Aqsa Parvez and Western denial

(This post edited and expanded. Part 2 is here.)

These are photos of Aqsa Parvez at age 16. The first is at the top of her MySpace page:

She was full of life. Now she is a hard and cold corpse. She never saw 17.

Aqsa, living in Canada, refused to wear a hijab to school. She would take her hijab off on the bus to school, then put it back on, in the school bathroom, before returning home.

Aksa's Pakistani father strangled her. Honor killing. She had to be killed in order to maintain the family's honor. Muhammad Parvez then called 911, and informed them he had just killed his daughter.

And it's as simple as that: honor killing. Honor killings happen multiple times every year, wherever fundamentalist Islam mixes with backward tribal culture. Wikipedia:

"The United Nations Population Fund estimates that the annual worldwide total of honor-killing victims may be as high as 5,000 women."

Palestinians are known to douse their daughters/sisters/sisters-in-law in gasoline, then light them on fire:

“I’m going to take care of you,” were the brother-in law’s soothing words before he doused Souad with gasoline and set her aflame.

Ninety percent of Souad’s body was burned and she was left to die in a local hospital – where the staff refused to treat her, for they understood all too well that it was important for this charmuta to die. Souad’s mother showed up to the hospital as the protagonist in the final act, hoping to finish off what her son-in-law had started. In her unrivalled motherly love, she brought a glass of poison to her daughter’s lips, commanding her to drink. But the entrance of a doctor into the hospital room interfered with the intended script and Souad’s life was spared.

By the miraculous and courageous intervention of a Swiss-based humanitarian worker (“Jacqueline”), Souad survived and was flown to Europe -- where she lives today under a secret identity. If her family discovered that she were alive and discerned her new whereabouts, they would still come to murder to her.

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Except, in the minds of politically correct Westerners, Aqsa Parvez' death cannot be an honor killing.

Why?

If fundamentalist Islam influenced Muhammad Parvez' decision to strangle his daughter, then politically correct observers will be forced to recognize fundamentalist Islam as a malevolent force. This amounts to willfully discriminating about a religion. This must not be done! Discrimination is bad! Intellectual discrimination will lay waste to every multiculti value the PC have based their lives upon. In order to justify their worldview (no religion is better or worse than any other religion), they need an alternative explanation for Muhammad Parvez' action.

Similarly, if backward tribal culture influenced Muhammad Parvez' decision to strangle his daughter, the PCs will have to acknowledge a cultural evil. Horrors! PC doctrine stipulates that problems in the world are not caused by cultural evil, but rather by righteousness - by the very act of judging. No one has the right to think about what is good or bad about cultures. No culture is better or worse than any other culture. The politically correct demand - in the name of all they hold holy - that we speak no more about such matters. After all, we are not heathen (sniff).

Therefore, PC Westerners are torturing logic to conjure up an alternative explanation for Muhammad Parvez having strangled his daughter. They've rationalized and wrestled up their best group of alternative possibilities. They've concentrated on everything except the real reason: honor killing.

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I give you Exhibit A: The Gazette (Montreal), in the close of an editorial:

Murdering daughters is no more an Islamic value than murdering estranged wives is a Western one.

Murdering daughters is not an Islamic value. Yet, it is a value which large numbers of fundamentalist Muslims have taken as their own. Jihad Watch:

the divine sanction given to the beating of disobedient women (Qur'an 4:34) has created a culture in which such abuse is accepted as normal. [Muslims] could call for a searching reevaluation of the meaning and continued relevance of Qur'an 4:34, and call in no uncertain terms for Muslims to reject definitively its literal meaning, now and for all time to come. They could acknowledge the prevalence of honor killing in Islamic culture, which has no sanction as such in Islamic theology but nonetheless enjoys enough Islamic approval that the Jordanian Parliament a few years ago rejected on Islamic grounds attempts to stiffen penalties for it.

Photo: Jordanian women protest the Jordanian Parliament's refusal to provide stiffer penalties against honor killings.

The Gazette editors drew a parallel between Muslims murdering daughters and non-Muslims murdering estranged wives. The Gazette editors might note fundamentalist Muslim husbands kill their wives - over shaming of the family - at a rate which is many orders of magnitude higher than the rate at which Catholics, for instance, murder their estranged wives. And I know that without even looking it up. Back to The Gazette editors' apologia:

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

It's just a teenager thing! Don't you see? It's as normal as... um... well... lemme get back to you.

That such clashes can sometimes lead to violence and even murder is also not a phenomenon peculiar to Muslim families,

The Gazette editors needed more math in school. The editors are throwing significantly different ratios of occurrence into the same basket. Anyone with sense knows that - also without even looking it up.

as anyone who reads newspapers attentively can tell you.

I read newspapers a-t-t-e-n-t-i-v-e-l-y (you condescending, lock-step snivelers), and I say this to your implication: BULLSHIT.

But once again, some people have been too eager to jump aboard the anti-Muslim bandwagon. To judge a faith and a culture on this one squalid incident is absurd.

