PrintDecember 13, 2007
What if Aqsa Parvez was strangled with her own hijab?
It seems everyone but the Mainstream Media is talking about the 16-year-old Canadian girl whose father strangled her for refusing to wear the traditional Muslim head scarf. Of course, with friends reporting that Aqsa Parvez often conveyed deep fear of her father and brother's violent reactions to her hijab removal, Muslim PR groups are working extra hard to paint a very different, a very secular picture.
By all accounts, Aqsa was a typical new-world teenaged girl - more concerned with music, dancing, makeup, boys and, yes, buying clothes than old-world customs. But her family's disdain for her cultural assimilation ultimately forced her to leave home last week for the safety of a friend's house.
Braving a trip home Monday to collect her belongings, the fear she confided to friend Dominiquia Holmes-Thompson that something "could happen" materialized in the shape of her father. Hours later, Muhammad Parvez called 911 to announce he had killed his daughter, whom police later found lying unconscious on her bedroom floor. When the girl died shortly thereafter, her father was charged with for murder
As news spread, the Islamic spin machine quickly switched to rinse cycle in order to allay concerns that the Muslim tradition of "honor killings," prevalent in some unassimilated European communities, had migrated to supposedly-homogeneous North America
Mohamed Elmasry of the Canadian Islamic Congress urged restraint:
"I don't want the public to think that this is really an Islamic issue or an immigrant issue. It is a teenager issue.''
And Atiya Ahsan of the Canadian Council of Muslim Women strived to decouple the hijab connection altogether, meanwhile trivializing Aqsa's death:
"Teenagers have for centuries been doing battle with their parents over a multitude of different issues, so to make differing views about the hijab a central issue of conflict is a mistake."
Bull.
Krista Garbutt recalls her friend's abject fear of being spotted by a family member without her head scarf on:
"There were times when we'd be walking down the street and she'd see her brother and she wouldn't be wearing her hijab and she'd have to put it on. She said, 'He'll kill me, he'll kill me.' I said, 'He's not going to kill you,' but she said, 'Yeah, he will.' And nobody believed it."
Of course, she may have just been "Islamophobic." What, Muslims can't be Islamophobes? Think about it.
And ponder this -- while police sources have confirmed that she was strangled, spokesman Constable J.P. Valade refused to give any further details about the teenager's killing.
Is mine the only PC Bravo Sierra alarm shrieking here?
Color me cynical, but I can't help thinking this nut-job asphyxiated his daughter with her own hijab when attempts to force it around her resisting head failed.
Now, should time prove me right, all dispute over the hijab connection will surely cease. But stay tuned -- with the Sharia denial card played and trumped, the next shuffle will undoubtedly be the assertion that, far from avenging a perceived disgrace upon his family, Parvez had merely succumbed to frustrated rage against a recalcitrant child.
And, hey, there's nothing Islamic or medieval about that, is there?
