The media's malevolent enthusiasm to self-enforce the blasphemy laws under the sharia ("do not offend Islam") has extinguished whatever humanity it might have had. Islamic gendercide is epidemic in Muslim countries, and an increasing problem in the West as Muslim populations grow. Muslims are responsible for 91 percent of honor killings worldwide. Islamic law stipulates no penalty for a parent who kills his child.
Instead of expressing repulsion and outrage at the systematic murder of girls yearning to be free and shining a light on this monstrous religious slaughter, the media goes to irrational (even criminal) lengths to deny the connection to Islamic law. We see this time and time again.
Such is the case in a column published today in The Toronto Star. The dishonesty and dhimmitude of the Canadian columnist, Rosie DiManno, is particularly galling. She is almost cheerleading the murderers and absolutely whitewashing honor killings.
The honor murderers in the Shafia case were quite clear that the three Shafia daughters had disrespected Islam.
And yet Rosie DiManno says that honor killing has nothing to do with Afghan (Islamic) traditions. DiManno comes across as a confused apologist desperately wanting to believe that the Shafia honor killing had nothing to do with Islam, but then she's confronted with reality.
Two passages from the same news article:
But there is nothing in being Afghan that can remotely rationalize or contextualize the crime of which they, with son Hamed, stand accused.
And yet, this is what Tooba’s sister Soraya, tracked down in Kabul by a reporter for La Presse, responded when asked whether she would ever kill for honour: “Yes.’’
More chilling was the remark added by Soraya’s husband, who had been sitting quietly in the background. “If any of (my) daughters dishonoured me, I would put them in a bag and eliminate them so no one would ever find their traces in Afghanistan.”
But this is Canada and dead daughters don’t disappear so easily.
As for "contextualizing the crime," Robert Spencer has pointed out the context time and time again:
A manual of Islamic law certified as a reliable guide to Sunni orthodoxy by Al-Azhar 
University, the most respected authority in Sunni Islam, says that "retaliation is obligatory
against anyone who kills a human being purely intentionally and without right." However, "not subject to retaliation" is "a father or mother (or their fathers or mothers) for killing their offspring, or offspring's offspring." ('Umdat al-Salik o1.1-2). In other words, someone who kills his child incurs no legal penalty under Islamic law.
Syria in 2009 scrapped a law limiting the length of sentences for honor killings, but "the new law says a man can still benefit from extenuating circumstances in crimes of passion or honour 'provided he serves a prison term of no less than two years in the case of killing.'" And in 2003 the Jordanian Parliament voted down on Islamic grounds a provision designed to stiffen penalties for honor killings. Al-Jazeera reported that "Islamists and conservatives said the laws violated religious traditions and would destroy families and values."
Muslim countries living under the sharia have more lenient sentences for honor murder.
Furthermore, the writer includes the following in the same sentence: "the Shafia family was not particularly religious" but that "they did pray five times a day." I kid you not. Read on, I fisk it all.
DiManno: Shafias’ alleged crime an inconceivable aberration even by Afghan standards Toronto Star (hat tip RV)
By Rosie DiManno, Columnist
KINGSTON, ONT.—I am trying to picture Tooba Yahya in a burqa, her bush of black hair tucked away under the forehead-pinching skullcap that anchors voluminous pleated fabric billowing like fish gills.
As a postpubescent female in Kabul, with the radically fundamentalist Taliban seizing power, she would undoubtedly have donned the crown-to-toe swaddling forced upon women who ventured outdoors.
Yet in a wedding photograph — with Mohammad Shafia smiling between his two wives, linking arms with the old one and the new one — 17-year-old Tooba wears a Western-style white bridal gown. And we know, from her own evidence on the witness stand, Tooba hailed from a liberal family — as least liberal in Afghan terms — to the extent that, when the Taliban forbade females from attending school, her father secured a private tutor for his youngest daughter. Such behind-closed-doors educating for girls was also against the law in Afghanistan.
In court here, Tooba never wore even the hijab, the modest head-covering scarf. This might have been a defence tactic, to demonstrate for the jury that Tooba — and by extent her co-accused husband and son — was not pious, not conservative, thus not unbearably strict with her daughters and unlikely to have acquiesced, much less participated, in what the prosecution described as a mass “honour killing’’ of three teenage sisters and Tooba’s co-spouse.
Except that she did.
