Canada's 'Honour Killings': Where Is
The Sense of Honour?
13 Feb 2012
By Eric Walberg
As Canada continues to pour troops and money into
American wars and intrigues in the Muslim world, the
media focusses on so-called honour killings, notes
Eric Walberg
Afghan immigrants Mohammad Shafia, 58, his wife Tooba
Mahommad Yahya and their 21-year-old son Hamed were
found guilty in a Canadian court Sunday of first
degree murder in the 2009 "honor killing" deaths of
four female family members, and sentenced to life
imprisonment. These were not poor, uneducated people,
but upstanding members of Canada's economic elite. The
enterprising Mohammad escaped to Pakistan as "free
Afghanistan" descended into civil war in 1992, before
emigrating to Australia and Dubai, where he made his
fortune in Doha's hot real estate scene, finally
settling in Canada in 2007.
Judge Robert Maranger called the crimes "heinous":
"The apparent reason behind these cold-blooded,
shameful murders was that the four completely innocent
victims offended your completely twisted concept of
honour. It's a sick notion of honour that has no place
in a civilised society." Mohammad Shafia replied: "We
are not criminals. We are not murderers. We didn't
commit murder. This is unjust." "I am not a murderer.
I am a mother," echoed Tooba Yahya.
The three defendants were found guilty of the deaths
of the couple's three daughters and Shafia's first
wife. The bodies of the victims were found in a car
submerged in a canal lock near Kingston, apparently an
accident, but wire-taps of the father revealed he
showed no remorse for their deaths because they had
damaged the family's reputation by wearing revealing
clothes and otherwise rebelling against tradition.
This and other circumstantial evidence convinced the
jury that the father had arranged their murder, using
their brother as an accomplice.
Since 2002, Canada has suffered about 6000 murders, 13
of which involved "honour killings", defined as a
homicide of a member (female or male) of a family or
social group by other members, for bringing dishonour
upon the family or community. Whether or not the
accused here carried out the crime, such drastic
resolutions of a family conflict are surely
reprehensible, though a tradition that has been part
of all cultures -- European and American included --
until the recent past. "Shotgun weddings" are just one
form, as are "shotgun divorces". A third of all women
murdered in the US are murdered by boyfriends or
husbands. Both East and West, statistics show that
most murders are by family members.
The main difference between the very few honour
killers in Canada's legal history and the overwhelming
number of whiter, more "civilised" home-grown
murderers is that the latter do not justify their
actions by a sense of morality however "twisted". They
are usually acts of revenge, hatred, drunkenness --
both behind the wheel and through drink-induced
madness.
But what about the other homicides which Canadians are
increasingly indulging in? Canada is slogging through
its 11th nightmarish year of occupying Afghanistan in
the name of freedom. Statistics about Afghan
"casualities" are notoriously poor, as the occupiers
say they're too busy to compile them. How many
innocent Afghans, not to mention freedom fighters,
have Canadian soldiers and mercenaries killed since
2002? Surely many thousand times the 13 deaths
attributed to honour killings on the home front.
And just why are the Shafias with their un-Canadian
ways even living in Canada at all? It is a direct
result of the destruction of their homeland which the
US fuelled starting in 1979 by arming and funding
mujahideen. Without that truly gruesome political
event, the Shafias would have been living in a
peaceful Afghanistan, where compliance with social
norms by their children would have been the case, and
no thoughts of this ultimate punishment would have
entered their stern father's head.
But no. And just as Canada enthusiastically jumped
onboard the USS Mission Civilatrice in Afghanistan a
decade ago to fight those very mujahideen, it is a
high profile participant in the propaganda campaign to
convince Canadians that Afghans are barbarians and
that exterminating them is a Boy Scout's duty.
The shameful, very noisy trial of the Shafias distorts
the real news about Canada's relations with Afghans, a
perfect metaphor for the high-tech imperial centre
presenting itself (through the embedded media) as the
world's sole source of progress and reason, even as it
drags that world down into chaos and destruction. The
colonial periphery is depicted as savage and cruel,
whereas it is in fact the victim of immeasurable
violence at the hands of the empire. The handful of
"honour killings" and hand cuttings for various crimes
(especially popular in US ally Saudi Arabia), however
deplorable, are a drop in the ocean of imperial
violence, and have actually increased due to Western
meddling.
