Moral Equivalence

This is a bit of old news in the sense that the act on which this article is based, the strangulation of a 16 year old girl in Canada by her father for her refusal to comply with Islamic customs, occurred last week; however, the continued acts of similar violence and moral equivalence continue.

Several Canadian Islamic groups have had the decency to deplore the slaying, which seems to have been carried out with the collusion of Aqsa’s brothers. Yet in an exquisite demonstration of moral equivalence, Shahina Siddiqui, the Canadian-based executive director of the Islamic Social Services Association of the United States and Canada, said:

“The strangulation death of Ms. Parvez was the result of domestic violence, a problem that cuts across Canadian society and is blind to color or creed.”

Oh, no, it doesn’t, Ms. Siddiqui, not this type of domestic violence, nor this particular crime: This was Shariah-based justice meted out to a Muslim girl for defying her fundamentalist father.

In Islamic culture, honor resides in the male, and a woman’s honor is relevant only to the degree that it reflects back on her masculine custodians. A man who can’t control his daughter has been shamed, so the thinking goes. Better her death than his dishonor.

This certainly is not a world view that “cuts across Canadian society,” and it sure isn’t “blind to color or creed.” It is the world view of a distinct and dangerous minority of strict Muslims who have settled in the modern, multicultural, liberal-minded West, but who demand that their children adhere to the medieval social code of their Islamic home countries.

What makes these people dangerous is the increasing insistence that Western societies accommodate their fastidiousness, rather than they themselves adapting to Western ways.

Ms. Siddiqui's efforts to suggest this behavior is not cultural are typical and appalling at the same time. CAIR would have immediately turned it into an argument about Islamophobia and blamed the act of violence on "western intolerance of the Muslim culture."

The US seems adept at calling a spade a spade, but Europe has caved in almost completely to Muslim demands that the Europeans assimilate to Muslim culture rather than the opposite. It's frightening.

I'm sure there are those who would point to my thinking as Islamophobic; call it what you like. But I have no desire to live under Sharia law. The only reason I have confidence that it won't happen is that sufficient numbers of Americans aren't willing to toss the American culture aside for any immigrant group.