The Sad Case of Aqsa Parvez

by Sister Toldjah | December 16, 2007 7:40 pm

Michelle Malkin[1] has been following closely the murder of Ontario 16 year-old Aqsa Parvez, who was killed by her father in what has been described as an apparent “honor killing.” Here was the National Post’s story[2] on the murder:

TORONTO — A Mississauga, Ont., cab driver has been charged with the murder of his 16-year-old daughter, who was attacked in the family home after clashing with her strict Muslim family over whether or not to wear the hijab, the traditional Islamic head scarf for women.

Muhammad Parvez, 57, was charged after his daughter Aqsa Parvez died in hospital late Monday.

The victim’s older brother Waqas Parvez, was charged with obstructing police in connection with the girl’s death.

Police were called to a home in Mississauga early Monday morning by a man who told 911 operators that he had killed his daughter.

They found Aqsa Parvez lying motionless on the floor of her bedroom, to all appearances dead, but paramedics found a faint pulse and rushed her to hospital. The teenager succumbed to her injuries several hours later, police said Tuesday.

Const. J.P. Valade would not give any details about the teenager’s killing, but police sources said she was strangled.

Friends of the girl said she had left the family home, where her brothers also lived with their families, about a week before the attack because of arguments with her father and brothers over her refusal to wear traditional Muslim garb, including the hijab.

“She was scared of her father: He was always controlling her,” said Dominiquia Holmes-Thompson, a friend and classmate at Applewood Heights Secondary School, where both were Grade 11 students. “She wasn’t allowed to go out or do anything: That’s why she left.”

The Post’s Barbara Kay wonders[3] if the Canadian judicial system will accept the “my culture made me do it” defense that was successful in a recent ruling in a rape case in Australia:

We begin in Australia, and the trial results of a 2006 rape of a 10-year old aboriginal girl by a group of nine aboriginal men and adolescents. District Court Judge Sarah Bradley gave all of them probation or suspended sentences — no jail time and no criminal records. Bradley concluded that the victim “was not forced and she probably agreed to have sex with all of you.”

This girl had been a sexual pawn since the age of seven. She is the kind of human wreckage that should have inspired amongst anguished feminists a mass demonstration with candles, white ribbons and demands for life sentences for her attackers.

But the judge was a woman, the girl and her attackers from a minority culture, creating the perfect ideological storm.

How could any woman get it so wrong? It’s like this: Indoctrinated in multicultural feminism, Judge Bradley is a moral and cultural relativist. Any sexual aggression against her own daughter would be anathema, but the cultural values of the Other are sacrosanct, and must be respected.

Thus, that judge didn’t see a 10-year old girl. She didn’t see an individual. She saw aboriginal Others engaged in behaviours particular to their culture, and she assumed it would be wrong to impose her standards on them. Believe it or not, I am sure she thought she was being sensitive to their “difference.”

A fired-up Michael Coren expressed in yesterday’s Toronto Sun[4] what a lot of us have been feeling since learning about this case, and hearing from Canadian apologists who are already lining up to suggest that these types of killings aren’t unique to Islam, and that Islam is a “religion of peace”:

It’s the episode of Little Mosque on the Prairie that I missed. The one where the father is so angry with his teenage daughter for not wearing the hijab that he strangles her to death. Perhaps it will be in the special features section of the DVD version, released just in time for the holiday that used to be known as Christmas, but not any longer because the word might hurt someone’s feelings.

Not that we know why, or even if Muhammad Parvez killed his 16-year-old daughter Aqsa last week in Mississauga, Ont. But we do know that he has been charged with the crime and that friends told reporters there had been terrible arguments about Aqsa’s refusal to wear Islamic head covering and that she wanted a different path from that of her family.

Most Canadian Muslim leaders immediately condemned what had happened but it didn’t take very long for the usual suspects to explain on radio and television that the tragedy had nothing to do with the Muslim faith and that all religions contain extremism. Islam, we were told, is a religion of peace.

Which is probably just what the owner of a Christian bookstore in Gaza thought three months ago as he was murdered and his shop firebombed. Or Danny Pearl, shortly before the American journalist had his head cut off by Islamic terrorists — who, naturally, filmed the whole thing and made sure their chants from the Koran were loud and clear.

Or the wretched gang-rape victim in Saudi Arabia sentenced to 200 lashes for daring to be in a car at the time of the crime with a man to whom she was not married or related. Or the women stoned to death for adultery. Or the Iranian men hanged because they were homosexual.

[…]

And on and on. On until the denial is sickening. It’s cultural, it’s because of colonialism, it’s because of Palestine, because of Iraq, because of misunderstanding. Because of anything other than Islam.

Only a bigot would argue that every Muslim was violent or opposed to Western freedom. But only a coward or a liar would argue that there was not a profound and deeply worrying link between conservative Islam and myriad acts of terror, intolerance and hysterical anger.

It is not I who say this but the countless Muslims who take to the streets at the drop of a cartoon to scream for blood and war; or the Muslims who preach jihad in North America and Europe, where they enjoy open societies founded on Christian enlightenment.

They may represent a minority, but the harm they do is incalculable. This dysfunctional venom does not come from Christian, Jew, Hindu or Buddhist and fatuous relativism will only blind the foolish. It is time for free discussion in this free country, whether it offends or not.

Amen.

Read more about the ‘peaceful’ nature of the Religion of Peace here[5].

Cross-posted from the SisterToldjah blog[6].

Endnotes:
  1. Michelle Malkin: http://michellemalkin.com/2007/12/16/aqsas-last-days/
  2. National Post’s story: http://www.financialpost.com/conrad_black/story.html?id=159480
  3. Barbara Kay wonders: http://network.staging.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fullcomment/archive/2007/12/12/barbara-kay-how-canada-let-aqsa-down.aspx
  4. Michael Coren expressed in yesterday’s Toronto Sun: http://www.torontosun.com/News/Columnists/Coren_Michael/2007/12/15/4725863.php
  5. here: http://www.thereligionofpeace.com/
  6. SisterToldjah blog: http://sistertoldjah.com/archives/2007/12/16/the-sad-case-of-aqsa-parvez/

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