Through the Swedish integration policy, public sector officials have gained knowledge of honour-related violence. Hopefully, this will result in a reduced number of forced marriages and honour killings. There is thus reason to praise both Mona Sahlin and Nyamko Sabuni. But how is it that virginity checks, hymen reconstruction, child and forced marriages, honour killings and ‘balcony suicide’ still continue to thrive in today’s Sweden? Why is it in today’s Sweden that 70 000 young people who, because of regulatory frameworks in honour cultures, are not free to choose their life- or love partners, and are limited in their choice of dress, friends and education?

I was born in a country where honour-related violence is still both legal and systematic, and in which honour killers can easily be freed with bribes, or get a reduction on their sentences. In my old homeland one of Pela’s killers, her father, walks free, while Pela lies in an unmarked grave because she was believed to have defiled the family’s honour. In my old homeland, the men are still legally entitled to four wives. In my old homeland 17-year-old Dua Khalil Aswad was stoned to death by nearly 2000 men in the street, right in front of police on 7 April 2007.

I was born in Iraqi Kurdistan, into a family with two brothers and four sisters. My father was a wealthy merchant, a wonderful man who went to the mosque five times a day. His religion was an individual matter, and he was always kind to us. The house’s patriarch was instead my mother, whose piety was of the literalist type, although she did not go to the mosque (because women were forbidden to do so at the time). She ran the home and the girls’ education with a view that we would become kitchen maids.

I grew up without learning to swim or ride a bike because it was perceived to undermine my virginity – a clean and nice girl’s most valuable treasure. I was genitally mutilated when I was six years old, was forced to wear a veil when I was sixteen, and was almost killed by my own brother when I was seventeen. He put an AK-47 to my head and demanded that I should accept being married off to a much older man whom I had never met, or even seen. So I had to choose between marriage and death. I ‘chose’ marriage, but escaped just before the ceremony. The clan leader called the men who could not handle me ”pussiesThere is a much stronger translation of this word, but I’m sure you know what it is.There is a much stronger translation of this word, but I’m sure you know what it is.”, while I was called ”the one who had balls”. I had trampled on their honour. In 1993, I fled to Sweden.

During my SFI classes, I reacted to the fact that several women could not sit next to men. This proved to be no one-off event, but part of a larger pattern. Since then there have been reports of schools that have set up screens between women and men, and Swedish municipalities which have introduced special separate opening hours at public swimming pools for men and women.

So, Sweden has continued to cultivate notions of gender segregation, enforced chastity, and the idea that young people should not socialise or marry outside their religious and nationality boundaries. The veil, the symbol of the oppression of women, is perceived by well-meaning Swedes as an exotic article of clothing, despite the veil being indicative of rigid religious edicts. The veil marks a rejection of love relationships for anyone who is not married, a rejection of girls swimming with boys, a rejection of homosexuality, and an acceptance of male supremacy in many areas of life. This would never be accepted by Swedish politicians and feminists if the children in question were Swedish. But, as far as the others are concerned, then intolerance is accepted in the name of tolerance. Gender discrimination is thus accepted and then expressed in the understanding of male-dominated organizations that require special rights – ‘rights’ that violate and discriminate against individuals such as children, women and young people within their own groups.

Cultural relativism and the identity-based political multiculturalism lead to concerns in relation to the parts of various cultures and religions that are in conflict with human rights. A culture is confined not only to music, food and dancing. Within the honour culture, there are also rules for how to behave, move and dress. Religion is then, much more than a belief in God on a personal level. In honour cultures you must, on the contrary, submit to God’s word as recorded in the Koran one and a half thousand years ago.

The term religion should perhaps be changed to freedom of belief. It is a human right to have faith in whatever God you like, but religious freedom as exercised in the West by Islamist organisations means to use religion as an instrument of power to limit freedom for women, children and young people even here in the West. Paradoxically, the latter have often fled from religious oppression – an oppression that now comes via the Islamists and, with the assistance of the cultural relativists, comes to us here in Sweden and in the West in general.

The honour killing of the Swedes, Sara in Umeå and Pela Atroshi in Iraq, could have been prevented; so it was claimed by Fadime Sahindal at a Save the Children seminar in 2001, which also involved a professor of gynaecology who stitched together life-threatening hymens for girls (which, strictly speaking, do not exist). I listened to Fadime and also listened carefully to the President of the Kurdistan National Association, who accused us both of cultural betrayal as well as of defamation of the Kurds. If more people had listened to Fadime, the terrible murder of this courageous young woman could have been prevented. Like the murder of the young boy Abbas Rezai and, most recently, the honour killing of Jian, whose father killed her in God’s name because she, like Pela and Fadime, were considered to have transformed from a pure girl into a Swedish whore.

Sweden is far from unique in terms of honour killings. The same fate met 16-year-old Heshu in England, 19-year-old Qazala in Denmark, 21-year-old Sabat in Germany, 20-year-old Banaz in England, 17-year-old Dua in Kurdistan, 16-year-old Medina in Turkey, and many other young men and women across Europe and beyond.

