Every week, it seems, we hear of some horror from the distant Islamic world, some ghastliness bound up with alien concepts of honor and insult.
A woman gets 200 lashes for enduring violent rape and having the temerity to complain about it. Another woman is jailed and threatened with death for letting schoolchildren name a stuffed toy after the prophet of Islam. A man throttles his teenage daughter for her refusal to wear a headscarf — oh. Wait.
That wasn’t news from the Middle East or North Africa. It happened earlier this week in suburban Toronto.
Muhammed Parvez, a middle-aged cabdriver, allegedly choked 16-year-old Aqsa to death after she came home to get some clothes.
She’d been staying with a friend for the past week, according to Canada’s National Post, after repeatedly clashing with her father and brothers over their insistence that she adopt conservative Muslim garb.
One of Aqsa’s high school friends said the dead girl hated being covered, and would shrug off her Islamic shroud on the way to school once her house was out of sight.
In North America, this kind of thing is normal teen pushback — like putting on lipstick when your mother won’t see, or sneaking a cigarette behind the gym — but what’s normal got Aqsa killed.
Several Canadian Islamic groups have had the decency to deplore the slaying, which seems to have been carried out with the collusion of Aqsa’s brothers. Yet in an exquisite demonstration of moral equivalence, Shahina Siddiqui, the Canadian-based executive director of the Islamic Social Services Association of the United States and Canada, said:
“The strangulation death of Ms. Parvez was the result of domestic violence, a problem that cuts across Canadian society and is blind to color or creed.”
Oh, no, it doesn’t, Ms. Siddiqui, not this type of domestic violence, nor this particular crime: This was Shariah-based justice meted out to a Muslim girl for defying her fundamentalist father.
In Islamic culture, honor resides in the male, and a woman’s honor is relevant only to the degree that it reflects back on her masculine custodians. A man who can’t control his daughter has been shamed, so the thinking goes. Better her death than his dishonor.
This certainly is not a world view that “cuts across Canadian society,” and it sure isn’t “blind to color or creed.” It is the world view of a distinct and dangerous minority of strict Muslims who have settled in the modern, multicultural, liberal-minded West, but who demand that their children adhere to the medieval social code of their Islamic home countries.
What makes these people dangerous is the increasing insistence that Western societies accommodate their fastidiousness, rather than they themselves adapting to Western ways.
So in the U.K., public swimming pools are now women-only at certain hours, and hospitals are reorienting their wards so that Muslim patients face Mecca.
In Minnesota, Islamic taxi drivers have refused to accept passengers carrying alcohol. A blind friend of mine has been turned down repeatedly by Muslim cabbies in Toronto, where she lives, because she uses a guide dog (which are, like all dogs, “unclean”).
Even the Western practice of free speech is under assault from Muslim activists. The Canadian Islamic Congress is pursuing claims before two human rights commissions against the respected magazine Maclean’s after it printed an article by Mark Steyn that the CIC says “subjects Canadian Muslims to hatred and Islamophobia.” There are no incidents linked to Steyn’s writing, no acts, yet human rights have been violated?
The CIC demanded the magazine give right-of-reply by way of a five-page insert written by Muslim law students. Maclean’s, which had printed numerous responses to the article, refused, and now faces months of expensive legal wrangling to fight for the freedom of its press.
It’s bad enough that women are flogged in the Islamic world, that girls who “dishonor” their families face death at their own fathers’ hands. It is chilling that such barbarism should take place on free North American soil.
