Fallout from Aqsa Parvez

There have been a couple of columns in the National Post in the last few days that I feel need some rebuttal.

The first was by a member of Canada’s Parliament, Mr. Ujjal Dosanth. His piece lamented the atmosphere of political correctness that seems to prevent Canadians from speaking out about the horror of honour killings. Nowhere, however, does he seem to be aware of the horror of Human Rights tribunals in Canada that are prepared to prosecute anyone who speaks unkindly of other people’s customs.

Furthermore, he states, most curiously, that no religion “condones” honour killing. Au contraire, Mr. Dosanth. An act can be condoned by actual approval or it can be condoned by lack of objection.

In a column in Front Page Magazine, Islamic expert, Robert Spencer, has this to say about Islamic views of honour killings:

… but the problem with honor killing is sanctioned by Islamic law and custom, thus making it very difficult to stamp out in Islamic communities. Hindu dowry-killing is not sanctioned by Hindu teaching. It is against the law in India. In Islam, however, the situation is quite different: Syria recently scrapped a law limiting the length of sentences for honor killings, but “the new law says a man can still benefit from extenuating circumstances in crimes of passion or honour ‘provided he serves a prison term of no less than two years in the case of killing.’”

That’s right: two years for murder.

And in 2003 the Jordanian Parliament voted down on Islamic grounds a provision designed to stiffen penalties for honor killings. Al-Jazeera reported that “Islamists and conservatives said the laws violated religious traditions and would destroy families and values.”

What’s more, a manual of Islamic law certified as a reliable guide to Sunni orthodoxy by Al-Azhar University, the most respected authority in Sunni Islam, says that “retaliation is obligatory against anyone who kills a human being purely intentionally and without right.” However, “not subject to retaliation” is “a father or mother (or their fathers or mothers) for killing their offspring, or offspring’s offspring.” (‘Umdat al-Salik o1.1-2).

In other words, someone who kills his child incurs no legal penalty under Islamic law.

No penalty – that is condonation no matter how you slice it. This is why you never hear Muslim spokespeople do anything but re-direct attention to cultural or ethnic practices whenever anyone raises the issue of honour killings and Islam.

The second column that caught my attention was one by Chris Selley, rattling on about how honour killing is such small potatoes in the great pantheon of murders in Canada (he cites statistics) and we should all just take a pill and settle down and stop calling for an overhaul of our immigration laws to stamp out this non-plague.

This is what I would call a shadow boxing column.

Who is calling for an overhaul of the immigration system to stamp out honour killings: somebody in the mainstream media, any members of Parliament, or any political party that could form the government in Canada? I know of no such movement, so Selley is simply punching aimlessly at the air.

What is missing from his statistical-analytical assessment is the horror that attaches to a crime in which parents kill their children.

Thousands of parents in this country put up with teenage children who shoot themselves up with drugs, break into homes, are involved in acts of violence, driving while drunk, and all sorts of other anti-social behaviour, while they bad-mouth their parents in the process. Such behaviour prematurely puts grey hair on the heads of the parents, but they love their offspring and stick with them until they get through these trying years and mature into productive adults.

The idea that parents would kill a teenage girl just because she wanted to wear jeans and tee-shirts and hang around with her friends at the mall is too terrible to contemplate.

When bloggers boil over benches

---------------------AQSA PARVEZ---------------------------

When bloggers get angry it can get very personal.

There are two American blog sites that are up in arms over a story about a granite bench in a “peace park” in the little burg of Pelham, Ontario.

Now before you go running to Mapquest or Google Maps, I will save you the trouble; this otherwise unremarkable town (population 16,000) is buried in the middle of the Niagara region, many miles away from the events that led to this dispute.

What Robert Spencer at Jihad Watch and Pam Geller at Atlas Shrugs are ticked off about is that the Pelham Fire Chief, Scott McLeod, gave an interview to the Toronto Star and, forsaking Geller, took credit for initiating a memorial to Aqsa Parvez in the form of a granite park bench, with the following inscription:

"Remembering new Canadians lost to the quest of integrating cultures – In Loving Memory of Aqsa Parvez – Remembered and Free."

A little history.

In December of 2007, sixteen year-old Aqsa Parvez, a Mississauga grade 11 schoolgirl, was rushed to Sick Kids Hospital, in Toronto, suffering from neck compressions. She died in hospital.

There was a 911 call allegedly made by her father confessing to her murder. He was charged with second degree murder. The girl’s older brother was charged with obstructing police. Subsequently, both were re-charged with first degree murder when the police concluded that the killing was planned and deliberate. There has been an extensive preliminary hearing in which the evidence was banned from publication.

