Situating Honorcide

More whitewashing of islamic honor killing. Until the general public recognizes that honor killing is an islamic phenomenon and demand a stop to it, our "leaders" will continue to go along with the charade that it's just a family matter.

FROM FRONTPAGEMAGAZINE.COM:

Situating Honorcide
By David Solway

FrontPageMagazine.com | 11/18/2008
The subject of “honor killings” is gradually becoming a matter of public controversy these days. The incidence of these crimes appears to be rising although the response to them is ambiguous and vacillating. There is little doubt that something alarming is happening—and has been happening for a long while—and that what we are really witnessing is a form of culture-specific violent behavior. But the general tendency among Muslim spokespeople and social activists is to average out these tragic events as part of a garden variety social phenomenon that is statistically inevitable.
When 16 year-old Aqsa Parvez of Mississauga, Ontario was strangled by her father for refusing to wear the hijab, Shahina Siddiqui, president of the Islamic Social Services Association, dissembled the murder as “the result of domestic violence, a problem that cuts across Canadian society and is blind to colour and creed” (National Post, December 12, 2007).
On the following day, a spokesman for the Canadian Council on American-Islamic Relations was quoted in the same newspaper, informing us that “Teen rebellion is something that exists in all households in Canada and is not unique to any culture or background.”
For Sheikh Yusuf Badat, Imam of the Islamic Foundation of Toronto, “It wasn’t about Islam” but merely a question “of parenting and anger management”; and Mohammed Elmasry, president of the Canadian Islamic Congress, whitewashed the killing as a “teenage issue.” Mohhamad Al-Navdi of the Canadian Council of Imams, while regretting the slaying of the young girl, responded by stressing “the duty [of parents] to convince their kids that this [the hijab] is part of their culture.”
The real crime, apparently, was not the actual killing, but the “failure” of the parents to inculcate the proper religious ordinances and to control the adolescent tendency to domestic revolt. Sheikh Alaa Elsayed of the Islamic Society of North America Canada agreed: parents should teach their daughters “to do the right thing” (National Post, December 14, 2007).
What these authorities do not tell us is that, in the Muslim tradition, a man’s honor is constituted by his possession of the three Z’s: zar (gold), zamin (land) and zan (women). It is when his possession of the latter is perceived as compromised that he will often resort to the extreme act, which is regarded as the legitimate disposal of his property. Teen rebellion is not the issue here; honor killings are.
READ IT ALL: