November 25, 2015: The flood of illegal migrants (African, Afghan and Arab) into Europe is causing culture shock all around. This is because most of the refugees come from cultures that tolerate many forms of child and wife abuse that are frequently prosecuted felonies in Europe (and the West in general). The shortage of interpreters and fear of being branded “culturally insensitive” has European police and social workers inclined to look the other way. Unless there is a murder as dead bodies cannot be ignored. But the vast majority of the abuse does not go that far.

A lot of this abuse of women is connected with ancient practices about “honor” that are nearly gone from Europe but still common in the Middle East, Afghanistan, South Asia and Africa. That’s where most of these unexpected refugees are coming from and political leaders want these desperate immigrants to be taken in and settled with a minimum of fuss. The media is encouraged to stay away from the fact that previous migrants from the same areas led to an increase in crime rates, especially theft and rape. 

These refugees are coming from a culture where it is common for there to be angry men using acid to attack (to blind and disfigure) women who have somehow offended some man’s honor. This includes father, brothers, cousins and uncles as well as jilted suitors and so on. Acid attacks are also used by Islamic terrorists trying to discourage young women and girls from getting an education or having any fun. But the majority of these acid attacks have nothing to do with religion and are all about ancient (before Buddhism, Christianity and Islam) tribal customs.  Americans, and Westerners in general, are only gradually becoming aware of these very different cultural norms and how difficult it is to persuade people to abandon them..

This first became news (in a low key way) as more Westerners went into Afghanistan after September 11, 2001 and witnessed things that were quite disturbing. A major horror was the prevalence of honor killings in the region. Thus women suspected of adultery or refusing to marry the man her parents have selected for her (or marrying someone they did not select) or getting raped are automatically at risk of being murdered to redeem family honor. In Afghanistan it was discovered that at least two or three women were killed each week for “honor”. This was found to be common in Iraq (and the rest of the Middle East). Attempts to find out just how many honor killings there were proved impossible as it was customary to keep quiet (another part of the honor angle) about such matters. There were also even more rapes. Some of these overlapped with honor killing incidents. Rape victims who were not murdered to preserve honor are often prosecuted for unseemly behavior. It’s believed there were more cases of rape because this sort of thing is usually kept quiet f only because more than a third of the time male relatives are the rapists.

Aid workers, especially those providing medical services, found that Afghan society was particularly brutal, with men behaving badly with each other and children often savagely abused as well. This is quite common in tribal cultures, where murder (and other crime) rates are much higher than in more advanced cultures. These bad habits continued, to a lesser degree, in many parts of the Middle East and Africa.

There are Islamic terror angles to this as well. For example in Iraq police arrested a woman in 2009 who was responsible for recruiting most of the female suicide bombers used in the previous year. The woman freely confessed that she convinced widows, rape victims and orphans that their only choice (to maintain their honor) was to kill themselves in a suicide attack. Some of the rape victims were raped by terrorists in order to make it easier to recruit them.

The U.S. has had exposure to “honor killings” in the past. For over a century police have occasionally had to deal with recent immigrants from southern Europe (who began arriving in large numbers during the late 19th century) killing daughters for being “too American” and bringing dishonor on the family. These killing were as common in Europe several centuries ago as they are in the Middle East, Afghanistan and South Asia today. But gradually these brutal customs fade away. In some parts of the Middle East, Central Asia and South Asia that process is far from complete. Now the nations accepting these unwanted refugees will get a culture lesson they will not like at all.