border afterward has been recognized has at least something to do with the fact that Europeans were not allowed or invited to draw the borders afterward. Before 1948 they had plenty of fun drawing Palestine’s borders with Jordan, Egypt, Syria and Lebanon, just as they had fun drawing and redrawing their own borders in 1648, 1815, 1918 and 1945. Thus Gaza is part of Israel, not because Gazans want to be part of Israel or because Israelis want Gazans, but because Europeans were not invited to decide the borders of Gaza. Had Europeans been asked to do so one can be assured that today Gaza’s borders would be recognized by the international community.

In South Africa the British were happy to pick up where the Dutch left off and colonize the country. They fought a war with the local Zulus and the Afrikaners in order to do so. The Zulu state and the Afrikaner states were dismantled to make way for a greater South Africa. After the First World War the British added German Southwest Africa to the mix. But Britain was not content simply to add. She also subtracted Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), Zambia and Botswana from South Africa’s control. In addition she subtracted Swaziland and Lesotho from South Africa, setting these tribal kingdoms up as countries and granting them independence. When South Africa became independent for the first time in 1934 it was left with a festering problem of an Apartheid system, already put in place for the most part under British rule, and a large mix of ethnic-tribal groups. It would take 60 years before majority rule was brought to the country. But during that time the government granted a number of tribal groups their independence. Beginning with the Xhosa homeland of Transkei in 1976, Bophuthatswana in 1977, Venda in 1979 and Ciskei in 1981 a total of four new countries were created by the South African government in much the same way England had created Lesotho and Swaziland. But unlike Lesotho and Swaziland which were both granted independence from England in 1968 and recognized as such by the world, there was to be such recognition forthcoming for the homelands. One might say that this was the difference that 8 years made, the world simply didn’t want more independent African countries. Most have pointed to the fact that the world perceived the independence of these homelands as a racist policy whereby South Africa was ridding itself of its majority black population by making the parts of the country that had a high population of black ‘independent’ so that the country would eventually have a white majority. Perhaps that was the cynical reason. But what was the reason behind the rest of the gerrymandering that Europeans did in Africa, or gerrymandering in American electoral districts for that matter.
What changed between 1968 and 1976 was that it was South Africa, a nominally non-European country, that was involved in giving countries their independence. But there is one rule to be followed when granting people their independence. Only Europeans can do that. Other countries can’t go about declaring independence and creating new borders without the say so of a European or a European court of human rights or a European committee of the U.N. Without some involvement of a man named Steve or Mike or Charles or Chris there can be no creating of borders or gerrymandering of countries and creating of Bantustans.
People will point to the fact that no non-European country recognized Cyprus as independent, except Turkey, and that no non-European country recognized the South African homelands as independent and that no non-European country wants to accept that Israeli responsibility for Gaza has ended. This is the sad fact of world affairs. Independence minded people such as Anguillans, who declared independence from nearby Britain, St. Kitts and Nevis(the two neighboring Islands England had forced her into a confederation with) in 1967, have been stopped in their tracks because Europeans have not recognized them(in the case of Anguilla the British invaded the island in 1969). There is not one place in the world since 1945 that has been able to gain her independence without the consent and recognition of European countries. It is strange because there are some 200 other independent countries in the world and yet they are dominated by the decisions of some 30 European countries as to who to recognize and when to recognize them.
The world should have gotten an early inkling of how ridiculous this system was in the 1950s when mainland China was not recognized as ‘China’ on the U.N Security Council, rather Taiwan was ‘China’ and had a permanent seat on the council. Indeed the U.N has a large role to play in the fact that borders are still determined by Europeans. All the countries on the Security Council are European save the United States and China.

Archeology and Islam
Seth J. Frantzman
December 1st, 2007

Bernard College, which is part of Columbia, recently awarded tenure to Nadia Abu el-Haj, whose only published work describes the destruction of archeology as ‘legitimate resistance’ against colonialism. For her the destruction of archeological finds is the elimination of “facts on the ground” set up by the occupying colonial power. Ms. Haj of course directs her entire life’s work towards an analysis of Israeli archeology and what she called the “Jewish settler-colonial nation building.” For her “the work of archeology in Palestine/Israel is a cardinal institutional location for the ongoing practice of colonial nationhood, producing facts through which historical-national claims, territorial transformations, heritage objects and historicities ‘happen.’” This is quite a brilliant thesis and no doubt the fact that she managed to base her theory on Edward Said’s ‘Orientalism’ means she certainly deserves tenure at a prestigious American University since academics at Universities have the primary role of indoctrinating students to agree with them and their pet theories, no matter how outlandish or hate-mongering.

