Recently TikTok star Ali Abulaban was convicted for murdering his estranged wife and her male friend. He filmed himself doing it, and filmed himself confessing to it as he called his parents after he texted them pictures of the corpses.

He had the audacity to plead not guilty to murder, trying to get off on a crime of passion conviction.

I don't like the "crime of passion" concept very much, since it seems to have been designed to help men who murder their wives. They seem to benefit from it the most, anyway. The whole idea of a crime of passion is that the perpetrator is otherwise not a dangerous to society, and wasn't violent beforehand. In fact, the victim is to blame, really. Maybe he shouldn't have done it, but surely you understand why he did?

Well......

1. Ali beat his wife throughout their marriage.
2. He cheated on her, but was paranoid she would cheat on him, too.
3. He stalked her by installing a listening device onto his daughter's iPad.
4. As a cherry on top, he had a cocaine habit that he refused to fix.

If you want to watch him be absolutely looney toons, watch his jailhouse interview.

Luckily the jury convicted him of murder, but took 7 hours to deliberate. So it sounds like at least one person on the jury wanted to cut him some slack.

The elephant in the room?

Some are saying that this was a Muslim honor killing. Others are saying that's not fair, because this is a very common murder motive among men in the West, as well. His Islamic beliefs and upbringing therefore shouldn't count. It wasn't a factor.

Here's why I disagree.

While men always commit the majority of violence on Planet Earth, it's still not six of one and half a dozen of the other everywhere. Whether we like it or not, Ali is statistically more likely than Lars to kill his wife.

We can go further- Bob The White American is more likely to kill his wife than Lars the Swede. We can still go further- Boyd The White Southern Gentleman is statistically more likely to commit a violent crime than Bill The Yankee. Did anybody here know that, that white violent criminals are statistically more likely to be from the South than the North? I think that's interesting, and I'd like to know why that is.

The premise of feminism is that things can and should be better for women. If it's a fixed state that is the same everywhere, it's a wasted effort. That Lars is less likely to kill his wife than Ali, Boyd, Bill, and Bob is a good sign. It means there are places where conditions are better. It also means that worse places have the potential for improvement.

If you'd like to feel sorry for Ali Abulaban, his father was violent when he was little. Ali's father beat his mother, him, and his siblings. His mother was 15 when she was married to his father, who was 25. While Dawalla Abulaban tearfully testified to this, at the time, in her world, this was normal. She would have a hard time telling her community that it wasn't, even as she took the stand to say that to mine.

Ali was otherwise spoilt, though. He was raised to believe he was better than others, and has raging narcissistic personality disorder. He had no respect for those around him, especially women. He was taught that his status as a man entitled him to all this bad behavior. This is very common in his culture, so you don't think that played a role in his crimes?

Because his parents very foolishly moved to a country where he couldn't just shoot two people on suspicion of adultery, he will now spend the rest of his life in the California prison system. Had they stayed in their home country, it would have depended on the status of his wife's family, but he might not have served prison time at all.

If the world is going to improve for all women, that will take some on-the-ground study and honesty. Why does this country have a higher rate of femicide than Denmark? What precisely is going on? The truth might not feel good, but we can go with the hope of improvement.

But what if white supremacists and right wingers say bad and mean things? Enh- trust me, they say it all anyway. In fact, they interpret the left's silence as confirmation that we also don't believe societies can improve. If black women suffer a higher murder rate than white women, we are all agreeing that black women are not important enough to get uncomfortable for them. "It doesn't feel good, it's not going to be rah rah biss boom ba, so let's just not, okay?"

But feminism has never been about preserving feelings.

Since white Southerners tend to have less money than white Northerners, and white Northerners ridicule them over classism, I'm sure it would hurt anyone's Southern Pride to know that they are more likely to commit a violent crime than a Masshole. Since many white Americans like to complain about crime, it might be a slice of humble pie for them to know that they are more likely to commit violent crimes than a Norwegian.

But data-driven, honest research can be incredibly helpful in reducing crime as a whole. If you study all factors that contribute to violent crime, culture may well crop up as one of them.

If you simply must, must, MUST have empathy for Ali Abulaban, then know this: had he been raised in the culture that the hypothetical Lars was, he'd most likely be a free man, pursuing his acting career.