It gets complicated. Actions like this are unequivocally evil and should be opposed with all our heart and soul. But on one side of us, we have the right-wingers who say “Yes! That act was totally evil — and Muslims do that kind of thing all the time, because they’re evil! You should stand with us in condemning Islam and agreeing that we should bomb Iraq and lock Muslims up in concentration camps!” And while we’re going, “Huh? Bwuh?”, people on the left side of us are saying, “Well, we really can’t condemn such an act as Westerners, because Western society and Christians commit many heinous acts against women too! As long as women are pressured into getting breast implants in the US, we have no moral high ground to condemn a teenager being torn apart by dogs on a trumped-up charge of infidelity!”

To me it seems that it should be possible to stake out a middle ground. Hard-line Islamic militia like the one in Somalia, strict Wahhabist Muslims like the people in charge in Saudi Arabia, and many of the pre-Islam cultural values held in some of the places where Islam has its strongest foothold, such as the honor killing bullshit in Pakistan and the female genital mutilation in much of Africa… these are misogynist, women-hating cultures, subcultures, or aspects of culture. We should despise the people who commit such acts and be suspicious of those who condone them. But this can never be used as an excuse to condemn the *entire* culture, as the entire culture is *full* of women and maybe many of them are fighting this kind of thing. For that matter there may be male allies in those cultures as well; poor Taslim’s *father*, rather than the more frequent equation of “father participates in honor killing”, appears to have been utterly horrified by what happened, and was held prisoner, helpless, while his brother and nephew murdered his daughter. So the problem is not “Islam” or “Muslim men” or even “men in Pakistan”, but the *specific* form of misogyny practiced in the culture.

At the same time, we as Western feminists, while recognizing that our lives are not peaches and roses either, would be spitting on our foremothers not to recognize that we have it *much* better than Taslim Solangi did, that we can be murdered by our husbands and have a judge pretty much ignore it but if we’re torn apart by dogs in front of our fathers as part of an attempt to steal his land we can be pretty sure we will not be retroactively declared to be the guilty parties and our murderers exonerated. Besides, as feminists we have the moral high ground to declare these acts evil even *if* one could point to a case of a Westerner doing the exact same thing, because we have as much obligation (if perhaps not more) to criticize our own culture as to criticize other people’s, and evil is evil. if we don’t fall in the trap of saying “A Pakistani Muslim man committed evil and therefore Muslims are evil” we have no reason to refrain from saying “A Pakistani Muslim man committed evil” even if plenty of American Christian men also commit evil… as long as we’re willing to point out their evil too, and we generally are.

I hope that the female senators who walked out of parliament in protest are evidence that her killers were wrong.

The police have taken the rare step of arresting some of those responsible, so I hope that’s evidence too. Then again, I wouldn’t be surprised if the authorities try to make it the One Time – making a bug show of this one time they do punish this evil, in the hopes of excusing all the times they don’t bother.

I’m glad the female senators walked out but what did the male senators do?