But what is most fascinating about the argument that destruction of archeology is in fact a legitimate weapon of national struggle is how neatly this dovetails with the history of Islam and its treatment of archeology. In fact Ms. Haj’s theory is not so brilliant or original. When Cortez built church’s upon the pagan temples of Aztec empire he was practicing her thesis. All the stories of idol breaking in the Bible were part of Ms. Haj’s thesis. The lopping off of the heads of Greek statues and carving out of their eyes and smashing of their genital organs was all in line with the view of Ms. Haj.

Islam however refined her ideas to a science. Wherever Islam went, whatever countries it conquered it tried its best to silence the past by means of destroying every structure or temple it came across. From the burning of the library of Alexandria to building a mosque in the place of the Temple Mount and in the place of Hagia Sophia. In India Mohammed of Ghazni, one of the fiercest Muslim warlords to colonize that land, bragged about destroying hundreds of ‘infidel’ temples. The blowing up of the Bamiyan Buddhas in 2001 by the Taliban was merely the latest manifestation of this Islamic method of dealing with history. Since Islam views all pre-Islamic history as evil it prefers that evidence of such a history not exist. Egyptian Islamist Muslims in the 20th century have even argued for blowing up the pyramids.

Ms. Haj thinks she is being brilliant by justifying the destruction of historical artifacts by pretending that those artifacts are being used as tools in a nationals struggle and thus must be destroyed. It is not worth pointing out the fact that Israeli archeology has been responsible for uncovering the history of many other cultures, including Canaanite and Pheonician and Greek and Muslim. Yes, Israeli archeology has also revealed archeological finds from the first Muslim period in Palestine. Ms. Haj would surely prefer that those good Muslim relics remain, relics like the Dome of the Rock or the tomb of the Patriarchs.

But perhaps Ms. Haj is correct. Perhaps archeology should be destroyed lest it become a tool of national-governments and movements. Muslims always seem to be ‘discovering’ graves of some companion of the prophet everywhere and demanding that a mosque be built wherever these ‘discoveries’ are made, such as in Nazareth. So these discoveries should be washed away, blasted from the soil so that no record of anyone’s past exists, lest those people one day show up and demand that they be allowed some connection with that place that their ancestors once lived. The Turks are expert at this, they have erased almost any trace of the fact that Armenians once lived in eastern Turkey.

But Ms. Haj’s thesis would please another ideology besides Islamism. She would have been at home among the Communists. In China and Russia the Communists spent half their time destroying the past in order to build a socialist present. They dynamited churches and synagogues and museums and everything they could find that they felt must be removed in order to make way for the socialist Utopia. In China Mao made sure to plow as many Buddhist monasteries and temples into the ground to erase any evidence that China had once been host to a fascinating civilization.

Ms. Haj and her Communist, Byzantine, Conquistador, Islamist friends are not brilliant people. Erasing history is easy. Most of human history has been erased which is why archeology only rarely yields great finds that truly re-write what we know. When is the last time Archeologists found something truly gigantic? Humans are great at destroying one another and burying eachothers civilizations under the dirt and sowing salt into the fields of ancient cities. What is difficult is preserving history. People would like to say that all archeology is political, and indeed much of it has been politicized. But the politization of archeology is a direct result of people like Ms. Haj who sixty years ago decided they had to wield archeology as their own tool against ‘colonialism.’ Now they have changed their tune and advocate the destruction of history. But they will not have to wait long. History has shown that those who enjoy destroying history are quite popular and because their actions can never be redeemed, their destructions cannot be rebuilt (like the Bamiyan Buddhas), one can be assured another round of iconoclasm is coming soon. What is most funny is to see that it will be an American college and its leftist liberal academics who will have been some of the first to support this new round of history destroying hateful fanaticism. But who else is good at destroying history more than the very people who write it, such as Ms. Haj. Its no surprise that the best Nazis learned Hebrew.

One might be surprised that the motto of the proto-Fascist Futurist movement was “we will destroy the museums, libraries, academics of every kind, will fight moralism, feminism, every opportunistic or utilitarian cowardice.” It may be a surprise to some that the modern leftist speaks like the 1920s fascist, that in many respects modern day leftist thought is merely fascist thought. So long as leftists think they are supporting ‘good causes’ or the ‘downtrodden’ or ‘Islam’ or ‘Palestinian nationalism’ or ‘resistance’ they will support the most disgusting things, the very things they combat in their own society at home. This is the tragedy of liberalism and it is a tragedy that is strangling society.


