Jacqueline Rose concludes a piece on the murder of Shafilea Ahmed by her parents with these words:
Going to university allowed Alesha [Shafilea's sister] fully to recognise that life in her family was "wrong". We can support those freedoms – and celebrate the justice Shafilea has now received – without using the case to stigmatise a minority community, or as proof that west is best. Rather than attribute a crime like this to backwardness, we would do better to see how deeply it is woven into the fabric of migration and modernity in which all of us are implicated.
They are words - in the Guardian, where else? - of quite spectacular inanity. Naturally, nobody, and therefore no community, should be stigmatized for the crime of another if they are not complicit in it. One may also leave aside as an overall question whether 'west is best'. However, if we have good grounds for supporting the freedoms that Rose mentions ('educational, sexual and professional' freedoms), then a culture that accommodates them is better than one that doesn't, at least in respect of the fact, and to the extent, that it does and the other doesn't.
As for Rose's final sentence urging us rather to see how we are all implicated in the 'fabric of migration and modernity' than to attribute the crime to backwardness, either it is meant to suggest that we are all morally implicated in this crime, or it isn't meant to. If it is, then the suggestion is false. If it isn't, then Rose is simply urging an irrelevance upon us. She may prefer some other word than 'backward' for the notion that it is acceptable to kill one's daughter for her defiance of parental wishes and/or traditional codes; and no doubt most of us are caught up in some way in the aforesaid fabric of migration and modernity; but the moral quality, so to put it, of what this mother and father did to their own child is not changed one way or the other by referring it to a more general implantation of people within social circumstances of migration and modernity. Note also Rose's scare-quotes around 'wrong'.