Ghost of a flea

Take your daughter, whom you love, and go to the region of Moriah

Written as a comment to an excellent article at The Media is the Enemy in response to the murder of a sixteen year old girl and the apologetics of The Toronto Star (via LGF).

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A father who murders his daughter with the connivance of other family members may justify his acts as the defense of the family's honour in upholding traditions and - grotesquely - of acting morally. I imagine the experience is one of horror as his daughter transforms into something non-human that he must kill if he is to defend his own authority. I can only pray that men who do this have some love of their own children and some horror at themselves for what they do; I am not convinced this is the case.

But this is only to consider such murders as individual tragedies and at the level of "the family", the primary social unit in the minds of many religious fundamentalists. At a wider level, such acts serve to terrorize society as a whole and as a warning to other girls lest they consider disobeying familial authority. Young Muslim girls are taught from the day they are born that women have a particular place in the world and must yield to familial authority or bring down upon themselves the wrath of God and an unforgiving, homicidal malice from those closest to them in all the world.

This is true not only for medieval backwaters without the law in the "tribal areas" of north-western Pakistan or ten minute's drive beyond the Kabul city limits. This is true of suburban Toronto with its shopping malls and multi-lane highways and CNN; its parliamentary democracy, Charter of Rights and Freedoms and countless titled faculty at women's studies and sociology departments. What lesson can Muslim girls take from this but that tribal law applies to them here as surely as it is does for hundreds of millions of other girls around the world? Their own fathers will not protect them; their fathers may be their murderers. Worse yet, their friends, their teachers and a small army of police will not anticipate such crimes, perhaps because none can imagine a father strangling his own daughter to death over a supposed religious edict.

Worst of all, even when we have the proof before our eyes, the Canadian media establishment will excuse the act and cry crocodile tears for the imaginary suffering of teenage girls more fundamentalist than their own parents. "Submit" they are told or die and there is nobody prepared to help them. Today I am ashamed to be Canadian.

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Toronto Star staff reporter Joanna Smith writes that the hijab can divide families. So too does murdering your daughter with your bare hands. So does standing by as your father commits an atrocity upon your sister. Joanna Smith cannot bring herself to describe a "normal" life without placing normality in scare-quotes; as if submitting to a custom we have repeatedly been told is not Islamic is normal, as if the expectation a daughter should not be murdered by her father should be abnormal. Smith names four muslim women in her article but somehow overlooks the name of a sixteen year old girl who even - especially - in death deserves better than this sickening equivocation.

Her name was Aqsa Parvez. The Toronto Star has the blood of the next girl on their hands.

Related: Mohammad Elmasry, President of the Canadian Islamic Congres, calls it "a teenager issue". And Ansar Ahmed joins "with the family of slain teenager Aqsa Parvez in mourning her senseless and violent passing." Surely with anyone but her family.

Posted by Ghost of a flea at December 13, 2007 07:01 AM

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Posted by: Christopher Ross at December 13, 2007 02:55 PM

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