Honor killings in Canada?

A few years ago, I would not have believed it possible that women could be murdered by their families.  I didn’t know that honor killings happened and I would have been shocked to hear that they occured in Canada.

I know better now.  In 2007, Aqsa Parvez was killed by her father because she wouldn’t wear the hijab.  She wanted to be an average Canadian girl.

Now, in the span of just a few weeks, SEVEN Muslim women have died in what Mark Steyn calls “watery graves.”

Three teenaged sisters and their “cousin” (who was actually their father’s first wife) were found in a submerged car in the Rideau Canal.  Their father claimed that one of the teens was driving without a license.  He was lying.  “Mohammad Shafia, 56, his wife Tooba Mohammad Yahya, 39, and their eldest son, Hamed Shafia, 18, all face first-degree murder charges in the deaths.“

The other three deaths were a mother and two young daughters who died after drowning in a hotel pool.  Not much information is available but they were Muslim and the incident is suspicious.  It’s wait and see but let’s just say that I won’t be at all surprised to learn that the deaths weren’t accidental.

There have been other honor killings in Canada and one sociologist, Aysan Sev’er, states the obvious:

Canada cannot overlook the motivation for these “heinous crimes.”"In Canada, we have been extremely culturally sensitive, and that’s a good thing,” she says. “But in this particular case, we may have pushed the pendulum a little to the other side, in the sense that there are cultural components in these types of crimes which we cannot ignore.”

See Kathy Shaidle‘s post for more.