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Necla Kelek, a Turkish-born German sociologist, has written two best-sellers, The Foreign Bride and The Lost Sons, that rip the cover off the 2.6 million-strong Turkish community in Germany. She tells of thousands of teenage girls who come to Germany every year to enter into arranged marriages, followed by lives of isolation, fear, and domestic servitude. Legislation curbing this cruel practice is to be debated in the German parliament next week. If the bill becomes law, brides from outside the European Union would be required to be at least 21 years of age and would have to learn German before their arrival.
The rise of Islamic fundamentalism in German immigrant communities has had a devastating impact on women. Bret Stephens reports at the Wall Street Journal Online. (You have to click through the ad to get to the article.)
There have been 55 honor killings in Germany in the past six years. Most of the victims were "fallen" girls who had broken from their families and were living "like a German." Usually the perpetrator is a brother, acting at his father's behest. The Turkish community tends to treat these young killers as heroes.Such violence is integral to what Ms. Kelek calls the Turkish community's "organized self-marginalization." The tender age of the foreign brides, for instance: That isn't just a matter of depraved sexual tastes. "They want a girl with 'closed eyes,'" Ms. Kelek explains. The younger the bride, the more likely she is to be submissive to her husband, dependent on his family, ignorant and terrified of the world outside.
Today, every second Turkish woman who has a child in a German school is herself a foreign bride. Two-thirds of these children arrive in school not speaking a word of German. The German educational system bends over backward for them, providing religious instruction in Turkish or Arabic and excluding girls from physical education, sex ed and other subjects where Islamic mores might be offended.
Astonishingly, to me anyway, the Social Democrats and the Green Party, both "progressive" parties, oppose the legislation.
For too many self-described progressives, limitless tolerance of "the other" has replaced the defense of individual liberty as proof of virtue.Ms. Kelek sees it differently. Europe, she says, "has to fight for its values," not least by putting some hard questions to its increasingly alien and belligerent Muslim communities: "'Why aren't your women free? Why aren't your children free?' If we don't ask those questions, this will only continue."
The "progressive" left is full of self-proclaimed feminists. How can they object to legislation designed to bring a measure of freedom to women? Why do they oppose the liberal rights that make their own liberation possible?
As necessary as this legislation is, it only addresses one side of the arranged marriage issue. Something further has to be done to combat the other approach—when a young girl is sent back to the Muslim country of her ancestors and required to marry an older man she's never met.
via Dhimmi Watch.
