Just a woman – a top film, but you also have to classify it. A Turkish friend, a Turkish macho with sexist posts and unmarried and unable to find a wife, wrote to me that this was probably completely exaggerated. His aunt had been divorced four times, had new men and if his sister wanted to divorce, it was not a problem and she would also live free without a family. You have to differentiate among the 5 million Muslims who mostly are not religious Muslims. The majority are pro-Western Attaturk Turks or secular Syrians and Iraqis, even nationalists and machos by our standards, but they would never commit honor killing, nor would they force their daughter under a headscarf. They reject that.

In addition, my Turkish friend said that the family of the film was an extremely religious Kurdish family, but that most Kurds were not religious, and if you thought that Kurdish families would look like this, you should not support the PKK and YPG and Rojahe in Northern Syria as most of the fighters on the front are Kurdish women. He also asked me if German filmmakers would make films about the violence of some German men against German women, which would force them into women’s shelters, and whether German male sexism would be extended to all German men. He hadn’t seen anything yet. And I honestly don’t have seen anything either. In addition, these are extreme cases that would then be stylized to entire population groups.

In addition, Terres de Femmes has only spotted 12 honor killings over the past decade, while AfD sites have gone into the thousands of unproven honor killings. So be careful. The machism of the so-called Muslims as a collective is one thing, but to regard them as a collective and to attach them to a population group and to generalize them is wrong. If anti-Semitism, racism, sexism, etc. is wrong, you have to fight it regardless of ethnic or religious composition, German, American or with a migration background or without or with.

The film was correct and well done, but it should be classified and not used for Muslim-bashing. I myself have taken a very exposed position with my manifesto of the Left Counterjiahd because I criticized the left Islamophilism and wanted to open an intermediate position on the right Islamophobia, but one should not exaggerate either. One must criticize honor killings as an extreme case of patriarchal family structures, but not generalize them – especially since Terres de Femmes was able to find 12 honor killings, but the AfD pretends that this is the normal case in Turkish, Syrian or refugee families. The balance makes it and its differentiation.