White guilt has terrible consequences. This was made profoundly clear in Canada during the three month trial of Mohammad Shafia, his wife Tooba Yahya and their son Hamed. They were convicted a week ago of the first-degree murder of Zainab (19), Sahar (17) and Geeti Shafia (13), and 50-year-old Rona Amir. The three teens were Mohammad Shafia and Tooba Yahya’s daughters, Hamed’s sisters. Rona was Mohammad Shafia’s first wife. The four women had been drowned in their car in June, 2009. The killers had chosen a canal in Kingston — a university town half-way between Toronto and Montreal — because they assumed that the local police would be less sophisticated and able than those in a larger city. They had also researched murder techniques on the internet, and planned this honour killing long in advance.
The case has naturally shocked the country, but is in fact only the most recent of a dozen murders in the last twelve years, most involving Muslim patriarchs aided by sons, cousins, and wives,
killing young girls who wanted to be horribly western by wearing nice clothes, dating nice boys, doing nice things. In the Shafia episode, the three daughters had refused to wear the burka, and one
of them had even dared to wear a bikini. Rona Amir had been unable to give her husband children, so he had taken a second wife, even though polygamy is illegal in Canada. Although not the
girls’ biological mother, Rona had loved them and tried to protect them. She had to die too.
Which brings us to the greater point here, with more long-term consequences than this single repugnant case. The authorities — be they police, politicians, social workers, media — are
obsessed with appearing to be progressive and non-judgmental where Islam is concerned; partly out of a fear of being accused of Islamophobia, but also because they genuinely believe that the white,
Christian West has more to learn from Islam than the contrary. The Shafia girls had pleaded with their teachers for help, and while front line social workers acknowledged that the situation was
potentially disastrous, the concerns evaporated as soon as they reached middle management. So Mohammad Shafia — who had written of his daughters, ‘may the devil shit on their
graves’ — was effectively permitted to commit mass murder.
Even now, commentators are embarrassingly, cringingly reluctant to link the crime in any way with Islam. Moments after the verdict was announced, the lead detective in the case told the public that
‘domestic violence is a terrible thing’. It is — but this wasn’t domestic violence. It was yet another example of a psychosis that has its epicentre in Pakistan, but extends
to most parts of the Islamic heartland, and many in the Muslim diaspora. It’s a self-evident truth that not all Muslims behave so brutally, but it’s also undeniable that Islam teaches
that a woman is the property of a father, then a husband. Most fathers and husbands are kind, but if they are not they are empowered by Koranic teaching and the prism of Sharia law to behave pretty
much as they like. Quite simply, honour killing is not considered a crime in much of the Islamic world.
While it’s true that honour killings are not exclusively Muslim, Islam is the only faith that boasts textual defence and sacred justification for such grotesque acts. When 16-year-old Aqsa
Parvez was murdered in Canada in a 2007 honour killing by her Pakistani father and brother, CAIR Canada — an oft-quoted and worryingly influential Islamic group — told the gullible
that, ‘It's important not to generalise. There are cases of violence across all faiths and all cultures’. That was rubbish; but worse than Muslim extremists hiding the truth are
non-Muslims embracing lies without question. We saw this during the Parisian riots, when mobs of overwhelmingly Muslim youths beat and torched their way through the city, often screaming
‘Allahu Akbar’. Yet they were almost never described as being Muslim by the media. So different from when the Norwegian killer Anders Behring Breivik, a freemason who wrote that he had
no relationship with God and had not attended a church in fifteen years, was repeatedly defined as a ‘Christian fundamentalist’ on international television.
Similarly with gangs of young Asian men in England who groom women to be sexual commodities. The fact that they are invariably Muslim suddenly becomes irrelevant to journalists who otherwise assume
every background detail to be essential to a good news report. In the United States, President Obama played this game of obscene hide-and-seek when he dealt with Major Nidal Malik Hasan, the US
Army psychiatrist who killed 13 colleagues and wounded dozens more. Even though Hasan identified himself as a Muslim radical and told friends that it was the duty of a Muslim to wage war against
the US Army, Obama refused to refer to the man’s religion.
He has gone further. Under the current administration, and to a degree even under his predecessor, moderate Muslims have been marginalised and almost excluded from the political establishment and
halls of power. It’s the racism of lowered expectations. Fundamentalist organisations have convinced white liberals that only activists with beards or burkas are genuine Muslims, and to think
otherwise is colonial and patronising.
It leaves us in a situation where will be more honour killings, and more Shafia girls murdered merely for being who they are. The killers can be dealt with, but not their politically correct
enablers. There’s something terribly unjust about that.
Michael Coren is host of The Arena, a nightly current affairs show on Canada’s Sun News TV.