With Aqsa Parvez finally resting peacefully, her murderers — her very own father and brother — sentenced to the Canadian-style “life in prison” with no chance of parole for 18 years, it’s time for the religious equivalence and multiculturalist types to step forward again and declare that “honour killing,” which I more accurately define as honour murder, is not just Islam’s problem.
Ujjal Dosanjh, Liberal MP – it’s the bloody patriarchy, stupid!
There is a huge misconception that these crimes occur because of certain religious beliefs. There is no religion that condones the murder of women. It’s the feudal/patriarchal culture of male dominance and control that’s the culprit.
Dr. Amin Muhammad, Professor of Psychiatry at Memorial University of Newfoundland and Labrador – it’s not just Islam, stupid!
While many recent cases in Western society involve Muslims, Dr. Muhammad said honour killings have also been committed in the name of Hinduism, Sikhism and Christianity.
To which I say: While it may be true that “honour killings have also been committed in the name of Hinduism, Sikhism and Christianity,” the numbers pale in comparison to the thousands of females murdered each year around the world in the name of Islam for the sake of family honour.
United Nations Population Fund:
Throughout the world, perhaps as many as 5,000 women and girls a year are murdered by members of their own families, many of them for the “dishonour” of having been raped, often as not by a member of their own extended family.
It is dishonest at best to survey the numbers of honour murders committed by Muslims, along with the allowances for honour murder within the legal structures of Islamic nations, such as Syria, Pakistan, Yemen and Afghanistan, which can be seen as a tacit endorsement of the practice, and then suggest equivalency among faiths when a handful of honour murders are committed by members of other faiths. Honour murder is a much greater problem for Islam than it is for other faiths and it is ludicrous to even suggest otherwise.
As for endorsement within religious texts, Dosanjh and Muhammed are correct that no religion condones honour murder per se, but they should have been more careful to point out the caveats under Islam that have led to the widespread acceptance of honour murder within Islamic tradition. As an example, Christianity, the faith I know best, provides no justification whatsoever to murder one’s own children or one’s wife, whereas the Qur’an Sura 18 arguably allows for the killing of children not even your own as long as you’ve accurately determined a child will grow up as a non-believer. (How that determination is made, I have no clue.)
Does honour murder occur in other faiths? Yes. Under which faith is it most prevalent, by far? Islam. Which nations tacitly endorse the practice through caveats of law? Islamic nations. That’s the point that must be accepted before reform can be realized, and it’s the critical point that Dosanjh and others prefer to gloss over to our collective detriment.
I credit Dosanjh in one respect, though; his reference to the role political correctness in shaping the response to honour murder.
… political correctness prevents us from demanding that the cultural norms that justify such heinous practices as honour killings have no place anywhere in the world. We must never be too sensitive to call a spade a spade.
As if on cue, some on the pro-dhimmi side are already suggesting Canadian judges should take “cultural practices,” such as honour killing, into consideration out of respect for (I say genuflection at the altar of) multiculturalism. Scaramouche, via Mark Steyn:
John Oakley is seriously entertaining the question of whether Canadian judges should give those who commit “honour” killings a break because they have different “cultural practices” and may not be aware of our norms and laws; defence attorney Lawrence Ben-Eliezer thinks judges should take these differences into consideration because we have “multiculturalism”.
Canadians, of course, are already aware of what “taking these differences into consideration” means: preferential treatment of en vogue “victim” groups of the political left. What Canadians are less aware of, in my opinion, is the tangible threat posed to Western society by ardent multiculturalism, our Achilles heel.