The criminal trial is to take place in January, 2011.

Yes, the wheels of justice do grind slowly in Canada.

The arrest created a sensation because it was alleged in the media she was murdered because she did not wear a hijab all the time. It has been branded as an honour killing.

Both Geller and Spencer write frequently on their blogs about honour killings, including this one.

Geller was appalled to learn that Aqsa was buried in a cemetery with only a numbered marker in the ground. She organized a fund which received $5,000 in donations to put up a stone somewhere as a memorial to Aqsa with this inscription:

In loving memory of Aqsa Parvez

April 22, 1991 – December 10, 2007
Beloved, remembered and free

According to Geller, McLeod is a frequent reader of her blog and had contacted her about this memorial before the events in Pelham unfolded.

What annoys the two bloggers is not only that McLeod wants the brownie points, but that he deliberately appears to have distanced himself from Geller. The money came from the municipality with the assistance of a local female councillor and a point was made in the Star story that none of Geller’s donation money was used.

I guess I would be pissed off too, if I were Geller.

But I am not Geller and I haven’t been personally involved in this effort, so, just as a third party observer, this is what occurs to me.

I would not attribute evil motives to McLeod. He’s just a small time local guy who has done something notable in the community, probably the most exciting thing to happen in Pelham since they paved the highway into the town. Geez, he got his name in the Toronto Star. Who in Pelham can claim that distinction? He wants to take the credit. So be it. That is human nature.

And because I don’t think that he is evil in intention, I think it is consistent with portraying himself to be the local hero who thought up the idea that he would distance himself from Geller’s Aqsa fund. I don’t think Geller should assume he is somehow saying her money is tainted because of her politics.

As to the depiction in the story of Geller’s blog as being anti-Muslim, that is standard form multi-cult Toronto Star coverage. That goes well beyond McLeod.

Leaving aside the matter of who gets to be the hero of the piece, I am not overly impressed with either of the two inscriptions.

This is what one Muslim spokeswoman had to say about the Pelham one:

Alia Hogben, executive director of the Canadian Council of Muslim Women, is happy that a town is remembering Parvez. "But I have some difficulty with what they are trying to say in the inscription. Maybe they are trying to raise questions but I'm not quite sure (the inscription) reflects her death."

I agree with that.

I also don’t think Geller’s inscription passes muster. It is okay for a normal headstone, although it is never going to be placed on her grave.

If you read Geller and Spencer closely you find they are upset that the honour killing aspect in the Star story appears to be absent and that the message is lost in politically correct mush.

They are right about that and that is why I am not enthusiastic about Geller’s version of a memorial because it appears to suffer from the same problem.

Here is what I would do if I were Geller and I had $5,000 to put up a memorial to Aqsa.

First, I would ensure that the memorial was put up somewhere in Mississauga where Aqsa lived and died. What is point of locating it in Guelph or Pelham? The community that her death was supposed to appease is in Mississauga. That is where the message has to be hammered home, amongst the very people who tacitly support honour killings.

Secondly, I would wait until the trial is concluded and verdicts are secured.

I see that Spencer makes no bones that Aqsa’s father murdered her. In Canada, you haven’t murdered somebody until you are tried and the court says you did.

I know, I know: if it swims like a duck, it waddles like a duck and it quacks like a duck, it probably is a duck. Still, there is the presumption of innocence and we have the same libel laws as the United Kingdom, so one should be careful. It is up to a jury to declare it is a duck.

Consider this. Perhaps it was not the father, it might have been the brother, and the father was trying to take the rap for him. Not that he is not guilty of complicity, but why name him if it might have been the brother?

There is also an issue involving the question of the Islamic dress that remains unresolved.

According to this Toronto Life background story, Aqsa’s close friends don’t put much stock in the “wouldn’t wear the hijab” angle. Aqsa apparently wore it on whim. She liked her religion and some days just felt like wearing it, and other days not. One very telling thing was that one of her close girlfriends is black. And Aqsa’s father did not like her choice of friends, warning her that black people would lead her down inappropriate paths in life.

So it might well be an honour killing, but possibly not for the reason the media has spread about. Or it might not be an honour killing at all – just a domestic fight that got out of control over a teenage girl’s choice of friends. We won’t know the answers to these questions until the trial.

Assuming that the outcome of the trial will establish the guilt of the father and/or brother and that the evidence supports the honour killing motive, then I would suggest that a plaque be mounted in a suitable location with the following inscription:

AQSA PARVEZ
(April 22, 1991 – December 10, 2007)

This plaque is dedicated to the memory of a young Canadian Muslim girl who was murdered by her closest male relatives, in accordance with the barbaric practice of honour killings, because she allegedly shamed her family by her desire live like a Canadian.

