The Sydney Opera House canceled an event that was slated to examine the issue of whether honour killings can ever be morally justified, following public condemnation across social media.
The Festival of Dangerous Ideas (FODI) event titled Honour Killings Are Morally Justified, featuring muslim writer and activist Uthman Badar, was scheduled to take place in August.
The announcement of the event sparked an immediate and angry public response with calls for a boycott of the event. Two NSW government ministers publicly rebuked the session.
The reaction prompted organisers to release a statement on Tuesday night stating the event would not go ahead.
Pru Goward, the NSW Minister for Women, said the event was “truly a dangerous idea” and the topic was a “deep insult to women”.
“We have millions and millions of women in the world who fear honour killings. It is a regular occurrence in many countries – it has been known to happen in NSW.”
On Tuesday night festival organisers released a statement saying that FODI was intended as “a provocation to thought and discussion, rather than simply a provocation” and implied that the title of the event gave the wrong impression of the session.
Simon Longstaff, joint co-founder and co-curator of the event, took to Twitter on Tuesday night, claiming that people didn’t read further than the session title and took it out of context.
According to the statement released by the Sydney Opera House Facebook page, it implied that the name of the scheduled event was a lapse in judgement.
“It is always a matter of balance and judgement, and in this case a line has been crossed,” the statement said. “It is clear from the public reaction that the title has given the wrong impression of what Mr Badar intended to discuss.
“Neither Mr Badar, the St James Ethics Centre, nor Sydney Opera House in any way advocates honour killings or condones any form of violence against women.”
Badar, an Australian spokesman for Hizb ut-Tahrir, a group described by the festival as “global advocacy group working for positive change in the Muslim world via the re-establishment of the Islamic Caliphate”, also released a statement defending himself, saying the idea that he would advocate for honour killings is “ludicrous”.
In a Facebook post, he said he wanted to explore the issue and described the public outcry as “Islamophobia”.
“I anticipated that secular liberal Islamophobes would come out of every dark corner, foaming at the mouth, furious at why a Muslim ‘extremist’, from Hizb ut-Tahrir no less, was being allowed a platform at the Sydney Opera House to speak,” he wrote. “What’s interesting is that I’m being attacked left, right and centre without having opened my mouth yet.”
According to the United Nations, approximately 5,000 women are killed every year as a result of so-called “honour” killings, and Human Rights Watch describes these acts of violence as “acts of vengeance, usually death, committed by male family members against female family members, who are held to have brought dishonor upon the family”. The mere perception that a woman has behaved in a way that “dishonors” her family is sufficient to trigger an attack on her life.
It is worth noting that “honour killings” is another way to express what is actually violence against women. There is very little distinction in the outcome between an honour killing and a woman being killed by her partner, which happens once a week in Australia.