At the same time the honour killing of 16-year-old Medina received attention in the Swedish press, the Daily News published an article about a thousand Muslim taxi drivers who blocked the streets of Oslo in protest against the publication by Norwegian newspaper Jyllands-Posten of the Muhammad cartoons. Imagine if feminists, politicians, journalists and people in general had instead blocked the streets of the world from Turkey to Norway, Sweden, Brussels and the United States in protest against the barbaric treatment of Medina, who was bound with ropes and buried alive because she had male friends. Instead, our leading cultural relativists and identity-politics opinion makers like Masood Kamali, Mattias Gardell, Jan Guillou and Gudrun Schyman have been busy calling those of us who protested against various elements and behaviours in honour cultures racists or Islamophobes.

Why are all these killings happening in Sweden? After the murder of Fadime on January 21, 2002 something of a moral panic broke out in Sweden. She was already known as a public figure and commentator who, despite years of death threats, had dared to defy the honour culture. Now it became obvious to a wider public that behind the murder was a proactive collectivist pressure, which made it no longer possible to explain away the fact that many girls (and, for that matter, boys) live a life of ‘honour’.

The former integration minister, Mona Sahlin, admitted that her previous silence was due to cowardice and launched some urgent action. At the same time, however, she wore a veil when she visited the mosque in Södermalm, which was more than a temporary mark of sympathy with those Muslims that did not follow honour cultures, but you still could feel the hostility from non-Muslims.

Around the same time, Sahlin appointed one of the most arrogant cultural relativists, Masood Kamali, to investigate the possible existence of structural discrimination in Sweden. Kamali, who denies honour killings’ cultural and religious links, concluded that such discussion of honour killings as occurred in the media could cause racism, intolerance and discrimination, and claimed that the issue had gained a disproportionate amount of attention. In fact, according to him, it had affected only a few girls. Us immigrants who struggled against the honour culture, he called Pol Pot-communists, and the Swedes who finally dared to point out the difference between men’s general violence against women and the family’s collective violence against its own children, he called racists.

Government Sabuni got the epithet ”house nigger”. And Gudrun Schyman gave him covering fire by calling all men all over the globe Taliban. Professors like Kamali and Eva Lundgren and politicians and feminists like Schyman planted such racist fear in the Swedish people, eagerly cheered on by a number of commentators who introduced and popularised the term ”Islamophobia” as a term for the criticism of the various problematic aspects of Islam and Islamism.

The fear that thus arose of being called a racist or Islamophobic was profoundly unfortunate. I have continually encountered it ever since, when I have followed up efforts against honour-related violence. It hardly helped when Sabuni’s ministry sent clear signals that honour-repression against young people must be taken seriously. In the municipalities and county councils there were already (except, for example, the county administrative board of Östergötland) terrified Swedes who wanted to avoid confrontations with representatives of honour cultures, which regularly has prompted calls for ‘cultural and religious considerations’. Training staff in the workings of honour cultures may have worked well, but to get the same officials to show civil courage was much harder.

Due to such fear of conflict, municipalities and county councils gave the job of dealing with the problems of honour culture to different societies and organisations with many immigrants, who were considered to be better placed to deal with issues of honour. In this way, the responsibility for solving the problems was delegated to the immigrants themselves – in their little corner of society. These project policies have contributed to the segregation that has fuelled the impression that immigrants’ problems are confined to, and should be resolved in, separate enclaves in the community, away from the vast majority of residents. Another consequence of this has been that serious ideological contradictions have arisen between us immigrants, or between us equality-loving, liberal-minded commentators and conservative and religious groups.

In addition to the county administrative board’s completely inadequate and tentative efforts, the situation with regard to other agencies is not much to cheer about either. They simply ignored or opposed Sabuni’s new non-culturally relativist agenda. Let me give some examples of organisations and agencies that you would think would have reason to pursue this type of question.

The Equal Opportunities Ombudsman has consistently refused to consider the difference between honour-related violence on one hand, and violence against women in society generally, on the other. A blind eye is turned here to the fact that an honour killing is a pure execution. The verdict comes before the act, deciding where, when, how and who should do it. The person executing the murder is seen as a hero because they are considered to have re-established the men’s honour. Although many women are murdered by men in Swedish society, the men who murder women are far from being heroes. They are sentenced to long, severe jail sentences and stigmatised in civil society.

The Ombudsman devotes considerable energy to examining gender equality in the Swedish church, which now ordains homosexual couples; while avoiding dealing with the so-called minority communities in which homosexuality is perceived as a disease and is completely forbidden. DO, the discrimination ombudsman, keeps silent about the 70 000 young people who are discriminated against because of honour cultures. Its presence in the debate about honour-related violence is marked instead by defending the wearing of the veil and the burqa – these symbols of discrimination against immigrant women. In addition, it is making the case to obtain compensation for Islamists who offend others by refusing to shake hands.

