In “We must be honest about honour killings” in The Spectator, February 6, Michael Coren tells truths that the mainstream media is too clueless and/or compromised to tell about Islamic honor killings.
We are very happy and honored that Coren, award-winning television host and bestselling author, will be speaking at the first-ever human rights conference dedicated to exposing the plight of women under Islamic law in Dearborn, Michigan, on the anniversary of the honor murder of Jessica Mokdad: the Jessica Mokdad Human Rights Conference.
White guilt has terrible consequences. This was made profoundly clear in Canada during the three month trial of Mohammad Shafia, his wife Tooba Yahya and their son Hamed. They were convicted a week ago of the first-degree murder of Zainab (19), Sahar (17) and Geeti Shafia (13), and 50-year-old Rona Amir. The three teens were Mohammad Shafia and Tooba Yahya’s daughters, Hamed’s sisters. Rona was Mohammad Shafia’s first wife. The four women had been drowned in their car in June, 2009. The killers had chosen a canal in Kingston “” a university town half-way between Toronto and Montreal “” because they assumed that the local police would be less sophisticated and able than those in a larger city. They had also researched murder techniques on the internet, and planned this honour killing long in advance.
The case has naturally shocked the country, but is in fact only the most recent of a dozen murders in the last twelve years, most involving Muslim patriarchs aided by sons, cousins, and wives, killing young girls who wanted to be horribly western by wearing nice clothes, dating nice boys, doing nice things. In the Shafia episode, the three daughters had refused to wear the burka, and one of them had even dared to wear a bikini. Rona Amir had been unable to give her husband children, so he had taken a second wife, even though polygamy is illegal in Canada. Although not the girls” biological mother, Rona had loved them and tried to protect them. She had to die too.
Which brings us to the greater point here, with more long-term consequences than this single repugnant case. The authorities “” be they police, politicians, social workers, media “” are obsessed with appearing to be progressive and non-judgmental where Islam is concerned; partly out of a fear of being accused of Islamophobia, but also because they genuinely believe that the white, Christian West has more to learn from Islam than the contrary. The Shafia girls had pleaded with their teachers for help, and while front line social workers acknowledged that the situation was potentially disastrous, the concerns evaporated as soon as they reached middle management. So Mohammad Shafia “” who had written of his daughters, “˜may the devil shit on their graves” “” was effectively permitted to commit mass murder.
Even now, commentators are embarrassingly, cringingly reluctant to link the crime in any way with Islam. Moments after the verdict was announced, the lead detective in the case told the public that “˜domestic violence is a terrible thing”. It is “” but this wasn’t domestic violence. It was yet another example of a psychosis that has its epicentre in Pakistan, but extends to most parts of the Islamic heartland, and many in the Muslim diaspora. It’s a self-evident truth that not all Muslims behave so brutally, but it’s also undeniable that Islam teaches that a woman is the property of a father, then a husband. Most fathers and husbands are kind, but if they are not they are empowered by Koranic teaching and the prism of Sharia law to behave pretty much as they like. Quite simply, honour killing is not considered a crime in much of the Islamic world.
While it’s true that honour killings are not exclusively Muslim, Islam is the only faith that boasts textual defence and sacred justification for such grotesque acts. When 16-year-old Aqsa Parvez was murdered in Canada in a 2007 honour killing by her Pakistani father and brother, CAIR Canada “” an oft-quoted and worryingly influential Islamic group “” told the gullible that, “˜It’s important not to generalise. There are cases of violence across all faiths and all cultures”. That was rubbish; but worse than Muslim extremists hiding the truth are non-Muslims embracing lies without question. We saw this during the Parisian riots, when mobs of overwhelmingly Muslim youths beat and torched their way through the city, often screaming “˜Allahu Akbar”. Yet they were almost never described as being Muslim by the media. So different from when the Norwegian killer Anders Behring Breivik, a freemason who wrote that he had no relationship with God and had not attended a church in fifteen years, was repeatedly defined as a “˜Christian fundamentalist” on international television.