Lubna Hussein faces up to 40 lashes for wearing pants in public.

On Wednesday, the court gave Hussein the option of accepting immunity as a U.N. worker or waiving it and standing trial. Hussein works for the media department of the U.N. and is also a journalist for the left-leaning Al Sahafa newspaper. The soapbox at her disposal has not been lost on her: In response to the court’s offer, Hussein waived her immunity, saying, “I wish to resign from the U.N. I wish this court case to continue.”

Later she added, “I wish to change this law.”

We can help her by watching closely and talking about her case in public. The more attention her case gets, the better. Please share her story.

Barbara Kay is on fire!

For greater clarity around domestic violence in Canada, we should use the term Inter Partner Violence (IPV), now favoured by many academics in this field. Normative IPV is violence that springs from psychologically troubled people — both men and women — who have problems dealing with intimate relationships, but have no healthy model for resolving them. Many of them have come from abusive backgrounds. Much of IPV involves alcohol, drugs or both, not the case with honour killing. IPV is usually situational and therefore spontaneous, rarely planned in advance like honour killing. Unlike honour killing, too, which invariably involves males killing females, about 50% of IPV is “assortative” — cases where damaged like seeks like — and the partners bilaterally provoke each other.

Canada’s male-on-female IPV murder numbers — about 45 women partners (not daughters) a year, low for a population of 35 million — are directly linked to an important cultural fact: Murdering women, especially their own loved ones, is anathema to healthy Western men. Unlike honour killings, such crimes are universally condemned: They are never validated, let alone encouraged in our institutions or houses of worship; indeed, all abuse of women is abominated rather than tolerated in the general culture.

We must understand above all that IPV and honour killings represent different stakes for society. IPV is not sociologically catchy: Healthy people do not take their intimate relationship cues from the pathological amongst them. Honour killing, on the other hand, is a form of ideological terrorism linked to a particular religious and cultural outlook, an implied threat to other women of what can happen if they don’t toe the party line and an emboldening “inspiration” to their male cultural peers. Like suicide bombing, another culturally induced form of hysteria, honour killing is a sick practice that can go viral if not nipped in the bud.

Cravenly ascribing the problem of honour killings to all men’s nature, which is what we do when we subsume it under the heading of domestic violence, itself misunderstood, rather than acknowledging the specific cultural matrix from which the phenomenon emerges, will only end in more dead innocent girls and women. That seems a rather high price to pay for our liberal elites’ pleasure in dancing to the vivacious gallopade of the multicultural-correctness polka.

What’s missing from this column are numbers for “honour killings” in Canada, which I’m guessing are pretty low. According to the UN (not exactly hysterically anti-Muslim people), something like 5,000 women are victims of such crimes a year around the world – mostly in the Middle East and Southeast Asia. I wonder how many women are killed by their male partners in “non-honour-killing” murders (what I gather we should call “male-of-female IPV murders”) worldwide every year.

It’s hardly the worst thing about them, but still, these kinds of results should obviously be mentioned in there somewhere if we are going to continue to believe (I use the term loosely) that women give their fully informed consent before undergoing abortions.

Washington, DC (LifeNews.com) — A new study done on women in Turkey who had abortions finds a 66 percent increased risk of contracting breast cancer as a result. The study is the latest to confirm that abortions cause significant adverse medical risks for women who have them, in addition to killing unborn children.

Yes, I know. Continuing an unwanted pregnancy also has consequences. But most people are usually aware of those (like, say, that there will most likely be a baby at the end). It’s not a question of which course of action is less risky so much as which one is right. And I for one believe that in virtually all cases, abortion isn’t the right course of action.

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Update: Seems like tanning beds are also dangerous that way. Me, I can’t understand why anyone would want to squeeze into one of those tubes (OK, so I am claustrophobic), regardless of cancer risks.

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Andrea adds: Both of these cancer links are no-brainers if you ask me. But one of them will be highly-contested. Intuitively, it makes sense that abortion would increase your risk of breast cancer. In totally non-scientific terms, it is my understanding that a woman’s body changes when she gets pregnant and part of that change involves increased hormone levels and a multiplication of breast cells. And when you abort, you are left with the multiplying cells (again, I’m not a doctor but isn’t that what cancer is?) and higher levels of hormones of the cancer-causing variety.

As for tanning beds, I have been known to use one once or twice in mid-February when you feel like winter will never end. But I gave it up when I realized if I am to get skin cancer, it should be because I spent time on the beach in Hawaii and not because I shut myself into a small, brightly lit, coffin-like tanning bed. Priorities, people.

Scientists think they’ve discovered a male contraceptive – one that involves inhibiting the sperm’s PLC zeta protein. I’m sure (certain! positive!) the guys will go for that. Sounds so virile.

Logic is a cold instrument that is frequently not compatible with life (or maybe I should say: Life isn’t always logical). Anyone who’s ever fallen in love will know as much – sometimes, we do things that don’t make sense even though we know they don’t make sense.

I like being logical, most of the time. But like anything else, logic can be taken to extremes. Like deciding, when young and reasonably healthy, that we wouldn’t want to live with illness or pain, therefore we should legalize euthanasia. Especially given how overstretched our medical system already is…

If, like me, you don’t like this sort of “logical” thinking, then you’ll appreciate this column.