Sympathy for Gillian Gibbons?
Seth J. Frantzman
November 30th, 2007

The case of Gillian Gibbons, on the face of it, cries out for sympathy. Like so many British people in recent years (recall the Marines in Iran) she has ended up being put on trial by a savage foreign government. She is accused of defaming or insulting the Muslim religion by allowing children she was teaching at the Unity school in Khartoum, Sudan to name a teddy bear after the ‘prophet’ Mohammed.

One should certainly pity the injustice of her being put on trial. But no one seems to have looked deeper into what she was doing there in the first place. She was teaching at a charitable school funded by westerners. Her school provided a free education to children in Sudan’s capital. Furthermore it provided a free education to the children of Sudan’s upper class. These upper class are composed entirely of Muslim Arabs. They are all loyalists of the regime in Khartoum. Each one of the children in her class was a descendant of the same elites who have been carrying out a genocide against Sudan’s blacks and Christians for the last half century.

Gillian Gibbons, like most westerners who travel as tourists never bothered to judge the country that she was traveling to. Like a good moral relativist she went to an Islamist country that was in the middle of committing a genocide and decided to teach their children for free so that those kids could grow up to be good Islamists and carry on their genocide.

She provided charity for the richest families in Sudan. She never provided charity for the people who need charity in Sudan, the blacks and the Christians who have been thrown off their lands in the millions and sold into slavery by the Sudanese government and their Arab Janjaweed allies.

Why does Ms. Gibbons deserve our sympathy? Ms. Gibbons is like so many westerners who have no qualms traveling to Malaysia, Zimbabwe, Saudi Arabia, the UAE or Iran. She should have learned something about the country she was visiting before she traveled there. She should not have volunteered her time to contribute to a genocidal regime. If she had stopped being a moral relativist and instead had a conscience then she would have traveled to Darfur to help the victims of genocide or she would have traveled to Southern Sudan to teach the Christian Dinka tribe, whose members have been slaughtered and butchered by the Sudanese Islamist Arab government.

Would the British people have had sympathy for Ms. Gibbons if she had gone to Apartheid South Africa in 1985 and given a free education to the children of Pretoria’s white elite? Would they have been so sympathetic if she had provided the children of the leaders of Apartheid South Africa with a free education and helped reinforce the values of Apartheid to those children? I doubt people would have been so sympathetic if she had subsequently been put on trial for insulting Christianity by naming a bear Jesus. The difference is that in the 1980s people like Ms. Gibbons went down to South Africa to help the blacks after reading about the situation there. Today’s westerner has no such judgment. If there is a racist genocidal regime in the Middle East most westerners have no qualms traveling there and volunteering to help in the genocide. Its no surprise that I recently heard a friend of mine tell me how she dearly wanted to travel to Zimbabwe. Why not? Zimbabwe and Sudan are the most ‘exotic’ countries in Africa. Exotic entails any country that has a racist, genocidal government and is a dictatorship. Surely Botswana is not exotic enough, there is no genocide there, no dictatorship, no mass murder. Not exotic. Thus it doesn’t deserve people like our friend Ms. Gibbons. There should be no sympathy for any westerner who travels to Saudi Arabia, Malaysia, Iran, or Sudan or the UAE and subsequently gets themselves into trouble. These countries are barbaric, and they do not deserve tourism or charity, unless that tourism and charity is going to the victims of these disgusting inhuman regimes. If westerners want sympathy they should have a conscience when they travel and when they do their requisite charity work for ‘coloured-exotic’ people.

In reply to an article noting that Ms. Gibbons had been released one European white woman named Kelly Chandler from London noted that “It's so obviously unintentional [the naming of the bear] and it does seem like they have over-reacted. But when you go to another country, you should live by their rules, however strict they may be.” A Muslim (or perhaps a Jew) named Hanna noted that “This is why people who have no idea of the religion [Islam] only see this side of it - because this is the type of story that makes the newspapers.” Another white European named Pete from Leicester noted that by condemning Sudan people were being “racist” and that “Whether or not she (or you, or I) agrees with the sentiment behind the offence caused, cause it she most certainly did - and most probably through ignorance.”

