Fellow Americans: Prepare to receive the entire female population of Pakistan sometime soon. And that's just for starters. I don't oppose this—but I honestly don't know if we can economically afford to do it. Given the recession/depression, I rather doubt we can. But get ready for something like this to happen anyway.

Today, the Obama administration reversed a Bush-era policy and opened the way for "foreign women who are victims of severe domestic beatings and sexual abuse to receive asylum in the United States." The battered women will have to meet "strict conditions for asylum" and will also have to show that "domestic abuse is widely tolerated in their country…that they could not find protection from institutions at home or by moving to another place within their own country."

Studies show that 50-90% of Pakistani women are routinely beaten, even when they are pregnant, and that daughter-beating and wife-beating are not considered crimes. Pakistani men will sometimes publicly gang-rape a young girl in order to falsely "avenge" another crime committed by a member of their own clan; be-head, throw acid at, or burn alive a girl or woman who has offended their family or political-religious honor; they will marry a ten-year-old daughter to a fifty-year-old man in order to settle a debt, or to receive a small sum of money. In Pakistan, most honor killings of girls and women are not prosecuted either. In one study, my own, first published in Middle East Quarterly, almost half the honor murders perpetrated in the West were perpetrated by Pakistani men or Pakistani families.

I know, I know: Male domestic violence is a global phenomenon. Why single out one country—isn't that "racist" or "Islamophobic" and doesn't that suggest that all Pakistani Muslims are batterers or tend to batter women more than, let's say, Christian-American men do?

But they do. They are trained to do so. Their culture has normalized woman-battering while the Big Bad West has actually gone and criminalized it, tried to shelter its victims and prosecute their persecutors. True, we have done so rather late in the day and in an imperfect way. But this level of progress does not exist in the Arab Middle East, Africa, or central Asia where even honor murders are accepted, rarely reported as such, even more rarely prosecuted, and where reduced sentences apply to this but to no other crime.

A friend, who insists upon anonymity, has suggested a campaign of sorts. He was not thinking of battered Pakistani women as candidates for asylum but now I am.

Apparently, the Obama Administration has also just declared its intention to allow Palestinians from Iraq and from Gaza into the United States. It is unclear whether such Palestinians are among those who cheered on 9/11, participated in the killing of American soldiers or Israeli civilians—or are themselves, human rights and feminist activists who have been censored, arrested, tortured, and persecuted by Hamas, by the Palestinian Authority, or by their own families. Here is a copy of the letter he wants people to send to their Senators. Think about doing so:

Here's Phyllis speaking again. And by the way folks: A battered woman can also be an America-hater–and she can believe that she deserves to be beaten. Studies show that as well. Ponder it all. Have a magnificent weekend.