The Shafia family was not, by all indications, a particularly religious family, rarely attended mosque but did pray five times a day — Tooba and sister-wife Rona Amir Mohammad anyway — during Ramadan. And though Shafia did declare, in one explosive passage captured on police intercepts, that his defiant, disobedient daughters had “betrayed Islam,” among their other sins, this trial was not about the Muslim faith (corrupted), except insofar as Islam imbues a follower’s life, in a way that Christianity does not, in the West, in the third millennium.
It is not, as DiManno feels compelled to add, corrupted, it is pure Islam. Authentic Islam.
Tooba had the big fancy hotel wedding reception that upper class Afghan women covet and expect, as part of the formal engagement pact. But in many other particulars, the woman accused of killing her daughters is an anomaly. She had a driver’s license (obtained in Dubai). She was widely travelled. And she was clearly not submissive to the males in her household.
When the Shafias talked about “our culture”, “our customs’’, our “traditions,” as both husband and wife did ad nauseam on the witness stand, they invested even the most marginal or banal happenstance with an exceptionalism exclusive to their Afghan-ness.
Ishcabibble, ishcacobble. You almost have to feel sorry for the writer. What a load of crap.
But there is nothing in being Afghan that can remotely rationalize or contextualize the crime of which they, with son Hamed, stand accused.
Afghanistan is a medieval place of patriarchs with Old Testament faces, especially outside its cities.
"Old Testament" faces? Really? The Muslims killed off all the Jews of Afghanistan according to the dictates of the quran.
Women are worth less than cattle and sheep. Daughters, sisters, wives are an extension of their menfolk. Creepy old men marry 10-year-old girls.
So did Muhammad, "the perfect model" (actually Aisha was six years old).
Rape is rarely prosecuted and females more likely to suffer the punishment for “getting themselves’’ raped and dishonouring their families.
Yes, because Muhammad said a rape victim needed four male witnesses.
If not for an international outcry by NATO nations two years ago, marital rape would have been removed as a crime on the new law books as President Hamid Karzai turned himself inside out to placate his Taliban opponents.
These are not "new law books." This is sharia law.
Yet Afghanistan has also hurtled into the 21st century over the past decade, since the abomination of 9/11 brought foreign troops onto its soil, donor nation billions into the country and a sudden eruption of modern technology into ordinary people’s lives so that even goat herders now have cellphones. More than anything else, Arabic TV networks such as Al Jazeera has opened up the outside world to an insular society that had been frozen in time.
Al Jazeera, terror TV, is heralded as a modern wonder? Only in its hi-def delivery of centuries old jihadist propaganda and Islamic supremacism.
I’ve made nine trips to Afghanistan since 2001. I have many Afghan friends and have discussed this alleged mass honour killing with them, including the editor of a Kabul newspaper aghast by the crime in Canada as alleged. Even by Afghan standards of proprietary attitudes toward females and the tolerance for punishment unto death for wayward daughters, the crime as portrayed by the prosecution in a Kingston courthouse is an inconceivable aberration.
Honour killings among Afghans are hardly atypical. But nobody I’ve spoken with had ever heard of anything as outrageous as what purportedly occurred at the Kingston Mills Locks on June 30, 2009 — which the jury has been deliberating since last Friday afternoon. The pathology — the psychosis — required to have committed such a ghastly deed, if that’s what the jury concludes it was, is surely specific to this one transplanted family, an act of barbarism found no where else in the annals of Afghan crime over the past century.'
Writer Rosie DiManno's observations here are completely anecdoctal and do not reflect the reality of devout Muslims in Afghanistan. Tell it to all of the dead girls, Rosie. On the one hand she writes, "women are worth less than cattle and sheep. Daughters, sisters, wives are an extension of their menfolk. Creepy old men marry 10-year-old girls" and then goes on to say that "though honour killings are hardly atypical" this one is just outside the limits of their barbarism.
And yet, this is what Tooba’s sister Soraya, tracked down in Kabul by a reporter for La Presse, responded when asked whether she would ever kill for honour: “Yes.’’
More chilling was the remark added by Soraya’s husband, who had been sitting quietly in the background. “If any of (my) daughters dishonoured me, I would put them in a bag and eliminate them so no one would ever find their traces in Afghanistan.”
But this is Canada and dead daughters don’t disappear so easily.
On the phone with Soraya, Tooba says: “Yes my sister, there are problems. To lose three daughters and have sinned three times.”
Just this exchange alone undoes writer Rosie's entire false premise.
