Dropping Context

[Gus Van Horn blog]

By Gus Van Horn from Gus Van Horn,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Robert Spencer opens a column about an "honor" killing in Canada at FrontPage Magazine by documenting several superhuman feats of context-dropping:

Aqsa Parvez was sixteen years old; her father has been charged with strangling her to death because she refused to wear the hijab. Shahina Siddiqui, president of the Islamic Social Services Association, declared: "The strangulation death of Ms. Parvez was the result of domestic violence, a problem that cuts across Canadian society and is blind to colour or creed." Sheikh Alaa El-Sayyed, imam of the Islamic Society of North America in Mississauga, Ontario, agreed: "The bottom line is, it's a domestic violence issue." Nor was this denial limited only to Muslims. Lorne Gunter said in the Edmonton Journal: "I see nothing uniquely Muslim in her death. If, indeed, her father killed her, her death is his doing, not Islam's." [bold added, links omitted]

All of these people are correct that this was a case of domestic violence, but wrong to imply that identifying it as such closes the case. This is a homicide and an important part of solving such a case involves identifying any possible motives of the killer. That Islam might be important here is so obvious that the three commentators here could not possibly be missing the point by accident.

Robert Spencer understands this, and lays out how Islam predisposed this young woman's father to kill her. But he also understands what it means that so many seem -- fellow Moslem to the father, and leftist alike -- so content to hang him while ignoring crucial evidence.

[T]hink for a minute about what Muslim spokesmen in Canada could be saying. They could acknowledge that the divine sanction given to the beating of disobedient women by Qur'an 4:34 has created a culture in which such abuse is accepted as normal. They could call for a searching reevaluation of the meaning and continued relevance of that verse and other traditional material that reinforces it, and call in no uncertain terms for Muslims to reject definitively its literal meaning, now and for all time to come. They could acknowledge the prevalence of honor killing in Islamic culture, which has no sanction as such in Islamic theology but nonetheless enjoys enough Islamic approval that the Jordanian Parliament a few years ago rejected on Islamic grounds attempts to stiffen penalties for it. They could call for sweeping reform and reexamination of the status of women in Islam.

For any of this to happen, Muslim leaders in Canada would have to adopt an unfamiliar and uncharacteristic stance of self-criticism, and Canadian leaders would have to abandon their ongoing infatuation with multiculturalism. [link omitted, bold added]

Ideas cannot kill unless acted upon, but in the sense that they can guide actions, one can liken them to parties to a murder, and see that as possible motives, they can, in a sense, go on trial. To see a bunch of Moslems and multiculturalists so eager to comply with Western law is rather odd -- until one realizes that by doing so, they hope to stop the investigation of a murder before it becomes apparent that in the sense I just indicated, Islam is one of the killers, and multiculturalism an accomplice.

To refuse to demand a full explanation of the father's motives here is not merely unjust. It is to sanction the murder of this girl by letting evil ideas go unevaluated by others who hold them and may later act upon them.

-- CAV

http://ObjectivismOnline.com/archives/003105.html