Lachlan notes an honor killing story involving Turkish immigrants to America and proceeds to opine:

Once again, we have a case of women being treated as property. What I think will happen is that people will focus on the “alien culture” aspect of this case. Because the people involved are Turkish, it’s easy for people to say “It’s an Islamic/Middle Eastern cultural bias! How evil and repugnant!”

And evil and repugnant it is. The problem is, we can’t look down our nose at it, when the same thing happens here in America. Not the honor killings part, per se, but the women as property part. I doubt any abuser you query would admit to it openly, but it’s there in the behavior, the language, the jealousy and possessiveness.

It reminds me of this recent entry by Zombyboy:

Yes, I judge this act, and I judge the culture that allows it to happen. Certainly, women are beaten in the United States, but our culture doesn’t simply look away. In Saudi Arabia, on the other hand, it is not only a common occurrence, but it is ingrained in the culture as a right of the man to discipline his wife. Only the most severe beatings are reported or prosecuted, while the entire community simply ignores the more socially acceptable beatings.

American culture isn’t perfect, but that doesn’t mean I have to stay blind to the faults of others. And I won’t.

We are a nation of laws, and a nation whose laws were written with a moral compass. True, that compass does not exactly point in the direction the everyone would want it to, nor would that compass always be in the name of justice — as I am a supporter of equal gay rights among other things since I am pretty much a libertine kind of guy — but sometimes that compass points in the right direction, and we know it. No matter how some people tell themselves that there is a conflict, that there is some sort of nuanced — and I hate that word and its root more than you, my dear friends, will ever know — intricacy to the solution, sometimes the simplicity of it all is so plain, it is frightening. It defies “brilliance,” it defies “intellectualism.” Too many times in discussing social issues (especially social issues) I find myself and hear others as well say “it’s not that simple.” It may be true in a lot of cases, but not in this one.

Here’s a simple answer to this situation of women being debased in culture. Said culture is back-assward wrong, and I won’t stand for it. Not in the name of political correctness, not in the name of “nuance,” nor “cultural appreciation.” Last time I checked it was a cultural thing that made terrorists fly planes into the World Trade Center. It’s pretty much “cultural” for the radical Islamists to want that, since they say it falls under the edicts of their religion. Would we prevent ourselves from preventing a terrorist from blowing us up, because he claims that it is a religious practice?

We have not sunk that low. Let’s start at the roots of it in our nation, and make sure that Ismail Peltek answers to his crime. Honor or none.