Truth demands fairness

There was surely not a single person in Canada unmoved by the Shafia case. After three months of trial in Kingston, Ont., Mohammad Shafia, his wife Tooba Yahya and their son Hamed were convicted 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 Amir and Tooba Yahya’s daughters, Hamed Shafia’s sisters. Rona was Mohammad Amir’s first wife. The four women had been drowned in their car in June, 2009, after their killers had planned and organized almost every detail of the crime.

And the crime was an honour killing. Which is where we get to the politics and religion of this grisly incident. During the trial itself, and as soon as the verdicts were announced, we were treated to a series of journalists, politicians, police officers and Islamic apologists explaining that this was an example of domestic violence, and that such crimes have nothing at all to do with Islam. The same occurred in 2007 when 16-year-old Aqsa Parvez was murdered by her Pakistani father and brother. CAIR Canada, an oft-quoted Islamic group, told the gullible that, “It’s important not to generalize. There are cases of violence across all faiths and all cultures.”

Next time I hear about Baptist, Catholic, Jewish and Buddhist honour killings I’ll take this comment seriously. Because we speak here not of the dozen slaughters that have occurred in Canada in the last 12 years, but the thousands — yes, thousands — that have taken place in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Palestine, Egypt and pretty much everywhere else in the Islamic world. They occur elsewhere, but to focus on the tiny and ignore the massive is intellectually dishonest and morally cowardly.

Whether we like to consider it or not in our supposedly pluralistic age, there is an intrinsic link within Islam between Koranic and Sharia teachings about the place of women and male power and the oppression and sometimes murder of women in Muslim cultures. To pretend this isn’t so is to allow Muslim women to continue to be victims, even fatal victims. Of course most Muslim men would never behave in such a way, but that is not the point. It’s that some do, and when they do, they believe their faith allows and commands it.

How different this denial is from the virtual joy the media has when it can describe a killer or criminal as Christian or Catholic. Each of the handful of times some demented loner has shot an abortionist, we’re told that this is typical of Christian thinking and an inevitable result of pro-life rhetoric, and then we have endless television detective shows dealing with the evils of such extremism. In the internationally acclaimed MI5 series — I must admit, I’m a fan — one of the first cases covered was of an American pro-lifer blowing up British abortion doctors. Such a thing has never happened in Britain, and this was at a time when Islamic terrorists were murdering dozens of British people in London. There’s honesty and balance for you.

Or when Anders Behring Breivik killed innocent teenagers on a Norwegian island. He was a freemason who wrote that he had no relationship with God and had not attended a church in 15 years, yet was repeatedly defined as a “Christian fundamentalist” on international television. The Catholic clergy abuse crisis is an even better example of this double speak. It was not pedophilia, it concerned around two per cent of clergy, most of it happened a generation ago, and the Church reacted in the same manner as schools, sports teams and every other institution. Yet Catholicism is singled out and held up for special contempt.

My friend Tarek Fatah refers to the morbid refusal of Western media to address the challenges of Islam as “the racism of lowered expectations.” In other words, white liberals like to think of brown, Muslim people as being incapable of acting in a civilized, law-abiding manner. What offensive hogwash! Equality is a noble aspiration, and to achieve it we have to treat religions as well as people fairly and judge them according to universal and not particular standards. Truth demands it, and so does the memory of four innocent, good, murdered women. God rest their souls.