Where the unspeakable is routine: The backward immigrant ghettos that produce honour killings relentlessly perpetuate themselves, creating an impossible situation for Europe.

By now, we are used to the idea that women in Saudi Arabia and other backwaters of the Muslim world may be savagely punished for dressing improperly or speaking to men. But it is a struggle to believe that a German woman living in Berlin could be shot dead for wearing makeup and dating men not approved by her family. And it is almost impossible to imagine that the man holding the gun was the woman's own brother.

And yet, it happened.

In 2005, Ayhan Surucu, an 18-year-old from a Turkish-Kurdish family living in Germany, walked up to Hatun Surucu, his 23-year-old sister, as she stood at a bus stop. He raised a gun and fired shots into her head and body.

Honour demanded nothing less, Mr. Surucu believed. His sister had divorced the Turkish man her family had forced her to marry at 15. Now, she was dressing like a German and dating German men, in violation of the ultra-conservative sexual codes of southeast Turkey. According to the same codes, the only way to remove the family's terrible shame was to remove Ms. Surucu from the family.

As this newspaper reported, Mr. Surucu was convicted of murder last week. His two older brothers were acquitted, to the cheers of family and friends in the courtroom.

Unspeakable as this crime is, it is far from unique. Various numbers about the scale of so-called "honour killings" have appeared in press reports, but the only certainty is that they are happening with frightening frequency. "Five other Muslim women have been murdered in Berlin during the past four months by their husbands or partners for besmirching the family's Muslim honour," reported Der Spiegel in March. "Two of them were stabbed to death in front of their young children, one was shot, one strangled and a fifth drowned."

The killings are so routine that when Hatun Surucu was murdered, the German media paid little attention at first. It was just another honour killing.

But then the director of a school near the murder listened to a class of 14-year-old boys -- the children of Muslim immigrants -- discuss the incident. "She deserved what she got," one boy said, as others nodded in agreement. "The whore lived like a German."
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The director was horrified. He sent a letter to teachers across Germany and it was that letter that turned Hatun Surucu's lonely death into an anguished national discussion.

The Germans aren't the only Europeans trying to figure out where this barbarism came from and how they can get rid of it.

Honour killings became a major issue in Sweden following the murder of Fadime Sahindal, a Kurdish immigrant, in 2002. Ms. Sahindal was already well known in Sweden for publicly refusing to submit to an arranged marriage. She started dating a Swedish man instead. So her father shot her to death.

Another case involved Pela Atroshi, an Iraqi who came to Sweden in 1995 at the age of 15, learned to speak Swedish, made non-Swedish friends and did all the things immigrants are supposed to do. Her parents were furious. They accused her of "living a European life," according to While Europe Slept, a disturbing new book by American journalist Bruce Bawer. So they sent her back to Iraq and had her murdered. An Iraqi court sentenced her father and an uncle to just five months probation because their motives were "honourable."

Even the United Kingdom, which has the best record of assimilating immigrants in Europe, is plagued by honour killings. In 2003, writes Mr. Bawer, "a lively 16-year-old London girl named Heshu Yones -- who'd fallen in love with a Lebanese Christian boy and planned to run away with him -- was stabbed 11 times by her father, who then slit her throat."

"Honour-based violence is going on in Britain on a vast scale," Jasvinder Sanghera, a researcher at the University of Derby, recently told Agence France-Presse.

Almost as frightening as the killings themselves is the reaction of immigrant communities. Very often, there isn't any. Public expressions of support are rare, but so are straightforward condemnations. How many in the immigrant ghettoes privately echo the sentiments in that German classroom -- "the whore was living like a German" -- is anyone's guess.

In this country, the politically correct way to talk about Europe's failure to integrate immigrants is to blame Europeans. And there's much that Europe has done wrong.

But there's also something else going on, something timid liberals would rather not talk about.
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Unlike Canada and the United States, European countries have tended to draw their immigrants from just a few countries. And in many cases, immigrants come mainly from particular regions of those countries -- such as south-east Turkey, the home of Kurds like the Surucu family.

This was a pattern set by the "guest worker" programs of the 1960s, which actively recruited unskilled labourers in poor, rural regions.

It was a good way to get cheap, temporary workers -- which is all guest workers were supposed to be. But it was a lousy way to get future citizens because these people tended to poor, badly educated and deeply conservative -- not the sort of people likely to adapt to life in modern, liberal Europe.

Ghettoes formed and it became clear that the "guests" were staying. No problem, policy makers thought. With education and intermarriage, they will integrate and the ghettoes will dissolve.

But these hopes were defeated, in part, by the immigrants' culture of arranged marriages. Across Europe, the children of immigrants -- educated, raised, and even born in Europe -- typically do not look to the community around them for brides and grooms. They go to the old country to meet someone through their extended families. And since those families typically live in rural regions, the husbands and wives they come back with tend to be extremely conservative.

In this way, the ghettoes only get bigger, more detached, and more conservative.

In these communities, as in the old country, family honour is prized above all else and that honour is stained if there is even a hint of a woman having sex outside an approved marriage under any circumstances -- even rape shames the family of the victim, not the rapist. And as in the old country, the only way to remove a stain on the family honour is to eliminate the source of the stain.

Let's say out loud what is obviously true: A major cause of Europe's problems with immigrants is the misogynistic, xenophobic, homophobic and violent cultures found in the countries from which most of Europe's immigrants come.

Europe may be sick. But it is the cultures of much of the Middle East and South Asia that are profoundly ill.

You can contact Dan Gardner at the Ottawa Citizen.
E-mail: dgardner@thecitizen.canwest.com

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