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Without question, this was the first serious foreign policy speech Obama has made as president. In giving it, he broke a number of taboos and slid over several potential minefields, reaffirming America's commitment to Israel as well as to Palestinian statehood in front of an Egyptian audience, and going out of his way to make statements about democracy, womens' rights, and religious freedom. If the speech were the dawn of a new age of public diplomacy then I'm all in favor.
Two things worried me about it, however... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Aasiya Hassan, a 37-year-old Buffalo woman and mother of two young children who was seeking divorce from her husband, was decapitated by him in at the office of his television station, Bridges TV, which he started in order to "portray Muslims in a more positive light." Police are calling the beheading "the worst form of domestic violence." Indeed. But the president of the New York state chapter of the National Organization for Women said it was more than that: “This was apparently a terroristic version of honor killing, a murder rooted in cultural notions about women’s subordination to men." Phyllis Chessler has a study in the current Middle East Quarterly titled, "Are Honor Killings Simply Domestic Violence?" Her emphatic answer is, "No." Read the list of dead Muslim women, many of them daughters brought to the United States or Europe, who embraced the freedom and opportunities of their new countries only to be killed for it by fathers, brothers, and even mothers. Chessler says too often the West averts its gaze from attitudes and behavior in Muslim communities that preceed honor killings—the beatings and forced marriages, for example—out of a misplaced sense of nonjudgmental multiculturalism.
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