Phyllis Chesler – A Context Killer Who Sold Her Soul?
May 12, 2010 15 Comments
You would think that someone with such an education and growing-up in a free society would be an upstanding citizen and person of respect. The United States, created under principles of equality, dignity and judging people by their personal qualities and not by their color, faith or family origin should be a bastion of fairness. Yeah sure, but then the war criminal Radovan Karadžić and he was a noted psychiatrist and well-respected professor as well.
Perhaps you all think I am very hard, condemning and unfair and except for the last, I am. What has she done to deserve such condemnation? Phyllis Chesler is also on a hate-agenda crusade against all things Muslim and Islamic and abuses her educative status and her well-respected feminist stance – which frankly I respect a great deal. This for me is reason enough to condemn simply put that such a reputation and background is to be respected and not abused for agenda. It is, I believe, people like her that if circumstances were there, turn into the likes of Karadžić. The combination of eductation, qualifications and built-up reputation mixed with xenophobia, religious hatred and a little bit of mental-scaring creates the worst of monsters. History is full of them. From a little bit of research there may be psychological reasons for her doing so and again, but being qualified in that field and world-gives her no excuses at all.
Recently I read what I thought was the saddest piece of context-abused and promoted as a scholarly work on honor-killings. Great, I thought, it is a very important and disturbing subject that I have had interest in for many, many years and in my own short political life was involved in to various degrees with providing support to victims. No such luck, it was the opposite. The classic system of contextual abuse by cleverly quoting and choosing to cross-reference selective data was used. That is the saddest form and is academically considered “cheating”. In her website, the article which is called “Worldwide Trends in Honor Killings” fails in every aspect as an authoritative or academic item. Reading though it, the evidence appears to mount as you read that it is the Muslim world above all that kills under the name of honour and faith. Get to near the end and you find the con:
“This study analyzes 172 incidents and 230 honor-killing victims. The information was obtained from the English-language media around the world with one exception. There were 100 victims murdered for honor in the West, including 33 in North America and 67 in Europe. There were 130 additional victims in the Muslim world. Most of the perpetrators were Muslims, as were their victims, and most of the victims were women.”
No official, government or academic studies were directly referenced and, anyhow, it was a small 230 cases and the target was not reflective of global cases but targetted towards those mostly in the US and thus not representative of what she is claiming at all. If anything was clear from this self-proclaimed “study”, it was that they picked and chose the results to fit an agenda already in mind, rather than following the basic, self-respecting and logical process of investigating an issue and then producing conclusions from it.
The United Nations Population Fund said back in the year 2000, that just on directly reported and obvious cases fittin the current definition, there was way over 5,000 cases of honor-killing globally and that it this criteria as defined was so limited that it was only scratching the surface of a “world-wide problem”.
Most certainly many of these horrible events are in cultures that are within the Muslim world , that is neither denied nor is it disputed. For those Muslims, it is self-evident and condemning. It is also not the issue of my condemnation of Chesler. What is disputed is that she has deliberately targeted the entire faith (as she does in many other items from her and her colaborators) and more importantly, she has carefully manipulated details – abused context – to suite her agenda. For someone who claims a morally high tone and flaunts her noble qualifications – that is unacceptable and reprehensible.
She has not only, as mentioned above, chosen selectively numbers and sources but also has attempted to mislead. That, considering her radical agenda, is not surprising. As I have noted in other items, there are three “laws to radical behaviour” that never fail.
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The first is “the lie”, that the radical agenda which is inevitably false, is espoused and the radical must push it as a truth.
- The second is that to perpetuate and to justify the lie, they must start to abuse context in an attempt to make the lie look as credible as possible.
- The third is that they are obliged to assume that the target audience (be it the public, their own followers or to decision makers) is ignorant, stupid and should only know what the radical thinks they should. Chesler has abused context and academic standards to tell the public “what to think” and that they are not worth providing full context and all the information available.
“Although Sikhs and Hindus do sometimes commit such murders, honor killings…..”
“In North America, most killers (84 percent) were Muslims, with only a few Sikhs and even fewer Hindus perpetrating honor killings; in Europe, Muslims comprised an even larger majority at 96 percent while Sikhs were a tiny percentage.”
“In Muslim countries, obviously almost all the perpetrators were Muslims. With only two exceptions, the victims were all members of the same religious group as their murderers.”
These three quotes say a great deal – about the motives of Chesler and her “study”. The first is the assumption that the vast majority of all killings are Muslim and that Sikhs and Hindus do it “sometimes”. Further down we will look at definitions and what happens similarly to South Asian girls regardless of religion that changes the entire picture.
That Chesler jumps in and outside of the United States in her “study” is another well-orchestrated scam to provide a particular image to suit the agenda. That “In North America, most killers …..” and later on “In Muslim countries …….. all the perpetrators were Muslim”. The act of picking and choosing, as mentioned at the beginning of this item is an academic disgrace.