The reality is best revealed by statistics. Muslim
countries have far lower murder rates than Western
countries. As empire-central, let's focus on the US,
where the murder rate is 5.2 per 100,000, seven times
higher than Egypt's 0.8 (sorry, no stats available for
poor Afghanistan). The US also has the highest
incarceration rate in the world bar none -- seven
times that of Canada and nine times that of Egypt. US
prisons are notorious, where rape and drug addiction
abound.
The flip side of honour crime is rape. The incidence
of rape in the US is 300 times that of Egypt (Egypt
0.1 per 100,000 vs 30 in the US and 1.5 in Canada).
The incidence of rape in Afghanistan was once upon a
time also negligible. It is now an epidemic far more
horrible than the isolated honour killings there (or
by hapless Afghan emigres) -- and directly a result of
the occupation's 150,000 killer-invaders and the chaos
they have brought. For better or for worse, we must
conclude from these statistics that old-fashioned
honour killing is a powerful disincentive to rape.
Also for better or for worse, it is a fact that second
generation Muslim immigrants often discard their
religion and customs, seduced by the overt sexuality
and commercialism of Western culture. The Shafias went
that route. But at the same time, other immigrants
become more devout and angrily reject the alluring
trappings. What happens to them?
A famous case is Aafia Siddiqui, a brilliant
American-educated Pakistani cognitive neuroscientist,
who donned the niqab and showed sympathy for the likes
of Al-Qaeda and other groups resisting the US
onslaught on the Muslim world. She paid the price by
being given a life sentence for supposedly trying to
murder her US interrogators in Afghanistan. Anti-war
activist Cindy Sheehan criticised the conviction and
the judicial process saying it was carried out by a
kangaroo court, though curiously Amnesty International
has not championed Siddiqui's cause.
Not only Muslim immigrants find solace in traditional
Islam. According to a survey conducted by Swansea
University, Wales, nearly two-thirds of the 100,000
recent British converts to Islam were women, more than
70 per cent white, with an average age at conversion
of 27. They identified alcohol and drunkenness, a
"lack of morality and sexual permissiveness" and
"unrestrained consumerism" as their motivation.
Current NGOs and Western media blithely exhort Afghans
and other unfortunates to adopt Western standards with
nary a word about how they might be serving the West's
implicit imperial agenda. This is rank hypocrisy in
the eyes of Muslims. Take for instance the Independent
Republican Institute, which was active in overthrowing
the Honduran government in 2009. It was just last week
caught with its finger in the cookie jar in Egypt,
much to the feigned shock of US President Barack Obama,
who threatened to cut off US bribes (excuse me,
funding) to Egypt unless all charges against the IRI
functionaries and other intriguers (excuse me,
altruists) were dropped immediately.
The Islamic world broadly disapproves of what it sees
as the collapse of morality in the West. While Western
critics accuse Muslims of having an "obsession with
the purity of women", for Muslims, naked ladies on
magazine covers, legalised prostitution -- not to
mention the alarming incidence of rape in the West --
do not represent liberation of women. On the contrary,
they see much of Western culture as undermining any
genuine sense of dignity for women.
Following the verdict against the Shafias, Canadian
Justice Minister Rob Nicholson called honour killings
a practice that is "barbaric and unacceptable in
Canada....This government is committed to protecting
women and other vulnerable persons from all forms of
violence and to hold perpetrators accountable for
their acts."
The only riposte possible is to condemn Nicholson's
own endorsement of Canada's "barbaric and
unacceptable" involvement in US imperial wars which
kill thousands of "women and other vulnerable
persons", and to demand that he "hold perpetrators
accountable". Fat chance.
***
Eric Walberg writes for Al-Ahram Weekly http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/
You can reach him at http://ericwalberg.com/ His
Postmodern Imperialism: Geopolitics and the Great
Games is available at http://claritypress.com/Walberg.html
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