Upon being pardoned by the Sudanese government last week Ms. Gibbons declared: “I am very sorry to leave Sudan. I had a fabulous time. It is a beautiful place and I had a chance to see some of the countryside. The Sudanese people I found to be extremely kind and generous and until this happened I only had a good experience.” Note: there is no critique of the genocide in Darfur, apparently her tour of the ‘countryside’ didn’t include watching African children being burned to death in their huts as their mothers were led off to be gang raped by the Janjaweed. ( One just wonders how many Englishwomen like Ms. Gibbons would travel to Israel and not mention the ‘occupation’.)
There is a message that should go out to all white Europeans: Stop supporting genocidal regimes, that way you won’t have to behave by the rules of those countries. According to the modern post-human leftist European logic if one is in a country and that country is a fascist state that is committing a genocide you should go along and volunteer to help out in the genocide out of respect for the culture and to ‘live by their rules.’ Europeans and Muslims pretend that this news story is why people have a bad view of Islam, but it is Islam that prosecutes people and whips them for naming a bear after their ‘prophet’. Islam gives itself a bad name through thousands of acts of terrorism a year and through genocide and religious intolerance, and then it pretends that this is the fault of the ‘media’. Its not racism to condemn fascist hateful states and their fascist disgusting laws, that’s called free speech and its called honesty. Europeans have a problem with honesty. And one last thing: Just because people cause offense doesn’t mean people should have been offended. The Nazis were offended at the very sight of a Jew, that doesn’t imply that the Jew did something wrong by offending the Nazis through his existence. The Sudanese genocidal regime deserves to be offended every day of the week, every hour of the day, every minute of every hour and every second of every minute until it is destroyed and salt is sown into the sand that produced it. If Europeans want to do some good this Christmas they can support the Sudanese Liberation Army or any of the other Black tribes fighting for their freedom from Khartoum. A few shillings could go a long way towards giving a Dinka tribesman an AK-47, boots, and a belt of ammo.


A War on Women
Seth J. Frantzman
December 3, 2007

The very existence of Islam represents a virtual war on women. That may surprise all the liberal leftist feminists in the west who devote half their time to reading the Koran and apologizing for Islam and attending Ramadan dinners but this is the fact of what Islam actually is.

Take four recent cases. In the West Bank town of Sebastia the Kiwan brothers locked their sister in a special cell they had built in their house for three years. Her crime? She had been divorced. But before she was divorced by her husband she had been sold into that marriage as part of a 'swap marriage' where two brothers married eachother's sisters, without consulting the women of course. She lost three years of her life, and of course all the other years before that. Today Amirah Kidwan is 40. She is a 'shame' to her family. Her 15 year old son was not permitted to see her during her 'incarceration.' Neighbors knew of the imprisonment and did nothing, considering it the business of the Kiwan family and as well know, Muslims don't interfere in eachother's business when it comes to a man's property: his women.

In Saudi Arabia five men gang raped a woman and recorded their 'fun' with a cell phone. When the woman informed police the police arrested her and sentenced her to be whipped 200 times for the crime of 'being alone with a man who is not her husband' which is a violation of Islamic law.

In Ramleh eight women have been murdered in the last three years. All of them have been members of the same Al-Ghanam extended family. All of their crimes have been crimes of immorality. They were perceived to have brought 'shame' on their family. So they all had to die. Each was killed by her own male relatives.

Between 2004 and 2006 six men from the Muslim Arab village of Bir al Maksour gang-raped four women and girls in the Galilee, one who was 13. In the same period another gang of four men from Kalunsuwa, another Arab village, raped two girls in Netanya and a man from Tireh, another Arab Muslim village, raped two girls in Kochav Yair.

These are only a few cases. 99% of Muslim crimes against women go unreported because, as in the case in Sebastia and in Ramleh until recently, most of these crimes are considered ones of 'honor' or they are simply not reported because Muslims feel it is not their duty to interfere in the rule of a man over his household. They aren’t reported for another reason: women are not considered human in Islam, they are objects to be disposed of like an old car, like a CD player that stops working. All of the western white educated intellectual academic Islamic scholars studying in departments of Middle Eastern Studies will dissuade us of this terrible accusation. They will point out, like Ahamdinjad did at Columbia, that Islam thinks women are different, and in fact women are the 'most highly prized sex in Islam.' Highly prized like one prizes a show horse. But what happens to that show horse when it hurts one of its legs? It gets put down. Women are treated differently. That is the excuse we often here from Muslims. In the west women are equal and in Islam they are 'different'. Different, like a human is different than a dog, a dog that when it gets out of hand has to be put down. Yes, we understand the code word 'different'. We understand what it means to be 'prized'.

