Culturally Motivated Crime

New Zealand’s pre-eminent radio documentary series, Insight, has a good record of covering contentious issues, making it the local equivalent of BBC Radio 4’s unmissable Analysis. It is, however, condemned to follow the Kiwi Weltanschauung – politically correct, diplomatic, multi-cultural, Left-wing in its unwillingness to find fault in dogma and doctrine, unwilling to cross lines, and thus ultimately intellectually shallow. A recent episode, Culturally Motivated Crime, encapsulated every one of these factors, broadcast on 19 October 2014.

Comprehensive as this report was, one vital facet was ignored, and, considering the unctuous sensitivity given to the subject, likely deliberately.  The role of religion in culturally motivated crime is essential to understanding it.  This omission from such a report limits the boundaries of discourse, which is, I would suggest, inappropriate for a programme named Insight. 

For the first time in decades of such crimes, the publicity given to the 1,400 females subject to systematic gang rape in Rotherham this year removed the veil of secrecy and inactivity maintained by the organisations meant to protect them.  This wasn’t a surprise to the well-informed.  In 2003 English journalist Rose George wrote about the French practice of tournante, or pass around.  “You pass round (faire tourner) a girl. They are . . . legitimate booty, if they have transgressed the viciously misogynistic codes that can arise when you take patriarchal religion, poverty and fury and mix them together. Feminists call this intersectionality: when gender and class and other issues intersect, and women are damaged by the consequences.”¹

Readers of this article were not in doubt about the perpetrators’ religion elliptically referred to, nor, after the publicity, the religion of those in Rotherham.  Usually described as Asians, this gratuitous allusion did a major injustice to other ethnic and religious groups.  They were not Hindus, Sikhs, Jains, Shinto, Confucians, Taoists, Buddhists, Zoroastrians or Baha’is, nor were they Copts, Assyrians, Melkites or Chaldeans.

They were Muslims.

Inspector Bridget Nimmo says in the programme that it is undeniable that serious family violence occurs across all parts of society and all different ethnic groups.  While this is true, the important factor here is whether such violence is morally sanctioned.  Cultural practice is ipso facto moral in the culture of origin, so re-acculturation to New Zealand moral standards is an imperative.  However, conflict will occur where religiously-sanctioned moral behaviour take precedence over New Zealand’s (indeed, the Western world’s) legal standards.

It is here that Islamic practices come to the fore.  Little understood in the democratic secular West is Islam’s doctrine of essentialism, the belief that nothing concerning the Islamic religion changes over time.  The standards set down in the 7^th Century are as applicable today as they were when first written.  Sharia law takes precedence over man-made laws which govern the West and Muslims are obliged to follow the rules laid down in the Koran and the Sunna. That many Muslims do not is an individual and temporary failing, not a measure of flexibility in Islam.  It is characteristic of Islam that it lurches violently between pragmatism and puritanism for this very reason, and the world is currently undergoing Islam’s return to puritanism after the shift to nationalism that followed the fall of the Ottoman Empire.

Notwithstanding reinterpretation of Islamic scriptures² to emphasise harmony with New Zealand’s mores, these same writings carry within them justification for each and every cultural crime mentioned by Insight. Not one of the other religions noted above does the same.  It is crucial to gaining an understanding of problems that now beset New Zealand and its new wave of immigrants to realise that the Islamic agenda is set globally by conservatives, not by well-meaning social agencies and their Muslim interlocutors.  There is ample evidence of a widespread failure to grasp this, leading to an incomplete and disjunctive world-view of the role of Islam in the West.

Insight’s comment by the Minister of Ethnic Affairs Peseta Sam Lotu Einga demonstrated precisely the issue.  He stressed the importance of having representatives of different communities recruited into various agencies, police or social services.  However, according to the BBC’s File on 4 of 28 October, cultural leaders recruited for just this purpose in the United Kingdom were leaking information about police liaison, leading them to suppress information on crimes that would bring shame to the community.

There is a fear of criticising and offending Islam – let’s call it Islamophobia – due to concerns about being labelled ‘racist’ or ‘culturally insensitive’, and of threats of repercussions and their realisation overseas³.  It was this fear that led to the egregiously delayed justice for the Rotherham victims.  The same sad, desperately insecure trepidation occurs here too.

The so-called millions of moderate Muslims in the West (which, it should be noted, is the wellspring of jihadists) and their bien pensant advocates will be on the back foot for the foreseeable future, forever excusing the behaviour of recalcitrant fundamentalists, while cleaning up the mess they make locally. 

Shakti is an organisation that provides support services for women, children and families of Asian, African and Middle Eastern origin.  Wellington co-ordinator for Shakti, Pollyanne Peña, doesn’t believe any religion or culture justifies violence and abuse.  She is sadly mistaken.  Her organisation has got its work cut out for a very long time to come.  

¹ http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/world-affairs/2012/10/nina-was-brutalised-her-rapists-and-then-french-justice-assaulted-her-ag

² The Shia doctrine of ijtihad, the exercise of critical thinking and independent judgment to solve problems.   Banned since the 10^th century by Sunni leaders who consider it politically dangerous to their ability to rule.  If a seemingly new problem arose, they were supposed to find an analogy from earlier scholars and apply that ruling to the problem.

³ The Islamic doctrine of tarhib and targhib -  terror and lure, where ‘tarhib’, from the word ‘irhab’ or terror, means to instil terror, and ‘targhib’ means luring or making something attractive, working on the Lesser Evil principle.  Compare this also with Voltaire’s aphorism, “Il est bon de tuer de temps en temps un amiral pour encourager les autres.”