And there it is, right on cue: the politically correct accusation of religious bigotry, followed closely by the politically correct assertion: "To judge a faith and a culture ... is absurd." I rest my case. And, I promise, I didn't read Exhibit A until after I had already written the topmost paragraphs about refusal to judge religions and cultures. I didn't need to read Exhibit A to understand the dilemma of the multiculti brigades.

The editors' phrase "on this one squalid incident" is unserious window dressing. The lock-step snivelers can pretend they would publicly judge Islamists in the right circumstances, yet they are actually afraid to judge any group which might rise up and do violence to them. For evidence, I point to the Muhammad cartoons. But I don't point to any Muhammad cartoons in The Gazette, because the cartoons did not appear there. That's something else I know without even looking it up.

Also, hewing to a strict debate point: Exactly who is judging fundamentalist Islam based on one incident? Hey, editors: Google. "Islamic honor killings" yields 268,000 links.

Oh, and I gotcha "absurd" right here, you condescending lock-steppettes. Absurd is failing to adjudge fundamentalist Islam as evil.

Fantasy scenarios insult the life of Aqsa Parvez. Truth respects her life. Aqsa Parvez was murdered in a fundamentalist Islamist honor killing (with maybe some tribal values thrown in).

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Here's a WaPo headline, on page A23, about the honor killing:

"Canadian Teen Dies; Father Is Charged."

Does that headline give you a good feel for the story?

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Michelle Malkin:

Five Feet of Fury [awesome blog name] and Halls of Macadamia [ditto] spotlight the press quoting spin doctor Mohamed Elmasry, President of the Canadian Islamic Congress, claiming it was a “teenager issue.”

“I don’t want the public to think that this is really an Islamic issue or an immigrant issue,” said Mohamed Elmasry of the Canadian Islamic Congress. “It is a teenager issue.”

Blood pressure rising yet?

Keep reading.

Jihad Watch catches the National Post in the act with this quote:

“The strangulation death of Ms. Parvez was the result of domestic violence, a problem that cuts across Canadian society and is blind to colour or creed.”

The only ones blinded here are the dhimmi journalists wielding the whitewash brush over Aqsa Parvez’s dead body.

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"A teenager issue"?! This Islamist apologist for honor-killing is a living representative of evil.

"The result of domestic violence"? Does the writer really believe a Canadian-bred culture of domestic violence had a larger influence on Muhammad Parvez than did his fundamentalism or his tribalism?

People with open eyes need to stand up for Aqsa by speaking truth. It is disrespectful to deny and lie about the cause of her death. Doing so truly is, in Michelle Malkin's words, "wielding the whitewash brush over Aqsa Parvez's dead body."

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Now comes my cyberspace friend, the often lucid (but not this time) Canadian citizen Skippy Stalin:

The media and the blogosphere is desperate to make this about the evils of Islam. It isn't.

"Desperate"? Skippy is accusing some bloggers (possibly me) of being over-eager to be right (about a misguided understanding of Islam). Skippy is bestowing a gift. He's reminding us to seek truth, as opposed to self-aggrandizement.

If anything, the lonely death of Aqsa Parvez is about the perversion of religion.

It's about the perversion of one particular religion. For example: Protestant Christianity does not pervert, in large clumps of Protestants, to accepting the murder of various female family members.

To one degree or another, all monotheist religions drive certain of their followers to murder and, in certain circumstances, religious authorities condone and celebrate this.

Skippy's attempted parallel is invalid:

Large groups of Muslims who believe in murdering family members

are not equivalent to:

Individuals of other religions who murder, plus one and off religious cults who murder.

When Skippy writes a post about monotheistic religions driving their followers to murder, I will respond with a post about how living without God does the same. Skippy's premise: religion is bad because it leads to murder, is suspect. I'm sure it's the first time, ever, that a Skippy premise has been suspect.

Well, not in Canada. Not anymore.
[...]
Believe whatever you want, but your rights end at the point of violence.

So tolerant of religious expression is Canada that it has long refused to step in when religious figures advocate violence, although that is a clear violation of the Criminal Code of Canada.

Thank you for pointing directly at the moral cowardice of Canadian authorities. That Jewish thing applies (misquoting from memory): When you are kind to the cruel you are cruel to the kind.

You should not be permitted promote the beating of children or acts of war against other ethnic or religious groups and hide behind your right to free expression in this country any longer.

Tell it Skippy! Solidarity forever!

Furthermore, it is well past time that the criminal and immigration law be brought to bear on this.

Tell it Skippy! Tell it brother! Bravo for standing on the morally righteous side of Canadian law. In about 2 seconds, you'll be accused of being secretly prejudiced against Muslims. Don't worry about it. When ad hominem is launched at you from behind castle walls, don't even flinch. Let it splash where it may. Wear it as a badge of honor.

May God watch over Aqsa Parvez' soul. I feel sick over her murder. Let us tell the truth about why it happened.