Amnesty also devotes more energy in defence of the veil than against honour violence. The former on the grounds that it is a human right to wear even clothes that are symbols of female oppression. When one of Amnesty’s staff criticised the veil, she was dismissed from her job in London. BO, the Ombudsman for Children, is also silent on the honour question. They initiate no campaigns against, for example, that many immigrant children are not allowed to participate in school sex education, swimming lessons, gymnastics lessons and music lessons. They refuse to engage in the issues of boys ’circumcision, or immigrant girls’ hymen reconstruction, in child- and forced marriage, or in children and adolescents who are kidnapped and sent back to their parents’ homeland.

Finally, a word about Save the Children, which should be the largest and most important children’s rights organisation. I support their charity for poor children, but I called them simultaneously Ignore the ChildrenJust a suggestion.Just a suggestion. or Save the Parents’ Culture and Religion when they censored Pernilla Ouis’ research on honour cultures. However, they should be commended for their “dialogue project”, which initiated a conversation about men’s and father’s roles with representatives of the male ethnic organisations in the immigrant suburbs, where it has been difficult to endure ‘Swedish’ equality. The dialogue group has arranged a number of memorable events, including the one I mentioned earlier, with Fadime at Save the Children, at which we had the opportunity to debate the honour question not only with representatives of various Muslim organisations, but also with officials and ministers.

After ten years of the Dialog project, however, some of the project staff, including Niklas Kelemen, were thrown out. They had dared to criticise cultural relativism and the implemented integration policies. It was gratifying that some, such as Nyamko Sabuni, sent out signals in defiance of cultural relativism and multiculturalism on the grounds of identity politics. As shown in the examples above, however, the wise initiatives taken by the ministers Sabuni and Sahlin have not been followed up.

Unfortunately, no integration policy is entirely free from the dual agenda that I highlighted above. On the one hand you say no to honour oppression. But, on the other hand, SST (the national board for state aid to religious groups) provides not less than fifty million Swedish Kronor every year to various religious minority communities, many of which cultivate sex and chastity ethics. Millions of kronor thus reach the conservative male ethnic organisations, which instead of helping Fadime (something that could have been done by, as she requested, speaking to her father) called her a cultural traitor and showed understanding for the murderer even after her murder.

Another example can be seen when the prime minister on the one hand condemns honour violence, but on the other hand, a Moderate politician in parliament, Abdirisak Waberi, has close ties to the former chairman of the Swedish Muslim Council, Mahmoud Aldebi and his wife Ibtisam Aldebi, who have campaigned for the introduction of Sharia law in Sweden. Waberi, in turn, has appeared on STV and argued that men should be able to beat women, and that polygamy is a good solution against infidelity.

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These sorts of double standards have become integration policy’s Janus face. With one hand you give a few crumbs to us immigrant feminists who are fighting against honour cultures. With the other hand you fertilise the soil of honour cultures’ lands. Therefore, I believe that it is not only honour culture, but also blue-eyed cultural relativism, which is equally responsible for the murder of Sara, Pela, Fadime, Abbas and Jian.

Against this background, the national association Never Forget Pela and Fadime compiled a wish list for the new minister for integration:

1. Tear up the integration policy based on the cultural relativist perspective, which at all costs, does not want to offend the representatives of different cultures and religions who violate children’s rights.

2. Make sure that – as Fadime previously suggested – all who come to Sweden get a solid education in gender equality and child rights. Require that such training is mandatory and based on the insight that ‘Swedish’ equality, in many ways, is the absolute opposite of the Iraqi or Somali versions that are currently cherished by many representatives of honour cultures, which perceives Sweden as a deeply immoral country. Integration is about more than education, language and job. Pela’s uncles, who honour-murdered her, and who have been sentenced to life imprisonment in Sweden, were highly educated, had jobs and could speak Swedish.

3. Close the religious schools that serve as nurseries for gender segregation. They educate children in religion and not religions. Schools and educational institutions should be kept separate from ancient beliefs that require female submission.

4. Ban the veil, at least for children in school. Sweden should not contribute to gender apartheid for immigrant children. Religion should be confined to the private level and include adults.

5. Integration Minister Eric Ullenhag must realise that the project’s policies have led to more segregation than integration, with the various authorities having handed over responsibility to ethnic and religious immigrant organisations. These organisations, with their contribution of several million kronor a year, have mostly managed to foment a movement towards small enclaves, which is contrary to the Swedish majority’s society.

To counteract this, the department needs to associate itself with a small elite group of courageous, committed, experienced and knowledgeable men and women not linked to religious and ethnic clan leaders. Only then can we take up the fight against honour cultures seriously, and abolish virginity checks and honour-related violence in Sweden. As a bonus, the Sweden Democrats would get fewer votes.