Honor Killings As Canadian As Maple Syrup

We’ve had quite a week of honor killing news in Canada. Three teenage girls and an older woman were dumped into the Rideau Canal by the father, mother and brother of the three girls. The story is being investigated as honor killings (although I say that it is a done deal).

Another story recounts the death by drowning of a Kingston, Ontario girl and her mother. The sister, who was also found in the pool, remains in critical condition. The news report says that none of the three knew how to swim. And all three have Muslim names.

More news from Cnews:

A psychiatry professor at Newfoundland's Memorial University who has studied so-called honour killings said he is working with Justice Canada to define the term in the hopes that it will be included in the Criminal Code.

"The legal system in Canada was not familiar up to now about the context of honour killing and now cases are coming up," said Dr. Amin Muhammad, who estimated it has surfaced in about a dozen cases in Canada.

When I read the initial sentence of this report, I thought the psychiatry professor was just your run-of-the mill Scots-Irish Canadian. But, it turns out that he is Muslim (at least by family background).

Here’s what Dr. Muhammad has to say about honor killings:

We have found psychopathic traits in people who are perpetrating [honor killings]. You know that mental illness is a taboo, a stigma, here also; people from that part of the world, they don't approach a mental health specialist.

So, the problem is not an Islam problem, by a psychiatric one. And the solution is partly to treat the honor killing as a medical problem. But Dr. Muhammad is more realistic than that and also wants it included in the Criminal Code.

Bear with me in the direction of my thoughts.

Here is what Tarek Fatah, the moderate Muslim of Canada, has to say in his provocatively titled article: "How to cure the honour killings ‘cancer’:

Not until the leadership of the Muslim clergy takes steps to end gender apartheid and misogyny will they be taken seriously when they say, "honour killing" is not permitted by Islam...

Not until Muslim clerics and imams seriously abandon their notion about women being the possession of men will we begin to address the cancer of honour killings, which take more than 5,000 lives in South Asia and the Middle East alone.

So, we have two prominent Muslim voices who say that honor killings have nothing to do with Islam per se.

Muhammed says that it is a psychiatric problem that should be treated both psychologically, and as a crime. And Fatah lays the blame on misogynistic Muslim clerics.

In fact, it has become a Canadian problem, worthy of amendments to Canadian laws. This is the proposition Muhammed makes.

None dares stress the fact that this problem almost exclusively occurs in the Muslim population. And if real policies were to be made, we would be reducing the number of Muslims coming into this country, who are perpetrating such alien crimes, and trying to reduce the ones who are already here.

In the name of an alien religion, with a population that is just under 2% of the population, we are being subjected with recommendations to change the laws of this country to accommodate them.

Such is the strength of Islam.