On December 7, 2007, Aqsa Parvez was found murdered in the basement bedroom of her Mississauga, Ontario home. Her refusal to her domineering father’s demands to wear the hijab was seen as the ultimate insult. Her father, Muhammad and her brother, Waqas, strangled her to death for her open defiance.
It was June 30, 2009 when the police diver who swam to the bottom of the canal in Kingston, Ontario found sisters Zainab Shafia in the front passenger seat of the car, Sahar, her younger sister in the rear, Geeti’s lifeless body floating over the driver’s seat and Rona (the girls’ supposed aunt) slouched in the middle back seat. All had been honour killed by their father, Mohammad, his wife Tooba Yahya, and their son, Hamed.
Where was the outcry then? Where were the candlelight vigils across the country; the tears; the prayers? At the time, Justin Trudeau said he was uncomfortable with the Conservative description of so-called honour killings as “barbaric.”
So, how did we pay respect to these victims of such honour killings? We celebrated Hijab Day in Ottawa. On February 25, 2016, the Ottawa Women’s Action Forum sent out an invitation:
Better Awareness, Greater Understanding,
Peaceful World when non-Muslim women will
wear a hijab for all or part of the day to be in solidarity
with Muslim women. We walk with our sisters.
Not a word was said about women who are forced to cover their hair or faces. Not a word was said about Islamic culture’s mistreatment of women and denial of their basic human rights. Not a word was said about the conflict between Sharia and western values of individual freedom and self-determination.
Now there has been a different kind of crime, and a very different reaction. On Sunday night in Ste. Foy, Quebec, six Muslim worshippers were shot at a mosque.
Immediately, the alleged shooter, Alexandre Bissonnette, was accused of following a white supremacist creed. Links have been made to Donald Trump and to various nationalist pundits, with the implication being that Bissonnette was inspired to kill Muslims by politicians such as Marine Le Pen and Geert Wilders.
In fact, it is hard to find clear or consistent evidence of white-nationalist or far-right views on Bissonnette’s Facebook page. Although he did like the IDF and Donald Trump (hardly fascist totalitarians), he also liked Agnès Maltais, who argued against Bill 59 (the Bill which would have assigned new powers to the Quebec Human Rights Commission to combat hate speech), respected Quebec journalist Mathieu Bock-Côté, the socialist party NDP and their late leader Jack Layton, Pope John Paul II, Anatoly Karpov, Mr. Bean, Katy Perry, Garfield, Tom Hanks, Kindness Matters, and others.
There are many unanswered questions about his act:
- How did a loner, a 27 year old Laval University student, with no prior convictions, get an AK47 in Canada? Who got him the gun?
- Why did he know exactly when prayer time was when everyone would be face down on the floor for evening prayer on their knees (it shifts according to the sun/moon every day) if he’d never been in the mosque and was anti-Islam?
- Why did the survivors say that there were TWO men with guns screaming “Allahu akbar” before they started shooting, though we are now told that Alexandre Bissonette was the lone shooter?
- Why are jihadists “lone wolves” and “mentally disturbed,” but Alexandre Bissonette is a “terrorist” even though he’s being arrested for mass murder, not terror?
- Why did Trudeau come out of the gate with a quick statement calling it a terrorist attack while he has called every jihad terrorist attack “unfortunate incident” or something similar?
- In contradiction to the Boston bombings, Trudeau did not talk about the killer as someone cut off from society, someone who felt “marginalized,” someone needing to be understood and embraced. He had no words of concern for the killer at all.
- It is unfortunate that it happened the night before Parliament resumed with the upcoming voting on Bill M-103, a bill to outlaw Islamophobia.
When a Muslim goes on a killing spree, it is nothing to do with Islam, and police are stationed at mosques to protect Muslims from Islamophobia.
When Muslims are killed, it has everything to do with Islam(ophobia), and police are stationed at mosques to protect Muslims from Islamophobia.
The Quebec City mosque killing is a tragedy. I strongly condemn all forms of violence, including violence motivated by hatred and bigotry, and I call on all Canadians to affirm their commitment to civil, open dialogue and non-violence. But if we are to fully understand this tragedy, we must pursue truth and speak openly about Islamic terrorism.