Six Muslim women have been murdered in Berlin over the past four months. In each case, the murderers are male members of the victims’ family who committed their crime to avenge their family’s “honor.”

Hatin Surucu was at a bus stop killed by three of her brothers while her 5-year-old son slept alone at home. Although born in Turkey, Hatin was raised in Berlin where she was training to become an electrician. Her “crime” was becoming too Westernized.

Five other Muslim women were killed by their husbands or boyfriends in the 16 weeks preceding Haitin’s death — shot, drowned, strangled or stabbed to death for being “corrupted” by non-fundamentalist values. In two of the cases, the women were stabbed by family members before the very eyes of their own children.

This isn’t a new trend in Germany. It’s been going on for quite some time.

The Turkish women’s organization Papatya has documented 40 instances of honor killings in Germany since 1996. Examples include a Darmstadt girl whose two brothers pummelled her to death with a hockey stick in April 2004 after they learned she had slept with her boyfriend. In Augsburg in April, a man stabbed his wife and 7-year-old daughter because the wife was having an affair. In December 2003, a Tuebingen father strangled his 16-year-old daughter and threw her body into a lake because she had a boyfriend. Bullets, knives, even axes and gasoline are the weapons of choice. The crime list compiled by Papatya is an exercise in horror. And the sad part, said Boehmecke, is that it is far from complete. “We’ll never really know how many victims there are. Too often these crimes go unreported.” [...]

One of the unsettling truths about Hatin’s death and the plight of many Muslim women is that it took the comments of three Turkish boys and the outrage of a male school director to get people to notice. When the murder first happened, it sent no shock waves through the mainstream German press. It only became big news when a group of 14-year-old Turkish boys mocked Hatin during a class discussion at a school near the crime scene. One boy said, “She only had herself to blame,” while another insisted, “She deserved what she got. The whore lived like a German.”

Not surprisingly, there are few American citizens who aren’t shocked and outraged by the prevalence of honor killings in Turkey and other Islamic countries.

American politicians apparently don’t share our outrage.

WASHINGTON, March 2 : The United States Wednesday refused to censure Pakistan for its parliament’s refusal to prevent violence against women.[...]

“I don’t know about this bill. I don’t know what the Pakistani parliament has or hasn’t done,” said State Department’s deputy spokesman Adam Ereli when asked to comment on the development.

Whatever happened to the Administration’s stance that if you’re not actively against something, you’re for it?

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