Attempting to excuse the inexcusable

Nick Packwood writes on the recent "honour slaying" in Toronto:

A father who murders his daughter with the connivance of other family members may justify his acts as the defense of the family's honour in upholding traditions and — grotesquely — of acting morally. I imagine the experience is one of horror as his daughter transforms into something non-human that he must kill if he is to defend his own authority. I can only pray that men who do this have some love of their own children and some horror at themselves for what they do; I am not convinced this is the case.

But this is only to consider such murders as individual tragedies and at the level of "the family", the primary social unit in the minds of many religious fundamentalists. At a wider level, such acts serve to terrorize society as a whole and as a warning to other girls lest they consider disobeying familial authority. Young Muslim girls are taught from the day they are born that women have a particular place in the world and must yield to familial authority or bring down upon themselves the wrath of God and an unforgiving, homicidal malice from those closest to them in all the world.

This is true not only for medieval backwaters without the law in the "tribal areas" of north-western Pakistan or ten minute's drive beyond the Kabul city limits. This is true of suburban Toronto with its shopping malls and multi-lane highways and CNN; its parliamentary democracy, Charter of Rights and Freedoms and countless titled faculty at women's studies and sociology departments. What lesson can Muslim girls take from this but that tribal law applies to them here as surely as it is does for hundreds of millions of other girls around the world? Their own fathers will not protect them; their fathers may be their murderers. Worse yet, their friends, their teachers and a small army of police will not anticipate such crimes, perhaps because none can imagine a father strangling his own daughter to death over a supposed religious edict.

Nick is quite correct. Locally, after the shock of the act wears off, it will continue to work as a compelling argument to every Canadian Muslim girl that despite living in a Western society, the tribe still has the final say over her fate. It will encourage submission to standards and mores of societies where women are considered little more than property . . . to be disposed of at the whim of the "owner" — their fathers, brothers, or even sons — with no hope of achieving self-ownership.

If you don't think this is utterly wrong, there is something seriously wrong with your world.

Update: Damian Penny has more.