One would like to see evidence of how Islam 'prizes' women. In Pakistan and Saudi Arabia and Iran if a woman dares to complain that she was raped she immediately bring dishonor on herself. If she is married she is accused of committing adultery. If she cannot bring four male witnesses to the rape then she is accused of having faked it and she then is put on trial for having unlawful sexual contact with men who were not her husband and she risks being stoned to death, whipped or imprisoned. In one case in Pakistan the rape of a young village girl resulted in her family raping a girl from the village that was accused of the original rape. Two rapes apparently made a right in this case. But what of the women. Their 'honor' is forever tarnished and likely they will be murdered by their own brothers for having brought shame on the family.

Imagine a culture where the brother murders his own sister rather than protect her. Islam is the exact opposite of western culture in this respect. Western culture is full of stories of men taking vengeance on other men who have wronged their sisters, mothers or daughters. But in Islamic society, from Iran to Pakistan to Indonesia, the women are to blame, not so much because they caused themselves to be raped, but because they have been perceived to have brought dishonor on a family. In the west the presence of a rapist in the family dishonors the family, in Islam the presence of a rape victim does so.

We are always treated in the west to explanations of how charitable the Islamic custom of divorce is. We are told that although the Catholic church forbids divorce, that Islam is more feministic and has always made it easy. One caveat though: It is only easy for the man. Women can not sue for divorce in Islam. Men can receive a divorce by simply saying "I divorce thee" three times in front of a male witness. That is the Islamic divorce law. It is very charitable for women. Women receive up to three months in Alimony, and if it is feared they are pregnant there is a longer period to determine if they are. In the famous case of Shah Bano in India a Muslim wife of some fifty years was disposed of in this manner, so that the husband could marry other women. She of course receives shame and dishonors her family, just as was the case in the Arab village of Sebastia.

Where does the Islamic hatred of women come from? Is it because of Mohammed and his twelve wives, one of whome was 6 years old at marriage. It must be hard to respect women when the most revered person in a religion spent his time having sex with as many as possible while instructing his followers that they might only have four wives and 'as many concubines obtained through warfare and in the slave market as one pleases.' Perhaps that is where the Islamic 'respect' for women came from: the fact that the Koran and the Hadith detail all the salve girls, that Mohammed and his follower s acquired and raped. Mohammed, if he hadn't been a prophet, would have fit in well in the 18th century American south, lest we forget all the dallying the Southern 'gentry' did with the slave girls, so much raping and dallying in fact that to find an American black who does not have some white ancestry is quite difficult.

Whetever the source is of the Islamic treatment of women, what is most intriguing is the degree to which western female intellectuals and academics excuse that treatment. At least 70% of those studying Arabic today in various programs throughout the Middle East are western women. More then 80% of the converts to Islam on a given year in any western country are western women. When Gaza was taken over by Hamas the first people to be evacuated were 200 Russian women, wives of Muslim Palestinians. They were evacuated with their Muslim husbands. Many prominent Muslim intellectuals have married western women and despite their claims to 'secularism' have encouraged their wives to convert, which the women have done with glee (I speak here of Said K. Aburish and Sari Nusseibeh as two examples). Prominent western women have converted to Islam from Tony Blair's niece to Sir John Goldsmith's daughter. The newest American film, Rendition portrays an American female convert, played by Reece Witherspoon, whose husband is an Egyptian Muslim. There have been cases of western women going to Iraq to blow themselves up and many of the Muslim organizations in the West such as CAIR have prominent western female converts wearing the requisite headscarf. One cannot understand this. Why don't western women embrace a religion that treats them well? Why do they hunger for the slavery offered up in Islam? Furthermore why to academics and leftists and progressives devote so much time to defending a religion, that even if it weren't for its treatment of women, hates abortion and promises the death penalty to criminals.

Why?

1 comment:

Ellen said...

In some cases, crimes against women in Arab/Muslim countries are scarcely punished. In Jordan and Syria, for example, there are three penal code articles on the books that offer leniency to the perpetrators in "honor" killings cases. The average sentence in Jordan is six months. It is as though the state has issued a license to kill.

Ellen R. Sheeley, Author
"Reclaiming Honor in Jordan"