Photo: Chicago Police Department / NBC 5
By Howard Foster -
The Chicago Sun Times reported the story of an unmarried Pakistani woman who dropped her newborn baby from an eighth floor window in the Uptown neighborhood on Friday as a routine crime story. It was on page eight.
The woman was described as “depressed” because her devout Muslim parents would disapprove of her pregnancy before marriage. The immigrant family was sharing an apartment, and 19-year old Mubashra Uddin managed to conceal her pregnancy from her parents. That is until she gave birth.
She then decided infanticide was preferable to the “shame” she would have brought on her parents by telling them. She is now being held without bail in the Cook County jail charged with murder.
The reporter should have done some background research on Muslim, particularly Pakistani, infanticide. This is hardly an isolated case of a disturbed teenager who “got in trouble.” It’s a growing phenomenon in Pakistan. http://www.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/asiapcf/07/20/pakistan.infanticide/ There were 1200 reported cases last year, a 600% increase from the previous year. And keep in mind that Pakistan is a relatively advanced Muslim society. Traditional Muslim culture still strongly prefers boys (so killing infant girls is often tolerated, and many turn up in Pakistani garbage dumps) and has not modernized its view of birth outside marriage and marriage without a proper dowry being given to the bride’s family. So Muslim countries are about two centuries behind modern western cultural attitudes.
Is it really any wonder that so many Muslims cannot make the transition to life here? Immigration is not simply the movement of people from one country to another. It only succeeds when the immigrants assimilate into the culture of their new country. Europe is experiencing the inevitable result of mass Muslim immigration without assimilation. And so are we with Hispanics who continue to lag in graduation rates into the third generation.
If the American media trained its considerable resources to exposing the roots of immigrant crime as they do to poverty, obesity or drug addiction we would be appalled by stories such as this murder in Chicago. It was not a routine crime story. It’s an immigration story, and it belongs on page one next to the Paris coverage.
