Editor’s note: this article is also available in Romanian.
For a long time, feminist organizations in the Middle East have received huge amounts of funding from the West (mostly from the United Nations or undisclosed sources). However, tens of thousands of feminist organizations in Iran also receive funds directly from the Iranian government, under the guise of Islamic feminism (more about this in future posts). These entities have a monopoly on politically incorrect statistics that make it difficult for anyone to address the many issues facing men and boys. One of the issues that has been gnawing at me for some time is honor killings because, in reality, the true victims of honor killings are almost exclusively men. It is impossible to get your hands on statistics to prove this, however, yet all the while Iranian feminist organizations have at their disposal data on any topic you can name.
While studying husband killings, I had a major breakthrough as I scavenged through a labyrinth of censorship that led me to solve the statistical problem of honor killings.
HUSBAND KILLINGS
In an effort not to complicate these issues further, let us start by addressing a huge problem in Iran: husband killings. Better yet, let us start with all the murders.
From 2001 to 2010, the average murder rate per 100,000 people per year in the US was 5.45. Since approximately 2,000 people per year are murdered in Iran, its average murder rate is 2.56, which has deviated only slightly in the past 10 years. In other words, the chances of getting killed in the US are twice as great as getting killed in Iran.
Both countries share a similarity: approximately 25% of all murder victims are female, with Iran seeing an increase to 28.8% in the past year. Among Iran’s 78 million people, 576 women are murdered annually compared with 1,424 men.
As discussed here in Farsi, when this subject is mentioned, feminists blame men for the high rate of husband killings. As mentioned here in Farsi, enormous censorship is at work not to reveal the extremely politically incorrect statistics of husband killings. However, criminologist Samira Kalhor revealed that husbands murdered by their wives comprise 22% of all murders in Iran, whereas women who are murdered by their husbands comprise 27% of all familial killings in Iran. (A familial killing is a murder in which the perpetrator is a relative of the victim, no matter how minor their familial relationship. For example, a murder in which the victim and the perpetrator are cousins is a familial killing.)—Huh, apples and oranges!
Kalhor did her best to make the number of murdered wives look bigger by comparing different categories, but since familial killings are only 31.9% of all murders, it is further deduced that only 8.6% of all murders are wives who are murdered by their husbands. Thus:
Fact #1: In Iran, 22% of all murders are husband killings, while 8.6% of all murders are wife killings.
It is perhaps a good idea to point out that this 22% is almost as many as all the murdered women combined, which probably means that in Iran women kill men far more than men kill women.
Armed with these facts, we can carry on to honor killings.
HONOR KILLINGS
Honor killing is actually a misnomer because there is no English equivalent for the word Namous. It has been translated as “honor,” but the two words do not carry the same connotation. Namous is committed out of a behavioral propensity found in some portions of Islamic cultures called Gheirat, which we will not bother explaining here but will mention that it is enabled and maintained by women too. Anyway, men being killed, lynched, or beaten for matters relating to Namous, or honor, as mentioned earlier, comprise almost all of the victims. So when I first saw the media reports representing honor killings as gender-based violence against women, I was surprised. Later I found out that the term “honor killings,” unlike its original phrase Ghatl haye Namousi, has been defined by the UN and feminists to exclude the overwhelming majority of its victims: men, many of whom were murdered by other men at the behest of women or sometimes directly by women. How did they do that?
Honor killings occur when the family members of a woman kill a man for matters violating honor; on very rare occasions, it has been seen that some families have killed their own female member. So here is the key contrast:
Male victims of honor killings are not family members of the perpetrators, whereas female victims of honor killings are family members of the perpetrators.
Guess what? Feminists have placed honor killings as a subcategory of familial killings! There you go: all male victims have simply evaporated by a single move of mental gymnastics. As an example, here is a UN report on honor killings in Egypt. As can be seen on page 2, all the victims are female family members of the perpetrators. Is it too rude of me to mention that in this report 25% of the perpetrators are women? What about if I suggest that women only kill if they have somehow failed to commit the murder by proxy, which is what mostly happens: honor killings at the behest of women? Many other tricks are played in that report, but it has been useful to make the necessary point here.
Although neither wife killings nor husband killings are technically honor killings, most wife killings have been counted by feminists as honor killings. So there you go again: in that UN report, female victims of spouse killings have been reported as honor killings, which accounts for 52% of all reported honor killings. This of course inflates the number of male perpetrators.
Although the numbers for male victims do not exist, the next few paragraphs will attempt to find the lowest bound (minimum number) of male victims in Iran.
