Hirsi Ali: Honor Killings on the Rise in the West

Written by Tessa Berenson on Thursday June 2, 2011

Islamic honor killings are becoming more common in the West and Ayaan Hirsi Ali is determined to get authorities to take the problem seriously.

Islamic honor killings are making appearances in the West, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali is determined to do something about it.

Hirsi Ali is the founder of the AHA Foundation, an organization aimed at spreading awareness about honor violence and defending women’s rights through raising awareness and promoting legislative action.  The AHA Foundation is hosting an honor violence symposium in New York City on June 6. FrumForum talked with Hirsi Ali about the goals of the symposium and what honor violence means for western culture.

“The mission of the foundation is to protect the rights of women from militant Islam and tribal custom,” said Hirsi Ali. “What we would like to do is make professionals aware of the fact that some of these practices are growing in the United States.”

By ‘practices’, Hirsi Ali is referring to the multiple types of honor violence supported by radical Islamism such as forced marriages, honor beatings, female genital mutilation, and honor killings.  Dozens of other examples of honor violence are outlined on the AHA Foundation website.

Most Western government agencies categorize these acts as domestic violence, but Ali says that “this is a specific type of violence, and I think it is important to bring awareness to the people whose job it is to address these issues so that they know, you know, that this is a different form of violence. And that this is culturally sanctioned and religiously sanctioned.”

There have been cases of honor violence in the United States in the past few years that have attracted media attention.  In 2008, teenage sisters Sarah and Amina Said were shot and killed by their father in Texas because he believed they were becoming too Westernized. In 2009, father Faleh Almaleki ran down his 20 year old daughter Noor with his car because she refused to marry the Iraqi man he had selected for her. And, just this year, 20-year-old Jessica Moktad was murdered because her stepfather believed she wasn’t sticking to traditional Muslim customs.

FrumForum asked Hirsi Ali how widespread these honor killings have become in the West. “In no western country is there systematic counting of exactly, you know, how many girls are affected in this way, chiefly because it’s still taboo,” she said. “And so the choice that you then make is to not to talk about and not to connect the dots.”

Through some of her own research, however, Hirsi Ali found that in the UK, based on the number of women who go to police stations to ask for help, there are up to 1,000 forced marriages a year.  She also found that in a very small region in the Netherlands there were up to 16 honor killings a year.

“These are all criminal acts,” Ali said. “These particular crimes have to be tracked and the perpetrators have to be punished…This is pervasive.”

Hirsi Ali has high hopes for the success of the AHA Foundation’s efforts, and believes that the United States is the place to start: “Through awareness and education, hopefully we will be able to eradicate these practices in the US, and hopefully set an example for other countries.”