Global News: November 2003 Archives

The CounterRevolutionary features New York Times articles saying that America is losing the peace, occupation is failing, and the enemy didn't have the weapons we thought they did. Of course, these articles are from 1945 and they're about Germany. Interesting reading -- start here and keep scrolling down. (Hat tip: Clayton Cramer.)

Little Green Footballs linked this story of Palestinian family life a few days ago:

Rofayda Qaoud - raped by her brothers and impregnated - refused to commit suicide, her mother recalls, even after she bought the unwed teenager a razor with which to slit her wrists. So Amira Abu Hanhan Qaoud says she did what she believes any good Palestinian parent would: restored her family's "honor" through murder. ...

Killing her sixth-born child took 20 minutes, Qaoud tells a visitor through a stream of tears and cigarettes that she smokes in rapid succession. "She killed me before I killed her," says the 43-year-old mother of nine. "I had to protect my children. This is the only way I could protect my family's honor."

And in India, the Scotsman reports that affluent urban families are adopting what was once mainly a practice among poor rural families: female feticide and infanticide.

A new report published by the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) has revealed that the practice of female foeticide, in which an unborn baby is aborted or killed at birth simply because it is not a boy, is now spreading from India's poor and rural classes to affluent urban families.

The report said that far from helping women win equality, increased affluence had brought little change, and that sex discrimination had in fact spread through all levels of Indian society. And it is estimated there are between three and five million girl babies, born or unborn, "disappearing" each year.

India has a shocking history of child-killing due to gender, but the tradition has largely been among the uneducated and rural classes. However, the new figures reveal that the sharpest fall in the number of female babies being born is now in Delhi. ...

The methods used in the past to get rid of unborn or newborn girls have been varied and shocking. Opium has been used as well as over-salted milk, which causes a slow and painful death in a baby. Midwives have also been known to hit newborn girls over the head or throttle them.

Anyone care to argue that all cultures are morally equivalent?