By using Fact #1, we get that 8.6% + 22% = 30.6% of all murders in Iran are spouse killings, and according to Iran’s police, 31.9% of all murders are familial killings.
Therefore, 1.3% of all murders are familial killings but not spouse killings. It is absurd to think that the entire 1.3% are female victims of honor killings, but we generously assume so.
According to Iran’s police, honor killings account for 18.8% of all murders (in the police’s definition of honor killings, male victims are included).
There are two possibilities here. The number reported by Iran’s police may or may not overlap with spouse killings. If there is no overlap, then the minimum percentage of male victims of honor killings out of all murders is easily deduced:
18.8% – 1.3% = 17.5% of all murders
Male victims of honor killings account for at least 17.5% of all murders in Iran, whereas female victims, as stated before, are far less than 1.3%. Thus, even if we assume generously that female victims account for 1.3%, then:
Fact #2: At least 93% of all honor killings include a male victim, provided that spouse killings have not been considered as honor killings.
Now, there is the possibility of overlap in the police categories of spouse killings and honor killings. So let us investigate such a scenario. Two questions arise:
- How many wife killings (which account for 8.6% of all murders) are honor killings?
- How many husband killings (which account for 22% of all murders) are honor killings?
A blind person can easily tell that if it was up to feminists, all of the female victims of spouse killings and none of the male victims of spouse killings would be categorized outright as honor killings.
Even if we count all the wife killings as honor killings (and none of the husband killings), we get the following for the bounds:
1.3% + 8.6% = 9.9% of all the murders in such a stupid scenario are female victims of honor killings.
18.8 % – 9.9% = 8.9% of all the murders in such a stupid scenario are male victims of honor killings.
Even in such an absurd scenario, at least 47.3% of victims of honor killings are men and boys. Once more, we say “at least” because:
1) We counted all familial killings that were not spouse killings as female victims of honor killings.
2) We counted all female victims of spouse killings as honor killings and none of the male victims.
The lower bound on male victims is therefore 47.3%, found by a maximum exaggeration in favor of female victims. We don’t have the actual number of male victims and can only speculate it to be well over 80%.
All in all, when it comes to this subject, the level of corruption is deep, and the feminist tactics are summarized as follows:
- Change the definition to exclude male victims.
- Count all kinds of familial killings (persons murdered by relatives, no matter how minor their relation) as honor killings—even if the murder was for something else entirely.
- Report the resulting twisted statistics as if the perpetrators are men.
- Rob women of any agency in such cultures and start blaming the patriarchy.
One key difference between the framing tactics of honor killings and those of domestic violence and rape is that honor killings really are a gendered issue because the majority of victims are male.
REASONS FOR HUSBAND KILLINGS
Since questions about the high rate of husband killings are being whispered now and then, feminists are quick to find a theory to defend it: it is because women do not have the right to divorce. This is a big lie, which has been debunked before [1]. If anything, it is actually the other way around: it is women who have the most rights to divorce in Iran. Recent statistics confirmed that 80% to 90% of divorces in Iran are initiated by women; and if you are curious, the number is actually pretty high: 150,000 divorces per year.
There is the possibility, however, that some women actually believe this feminist myth to be true. But it is unlikely that this can be a good explanation for such a disparity between genders in spouse killings.
A noteworthy possibility for such a high rate is that when women initiate divorce, especially if their husband is neither abusive, nor ill, nor addicted, etc., they will probably have to let go of part of their Mehrieh. If you do not know what Mehrieh is, see [1]. So if they can get away with murder, they will inherit most of their husband’s possessions and not settle for a mere 25%. Like this story in Farsi, in which the man the woman married after her husband’s murder turned out to be the murderer; and while the victim’s family maintained that she had had an affair with their son’s murderer and was actually complicit in his murder, she denied this. In the extremely chivalric judicial system of Islamic countries, male witnesses fall from the sky in favor of women. So this case is not considered a husband killing because the wife was not found guilty.
If you are wondering what happens to these women, there seems to be a huge and peculiar disparity for punishment in Iran’s all-male-judge judicial system: of the 580 people who received the death sentence in Iran in 2012, only 9 were women. So in theory, according to Islamic law, the judge should grant the right to choose the death sentence to the victim’s parents. But this does not reflect the reality, for 440 husbands are killed annually by their wives. It seems that men in high positions create obstacles if the murderer is a woman. More will be said later on the exceptionally chivalric judicial systems of Islamic countries.
[1] http://www.avoiceformen.com/feminism/feminist-lies-feminism/indentured-servitude-for-men-in-iran-the-myth-of-patriarchal-oppressive-divorce/