We have up until recently assumed that we cannot control life’s end. When that was the case — just as when we used to think we could not control life’s beginning — caretaking for those at the heart of the drama was accepted as everyone’s responsibility. But now we would view late-life sufferers, as we used to consider unwed mothers, as having gotten themselves “in trouble” and in need of a termination to that trouble. Of course, as with abortion, the pregnant woman, or the sufferer pregnant, so to speak, with pain, can choose not to terminate. But then, if that’s your choice, the result of the choice (the baby, the suffering) is also your problem, isn’t it? Because in the case of the sufferer, if you haven’t made a deliberate decision to die, then continuing to live is not a given, something you needn’t concern yourself with; rather, continuing to live then also becomes a deliberate decision, one for which you, not your family and society, are responsible.

For a glimpse into a future in which euthanasia and assisted suicide are legal, read a short essay by Richard Stith, Her Choice, Her Problem: How Abortion Empowers Men in the August/September issue of First Things magazine. Stith, who teaches at Valparaiso School of Law in Indiana, makes the persuasive case that when having children became an elective rather than a natural consequence of sex, responsibility for children shifted wholly to women. Men instinctively understood that if conception could be undone, then so could their responsibility for being involved with the children women chose not to terminate.

Instead of empowering women, abortion has placed many women in a cleft stick. As Stith notes: “One investigator, Vincent M. Rue, reported in the Medical Science Monitor, that 64% of American women who abort feel pressed to do so by others. Another, Frederica Mathewes-Green in her book Real Choices, discovered that American women almost always abort to satisfy the desires of people who do not want to care for their children.” If you substitute the words “euthanize” for “abort” and “elderly” or “chronically ill” for “children,” the analogy with end-of-life termination could not be more clear.

It’s hard to react to stories like this with anything other than a string of swear words. Nothing – absolutely nothing – justifies this kind of criminal behaviour.

The infant girl is reportedly not expected to survive.

No, I don’t have anything useful to say, other than “throw the books at them”. I just wanted to help making sure her suffering didn’t go unnoticed.

So a father, mother and brother are accused of murdering their three daughters and sisters, respectively, along with a “relative” who, it turns out, was the father’s first (and never, as far as I know, divorced) wife. Which gives us both polygamy and what looks like “honour killing”. And what did you hear from the feminists?

(…)

That’s what I thought.

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Update: Hey, I’m not the only one who noticed…

There’s a job I’d like:

SCIENTISTS in Britain are looking for women willing to eat chocolate every day for a year – all in the name of medical science.

Researchers at the University of East Anglia and a hospital in Norwich, eastern England are trying to find out whether chocolate can cut the risk of heart disease and need 40 women to step forward and help.

Most of the women will have to eat two bars of “super-strength chocolate specially formulated by Belgian chocolatiers” daily for one year and undergo several tests to measure how healthy their hearts are.

The others will have to eat regular chocolate as a placebo.

Heck, I can live with that! I was ready to look up phone numbers and was wondering if they’d take someone in Canada, when the newspaper had to ruin an otherwise splendid start to yet another rainy day.

One possible catch, for chocolate fans spotting an opportunity: volunteers for the research should be menopausal but aged under 75 and have type two diabetes.

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Andrea adds: Don’t let the fine print hold you back, Brigitte. I’ve been experimenting for some years now. What I’ve learned: Succumbing to the three o’clock urge for chocolate leads to a severe sugar spike, guilty feelings and extra time at the gym. The result is similar when I substitute ice cream and/or frozen yoghurt. Many areas of inquiry remain: Baked goods? Candy? I just don’t know. The science continues.

Phew, that’s a pretty strong indictment. I don’t know enough about Iran to have a definitive opinion as to whether these tales are true, but I do trust Mr. Fatah – who, if anything, usually strikes me as overly nice and conciliatory.

For 30 years, an entire nation has been subjected to imprisonment, torture, murder and — unnoticed by the world — the institutional rape of its daughters, all in the name of Islam. No other dictatorial society, not even the Saudis, have used rape as a tool of subjugation as the Iranian ruling ayatollahs have. Perversely, it has been dressed up as an act of piety and religiosity.

This truth is beginning to come out in the open. A serving member of the Iranian vigilante Basiji militia reportedly has told Sabina Amidi, a freelance reporter for the Jerusalem Post, about his enforced participation in the rape of young Iranian girls prior to their execution. The Basiji enforcer disclosed that the practice was justified by his superiors under the dubious proposition that, under sharia law, “it is illegal to execute a young woman, regardless of her crime, if she is a virgin.”

[…]

It seems the women of Iran have had it with the mullahs. It is time for all Canadians to come out and stand with their sisters, for history will judge them harshly if the freedom they seek for themselves, they deny to the daughters of Iran.

Count me in.

An editorial in today’s Ottawa Citizen says it’s a good idea to debate assisted suicide:

The deaths of a prominent British conductor and his terminally ill wife after drinking a fatal draught in a Swiss clinic this month have sparked an international debate about assisted suicide. Now, given a proposal by Quebec physicians, that debate is set to explode in Canada. And that is a good thing — no matter what your view on euthanasia.

[…]

The double suicide has led to a debate in Britain and elsewhere about the dangers of euthanasia, including that, by making it easier to end a life, those who feel they are a burden on others or society may feel pressure to do so. A debate to clarify how Canadians view the issue should be welcomed.

Totally. I’m game. Count me in. And while we’re all assembled, debating how Canadians view “end of life” issues, maybe we could squeeze in a session or two about how Canadians view “beginning of life” issues, too?