One aid to Chesler’s butchery of context is in fact the ease that she can do it, simply because the definitions of what is honor-killing is never clear nor is it set in concrete. Also many countries simply do not consider or record family murders as honor-killing. She obviously knows this and takes advantage. The comment that Hindus do it “sometimes” is far off the mark if we are to follow carefully with definitions.
What is Honor-Killing and the Definition Debarcle
Amnesty International’s definition of what is honor-killing is widely accepted by all parties.
“So-called honor killings are based on the belief, deeply rooted in some cultures, of women as objects and commodities, not as human beings endowed with dignity and rights equal to those of men. Women are considered the property of male relatives and are seen to embody the honor of the men to whom they “belong.” Women’s bodies are considered the repositories of family honor. The concepts of male status and family status are of particular importance in cultures where “honor” killings occur and where women are viewed as responsible for upholding a family’s “honor.” If a woman or girl is accused or suspected of engaging in behavior that could taint male and/or family status, she may face brutal retaliation from her relatives that often results in violent death. Even though such accusations are not based on factual or tangible evidence, any allegation of dishonor against a woman often suffices for family members to take matters into their own hands.
Demonstration against Dowry Killings
Since the UNFP hinted in 2000 the figure of 5,000 only scratched the surface, what other examples that fall into the above description are there? In 1995 Time Magazine reported that dowry deaths in India increased from around 400 a year in the early 1980s to around 5,800 a year by the middle of the 1990s, that already doubles the figure by just adding India into the picture and throws out the “majority Muslim” instantly. Why is that? Simply put we must conclude that the media, agenda groups and agenda-based academics with no self-respect are perpetuating an image. Like the dowry-deaths, we must wonder how many other cultural-killings are there out there and simply are ignorned, not counted or simply failed to be correctly defined.
In India, for example, more than 5,000 brides die annually because their dowries are considered insufficient, according to the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF). Crimes of passion, which are treated extremely leniently in Latin America, are the same thing with a different name, some rights advocates say.
“In countries where Islam is practiced, they’re called honor killings, but dowry deaths and so-called crimes of passion have a similar dynamic in that the women are killed by male family members and the crimes are perceived as excusable or understandable,” said Widney Brown, advocacy director for Human Rights Watch.
The practice, she said, “goes across cultures and across religions.” (National Geographic)
Chesler: Evil, Disturbed or Misguided?
What is the motivation behind the ugly islamophobic rhetoric of Phyllis Chesler? Just go through her website and it is full of anti-Islam rhetoric and links to the self-proclaimed anti-jihad movement or Israeli pro-settler far-right movements. Add to that a short look at Chesler’s past brings into quesstion some elements of her past that may have given to deep-seated mental conditioning . That is a very bold statement but it would explain much.
Chesler in early life had married an Afghani and lived in a large, polygamous household in Kabul. She has said publicly that this was disturning and that it helped create her feminist views and that is understandable and logical. It would have certainly done more than that. Her admission to these disturbing experiences in her early life, violence and worse in all likelihood have had a serious and traumatic effect. Adding to that, her work on anti-Semitism and her own openly Jewish activism could have a significant political cause to her anti-Islam status. Together, it is a recipe for ugliness and her agenda has proven to be such. She is unabashed in her support not only for the Jewish State (which in itself is fine) but also for the far-right radical settler-movement that is violent, religious and with strong links to a mass of different anti-Islam agenda groups.
With extreme-far-right blogger Pamela Gellar, a self-proclaimed leader of the so-called "anti-jihadist" movement.
That violent and abusive past in her life and added to that the collective radical values she is linked to could logically be a cause for a sad mix of cognitive dysfunctions manifested as cognitive distortions, or fundamental “faulty thinking”. If this is the cause of Chesler’s problems, to some degree understandable, it still requires condemnation, as they are not an excuse. (sources: http://www.psyskills.com/cogther01.htm, www.nicic.org, http://www.cognitivetherapynyc.com/pdf/heimberg2.pdf)
The alternative to her having such issues is that she is just plain evil.
This particular article on honor-killing disturbed me, simply because the issue is very important and to have the reality distorted so badly by Chesler is ugly and unconscionable. It distracts from the real issues and thus its importance. Also I have said a number of times now, that someone with her credentials and qualifications should be tackling this issue for sure, but from a purely academic, scientific and unbiased point of view. She failed in all instances miserably.
Honor-Killings or Cultural-Killings?
For my part the term honor-killing should be shelved, not to protect elements within the global Muslim community that are the cause of so much ugliness within their own community but simply because it does not give justice to the issue at all and allows for a false image of how large this horrible pandemic problem is and that it is a global pandemic. I suggest we call it “cultural-killing” or “cultural-based-killing”.
Having a better definition and objective take on what the real picture is also gives less ammunition to the likes of Phyllis Chesler to abuse the context, mislead and in fact lie – to fulfill her agenda.
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