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 fighting 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 |