DiManno's Dangerous Dhimmitude

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.

• "'I would do it again 100 times"
• "May the devil shit on their graves. Is that what a daughter should be? Would a daughter be such a whore?" 
• "God's curse on them for generations.  ... They betrayed Islam."said Mohammad Shafia, who honor killed his three daughters and secret first wife.

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?

Please, join us at the first annual  AFDI/SIOA  Jessica Mokdad Human Rights Conference on Honor Killings...

Comments

[Clit Beastwood]

DiManno is a hack of the first order!

Some time ago we had a fire here in Toronto and the residents were all put out of the building at 200 Wellesley. During the cleanup of the building all manner of interesting things were being found in the apartments. Now, you have to know that this was a welfare building. Anyway, a friend of mine had a source that was working on site that was telling him that not only did they have undocumented illegals working as the clean-up crews but that they were finding all kinds of things like large sums of cash, widescreen lcd tvs, drugs and even firearms. DiManno had been writing stories about the fire etc so he thought it would make a good story about all the interesting things that were being found in a bloody welfare building. Long story short, she completely blew him off and not in a particularly nice way, basically insinuating that he was a racist.She refused to look into it and basically told him he had no proof even though he told here exactly where to go and who to speak to. A couple of weeks after this, the story broke in another paper, that the clean-up people had found an assault rifle in one of the apartments.I wonder how stupid DiManno felt?

[Frank]

"The intellectual dishonesty and dhimmitude of Toronto Star writer, Rosie DiManno, is particularly galling."-Pamela

This kind of intellectual dishonesty was routine during the Cold War. Alexander Solzhenitsyn and other Soviet dissidents were astonished at the number of "useful idiots" (Lenin's term) in the West who were ready to hide the truth re the real Soviet Union. Many apologists for Communism then are now seen as criminal in their intellectual dishonesty.

What motivates Western apologists to hide the truth re real Islam's permissions to "honor killings"? It's unfathomable.

Sylvia Nasar in her book Grand Pursuit (page 396), notes of the apologists for the USSR that it "....now (2011) seems unfathomable: how some of the brightest and best were willing to serve as spies, agents of influence, and apologists for a foreign regime and why most, apparently had no regrets. They did what they did for the sake of "mankind."

A writer from a future generation will say much the same of people such as Rosie DiManno.

[Lucky12Duck]

What will it take for the U.S.A to wake up!

[Frank]

Pamela-

You must keep in mind that many of the DiManno types have been indoctrinated to think "truth is relative." (They have also been indoctrinated re visual diversity, which rationalizes suppressing real diversity: diversity of thought.)

You look at 1 + 1 = 2 and say truth is not relative: Islam's dogmas are the basis of "honor killings" and jihad. People such as DiManno deny objective fact.

In the long term, arguing the facts will make such people eventually face reality, but it will also cause them hate you for making them face reality.
Remember Solzhenitsyn was attacked by many Soviet apologists in the West as either lying or exaggerating re the gulags. Today, the people who attacked Solzhenitsyn are either still silent or dead to reality, the truth.

People such as DiManno will never admit the truth re real Islam.

[Eli]

Torstar = Leftwing shilling papper in Canada. That's all that needs to be said. Well actually more needs to be said. It exists just like the globe and mail does to reinforce the bubble of people living in major metro centres like Ottawa, Toronto, Vancouver that "all is well, go back to sleep" so the chances of the Torstar ever printing something even close to being related to the truth? Is about the same as CAIR spontaneously catching fire from their own words.

[Mackie]

What stands out continuously throughout DiManno's article is the dismissal of Islam as being a culpable contributor to these horrific honor killings.

If she could have just once addressed Islamic teachings as the guide for these murders then one might be able to accept most of her article. Yes it is true that there is no specific condoning of honor killings in the Quran. But Islam offers no refuge for women from this practice that pre dates Islam among Arab tribes. The hadiths, depending which ones you follow treat women as lesser beings which clearly invites these tribal actions against women, less we forget Surah 4:34. The treatment of women in the Quran and defining Islamic men as being closer to Allah is clearly an enabler of these honor murders of which an estimated 5,000 occur yearly. This has allowed clerics and Imans to openly interpret the teachings in the Islamic trilogy as allowing for these horrific actions.

You would think that for someone who says she has traveled to Afghanistan 9 times that she would have taken the time to understand where honor killing comes from instead of beating around the bush and insisting that what the Shafia's did was an anomaly or an aberration to Islamic teachings.

[alyn21]

Rosie Dimanno has been infected by the leftwing bias of the Toronto Star.
I suspect deep down that she is alot smarter then some of her columns would seem to indicate, but I guess in order to keep her bosses happy she needs to play the game of useful idiocy at least some of the time.
While I don't read the Star very often I have seen once in a while that she can actually write a column that makes sense.
Unfortunately in this instance that clearly has not happened.

[Lenin-McCarthy]

CBC News also sympathies with the Shafias. They are posting more reports from the defense team, they will not let readers comment on their articles. Right now the jury is in deliberation. I would not be surprised if a "not guilty" verdict or a lesser charge such as manslaughter is read. If this is going to be the case the message will be that muslims can get away with murder in Canada.

[Asha]

Rosie is a nutcase with severe cognitive dissonance: useful leftist idiot for Islamist sharia agenda proposed by her evil Toronto Star colleauges, especially Haroon Siddiqui, who lies constantly, openly supports Arab Spring and Muslim Brotherhood and whitewashes Jews and Hindu's stolen history.
As a Toronto resident, I read Sun Instead. Star is as bad as NY times.

[Debi Brand]

In brief, these killings were, in Quranic terms, not so much "honor killings," but simply obeying Allah, and his Messenger and those in authority.

If I were a Muslim, and, in commenting here spoke candidly, I would argue this taking of life falls right in line with what in the Qur'an and the Sunnah of the Prophet is clearly termed honorable, admirable, thus exemplary total and complete obedience to Allah and His Messenger.

If I were to speak as a Muslim, and do so honestly here, I would argue, ultimate sovereignty belongs to Allah and he alone—unless Allah entrust that authority to one he deems worthy of that trust.

None better for that, of course, then the Messenger of Allah. Thus, when one elects to disregard the verdict of that Messenger the order for those that reject such, the Quran and the Sunnah clearly spell out.

The rejection of the Prophet’s verdict is secondary to the disease of hypocrisy in the hearts of the hypocrites. Thus, the order of Allah and the actions that the Messenger of Allah ordered, approved of, and praised are categorically in line with what the “sacred texts” spell out herein--and in numerous other Islamic sources, precedents and parallels; eliminating any ambiguity of just what message one deduces from the Qur’an and the Sunnah:

From Surah Al Ahzab; ayat 59 – 62:

"If the hypocrites and those having a malady in their hearts … do not stop (their evil deeds [in this instance, Muslim woman refusing the use of the Hijab--full covering]), We will certainly stir you (the truly obedient to Allah) up against them … Wherever they are found, they shall be seized, and shall be killed thoroughly,--a consistent practice of Allah …. And you will never find a change in Allah’s consistent pattern.”

This is Islam, plain and in practice.

Indeed, celebrate your new local mosque—along with those we build, restore, or aid in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere.

This is Islam.