That seems to be closer to reality and what is needed.

Ah, religion, what would the world do without it? Chapter 2, Honour killings.

Honour killings are not Islam, they are barbarism, according to Steve Rockwell, an imam in Toronto (see story at this site).

The columnist who wrote this, and included a number of similar claims by Muslims, took it at face value; i.e., if Muslims say that it is not Islam, then he will print that. There is a sense in the Canadian mainstream media that Muslims get too much bad press and this type of story appears mainly to balance the equation.

I think I would not be too far off the mark if I were to suggest the columnist knows very little about Islam, and if he had not been trying to use his print pulpit to “balance the cosmic scales of justice”, might have consulted with other spokespersons to get a balanced view of the subject.

This response of Rockwell and others was provoked by the news that the brother of Aqsa Parvez, the 16-year old girl who was strangled to death in the Greater Toronto Area, has now been charged with first degree murder. Aqsa’s father had already been charged with murder, and had recently had that charge upgraded to a first degree category (meaning the murder was planned and deliberate, not a spontaneous act).

The allegation in the media, from interviews reporters conducted with Aqsa’s friends at the time of her murder, is that she was the victim of an honour killing because she was refusing to wear the hijab and other traditional Muslim garb when outside the house. She was supposedly fighting with her family over these matters.

If these facts are true, then this would be Canada’s first recorded honour killing. There have been honour killings in the United States and a number of them in West European countries.

When Aqsa’s murder was first in the news I scanned a great many letters to editors from Muslims all saying the same thing: this sort of thing ought not to be laid at the door of Islam. It was tribal, or it was “cultural” or, as depicted by the outrageous Dr. Mohamed Elmasry of the Canadian Islamic Congress, it was just the normal teenage daughter-father fight one might expect in any family.

For balance, I would say I saw a similar thing coming from a columnist in the Sun chain of newspapers urging her readers not to put any significance to the fact that Catholic trustees on the Toronto District Catholic School Board were stealing from the public purse. Her argument was that their kleptocracy was outside of their religion, so bracket the religion and put it aside as an issue in this case.

My response to that is simply this, if the whole point of having a separate school system based on religious grounds is not to provide a superior moral grounding (in Catholic eyes, that is), then the taxpaying public is being cheated out of education dollars needed to provide two costly competing systems instead of one simple school system for all. Her argument wasn’t helped by the fact that the Toronto Archbishop wrote a stinging letter claiming that the trustees had stained Catholicism. In short, one must ask oneself what is the point of religious training if not to prevent public servants from stealing the public’s money?

There is an online explanation of honour killings by the BBC at this site. It talks about how it is prevalent in the “South Asian” and “Middle Eastern” communities. Not once does it say the words Islam or Muslim. It does mention how a girl was stabbed to death by her father Abdullah over her western dress and her Christian boyfriend.

Since the article does not tell us why the religion of the boyfriend should be objectionable, I suppose we can speculate that her father was simply a murderous raving atheist. God knows, there are plenty of those walking around.

That last sentence was an oxymoron in case you missed it.

Near the end of this most PC piece we get some slippage:

Ram Gidoomal of the South Asian Development Partnership has campaigned for years for people to open up and turn in those who get away with justifying honour crimes.
He has consistently called on leaders in mosques, temples and churches to do more…

If honour killings have nothing to do with religion, why badger these folks about it?

I would go along with the assertions that honour killings are more culturally understood than religiously defined except that cultures are bred by religion, nourished by it, and continually informed by it. You cannot simply bracket religion as being an unimportant context to be ignored.

I joked earlier about atheist honour killings, but the fact remains that all honour killings occur amongst people who practice one of the traditional religions. It is also true that most of these reported killings are committed by persons who come from very ordinary walks in life. In short, they are not Koranic or Biblical scholars. They are simple people who were taught some religious precepts, and, if they keep up their attendance at their various houses of worship, continue to be fed the doctrine. Furthermore, almost every instance of an honour killing is the result of a male (father, brother, uncle, cousin) attacking a female; sometimes mothers join in to support the males.

Could there be something in the religious texts that would give these South Asian and Middle Eastern cultures the idea that males have some right to dominate women, and give some women the idea that they should be submissive to such males?

That is simply a rhetorical question in case you missed it.

The Koran, Hadith, Old Testament and New Testament are rife with misogynist and male dominance pronouncements. Maybe the culture would improve if the religion were improved.