The Shafias were urbanites, from Kabul. They practiced cafeteria Islam, as many cafeteria Catholics pick and choose the articles of faith they wish to embrace whilst discarding the rest. It appears true, as Shafia testified, that theirs was a relatively relaxed household, even as the paterfamilias clung to an honour-based code of ethics and control. The daughters were not subjected to more extremely rigid rules than first-generation immigrant families from elsewhere, including frankly, my own, though that was a generation ago. I am not convinced, from what was heard in the courtroom, that the Shafia daughters — I would describe them as Afghan princesses, naïve and materialistically indulged and downright silly a lot of the time — were physically abused to any significant degree.
Ghastly. Writer Rosie appears harder on the dead daughters than the honor murderers.
Court was told of only three instances where the children and Rona were struck by either Shafia or Hamed.
This is untrue on its face. Here again the writer's dangerous infatuation with the honor murderers results in inaccurate reporting. Rosie is misrepresenting the facts here. Why?
Fahima Vorgetts testified that Rona was not allowed to use the phone in the family’s St. Leonard house so she would go to a payphone in a nearby park in the evening and call. She said many calls were marked by long bouts of crying as Rona recounted constant abuse and humiliation.
“She did say that he beat her up, the husband beat her up … he was pulling her hair,” Vorgetts testified. Rona also complained of being kicked by Shafia.
“She said that her husband and her husband’s wife were abusive towards her and she needs help, what to do, where to go,” Vorgetts told jurors. “She did not have any information, knowledge about what to do in this country.”
Vorgetts said she urged her to go to a shelter, a church or to police, but Rona told her she was too afraid to leave and was warned by Shafia that he’d make sure she was shipped back to Afghanistan if she went to authorities. Vorgetts testified that Shafia held all of Rona’s identity documents, including her passport, so Rona believed she could not flee to another country, where she had relatives.
“She said that her husband’s wife would mock her, put her down in front of the family’s guests,” she testified. Rona told Vorgetts that Yahya told Rona, “you are a slave, you are a servant.”
The psychological tyranny was profound, however. And for what? As Crown attorney Laurie Lacelle said in her closing submissions, the girls pined only to be more like their friends, their purported infractions “so trivial and so inoffensive to Canadian values.”
It was the perceived sexual transgressions of Zainab and Sahar that provoked their father, as is clear from the wiretaps, and which therefore reflected badly on the family’s reputation. Girls “in the arms of boys.” A daughter who fled to a woman’s shelter and was therefore beyond the tentacles — if only for two weeks — of family surveillance. Their “sexual integrity” had been compromised. In the Shafia household — like countless others, of families that have immigrated to Canada from deeply conservative countries in Central Asia, the Middle East, the Horn of Africa, the subcontinent — the concept of “dating” doesn’t exist; it’s 0 to 60 in a nanosecond, a twinge of attraction to betrothal.
Under the sharia, perceived sexual indiscretion is grounds for honor killing.
If there’s anything that should be learned from this trial, any warning we should heed, it’s to be alert, as a society, to the secret lives of girls in gilded cages, ethnic daughters held hostage in their own homes by chauvinism and misogyny. Sadly, that is not uncommon.
Sadly, Ms. DiManno, you have not learned this very thing. This entire article is a pathetic attempt to whitewash the motive of this mass honor killing paving the way for more of these murders.
Shafia’s condemnations of dead daughters reveal a man with no-off switch for his temper, someone at least capable of so diabolical a crime. Mother was an accomplice to the bondage and ostracizing of her girls. Hamed, who never testified and says little on the intercepts, remains a cipher.
They left the Stone Age behind 15 years before the bodies of Zainab, Sahar, Geeti and Rona were discovered in a Nissan submerged in the Rideau Canal. But they brought their wretched moral absolutism to Canada with them.
Whether murder was committed or not, that is the psychopathy of the Shafia trinity: Mother, father and son.
Here is what Ms. DiManno does not get. They left the Stone Age behind but they did not leave Islam behind.
Look at these faces. How many girls have to die?
position. They did not, in fact, run both sides. They ran a weak ad that essentially depicted Israelis saying, Please be our friend. Please don't hurt us. This ad was based on a false premise and was as offensive to me as was the anti-Israel ad they also ran, which called for ending U.S. support for Israel. The anti-Israel ad blames Israel, its military, and U.S. military aid to Israel as causes of Palestinian terror directed against innocent civilians in Israel and abroad. That is a deeply offensive position to any lover of freedom.
Devout Muslims murder Jewish children and babies in their sleep, simply because they are Jewish. Forgive me for publishing these pictures, but we live in the modern age of the barbarian -- and the media, the political elites and the chattering class scrub, and in some cases glamorize, the savagery of these bloodthirsty anti-humans. One can only imagine the 
