But it gets better. If you’re a charity that specializes in helping Muslim girls from being forced into marriage, the relevant municipal body in London will withdraw funding because you’re insufficiently “inclusive”, as happened to Ms Whittaker-Khan’s charity. She is, by the way, a British Muslim woman whose mother was the victim of an honour killing.
So apropos point #2, here’s what I think a body calling itself the “Canadian Islamic Congress” ought to be concerning itself with. In December 2007, a few days after the Canadian Islamic Congress launched their complaint against Maclean’s, Aqsa Parvez, a 16-year old schoolgirl in the Toronto suburbs was strangled to death allegedly by her father, Muhammad Parvez, with the help of her brother, Waqas Parvez, for the crime of refusing to wear a hijab. The Washington Post headline?
Which at least is blandly indisputable. Faced with an honour killing in Ontario, much of the rest of the coverage added insult to fatal injury. Mohamed Elmasry, President of the Canadian Islamic Congress, said:
I don’t want the public to think that this is really an Islamic issue or an immigrant issue… It is a teenager issue.
Kids today, right? It’s like Bye Bye Birdie – The Director’s Cut. Yet much of the media rushed to echo him. Canada’s Number One news anchor went to weirdly contorted lengths to avoid the word “strangle”:
Her neck was compressed, to the point she couldn’t breathe.
And a strangely insistent editorial in the Montreal Gazette declared:
Muhammed Parvez might have been fighting a losing battle trying to make Aqsa wear a hijab, but that hardly sets him apart. Few are the fathers, of any faith or none, who have not clashed with their adolescent daughters over something…
Hmm. Choking from the stranglehold of political correctness, a Canadian reader sent me the following observation:
If the allegation is true, his unquestioning obedience to a culturally enforced dress code overrode the natural love of a father for his daughter to the extent that he strangled her to death to enforce it. Again, if the allegation is true, it is difficult to imagine an act more diametrically opposed to Western values; more filled with hatred and contempt; or an act more damningly illustrative of violence arising from systemic discrimination against women.
The key word here is “systemic”. “Honour killings” were something we assumed took place on the fringes of the map – the Pakistani tribal lands, Yemen, Jordan. They now happen in the heart of western cities, and western feminist groups are silent, and western media rush to excuse it as just one of those things, couldda happened to anybody, and the Canadian Islamic Congress regards a Canadian honour killing as a “teenager issue” that distracts from their complaint against me for suggesting that (some) Muslims find honour killing “acceptable”. The day after Aqsa’s strangling, the lunchtime call-in poll on Toronto’s CITY-TV posed the following question:
Do you think society discriminates against women who wear a hijab?
Gotcha. It’s our fault.
The underlying message the press coverage communicated was horrible and heartless: the murder of Aqsa Parvez is an acceptable price to pay for cultural diversity. The best column I read on the murder came not from the mushy relativists at the Montreal Gazette and their brethren across Canada, but from a Pakistani newspaper. “A year ago, Muhammad took a passenger to Applewood Heights Secondary School. Perchance, he spotted Aqsa without her headscarf. Since that day, a year ago, Aqsa had been showing up at school with bruised arms,” began Farrukh Saleem in The Daily Times. He continued:
Honor killing is our export to Canada… Here’s a fact: Aqsa has been murdered. For us, denial is not an option. According to the United Nations Population Fund more than 5,000 women worldwide fall victim to honor killing. Denial is not an option.
According to the UN’s Special Rapporteur “honour killings had been reported in Egypt, the Islamic Republic of Iran, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Pakistan, the Syrian Arab Republic, Turkey and Yemen”. Egypt is 90 percent Muslim, Iran 98 percent, Jordan 92 percent, Lebanon 60 percent, Morocco 99 percent, Pakistan 97 percent, the Syrian Arab Republic 90 percent and Turkey 99 percent. Of the 192 member-states of the United Nations almost all honor killings take place in nine overwhelmingly Muslim countries. Denial is not an option.
More recently, honor killings have taken place in France, Germany, the United Kingdom and Canada…
Dr Saleem concludes:
Who will take the honour out of these killings? Who will expose the horror from under the hijab? Who will protect women from the laws of men?
Well, don’t look to Dr Mohamed Elmasry and the Canadian Islamic Congress, or their enablers in western feminist groups. In staying silent, the latter endorse “second-class sisterhood” for Muslim women. In December 2008, on the first anniversary of her murder, Joe Warmington of The Toronto Sun paid a visit to Meadowvale Cemetery in Brampton and found Aqsa Parvez buried (presumably by the members of her family) in an unmarked grave – no name, no marker, just a number: section 17, plot 774.
But I remember Aqsa Parvez, and I stand by what I wrote.
EXHIBIT #8
The church dance that snowballed
GULBUDDIN Hekmatyar, later a Prime Minister of Afghanistan and an opponent of the Taliban, and later still an ally of the Taliban, and more recently Iran’s Mister Big in the Hindu Kush, made his name in the Eighties, when there were so many Afghan refugees in Peshawar that the Pakistani intelligence service, the ISI, decided to streamline operations and make the human tide sign up with one of six designated émigré groups in order to be eligible for aid. Hekmatyar headed one of the two biggest, with some 800,000 people under his banner. He also has the distinction of being the commander of Osama’s first foray into the field. In 1985, bin Laden and 60 other Arabs were holed up in Peshawar doing nothing terribly useful until they got the call to head across the Afghan border and join up with Hekmatyar’s men to battle the Soviets near Jihad Wal. So off they rode, with a single local guide. They arrived at Hekmatyar’s camp at 10 in the evening only to find the Soviets had retreated and there was no battle to fight.
“Your presence is no longer needed,” Hekmatyar told Osama’s boys. “So go back.” So the neophyte warriors shot a few tin cans off fence posts, handed in their weapons and caught the bus back to Peshawar: mujahedeen tourists who’d missed the show.
This poignant vignette occurs in Lawrence Wright’s masterful work The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road To 9/11. I picked the book up a couple of weeks ago without much enthusiasm, mainly because of a growing suspicion these last five years that a “human interest” view of current events is bound to be misleading. Osama himself seems merely an extreme embodiment of larger globalized trends he’s barely aware of. The praise The New York Times heaped on Wright for his portrayal of John O’Neill, the “driven, demon-ridden FBI agent who worked so frantically to stop Osama bin Laden, only to perish in the attack on the World Trade Center”, suggested one of those artificially novelistic accounts too obviously aimed at getting a sale to Miramax. And most of the Wahhabist fellows over on the other side are too irrational for the psychological demands of fiction: it would surely be as unsatisfying as reading a detective novel where every character’s insane.