Hmmm..I notice that the part where the lady said that as far as she, an insider knows, that the issue was not about the hijab..has been mentioned on ONE post only...interesting. So, now the same country that tries to hold the press to a certain standard stays quiet? Oy ve.
Truth be told...most times when kids go to school, the stories they tell about parents are to be taken with a grain of salt. I complained about my mom to my friends...and I am sure my kids probably say the same about me on occasion.
As a matter of fact, and I chose to do NOTHING about it, one time a Jewish counsellor happened to write a report about me...about how anti semitic I was etc. NOT KNOWING WHO I WAS. AND SUpposedly based on my child's report. JUST about everyone who knows me accuses me of being TOO JUDEOPHILE....my point...we ought as adults and thinking people to know how big a quantity of salt we have to put on those stories...

Free press in the US and Canada are not as free as they would like the public to believe. Especially in the US. The worse defender is FoxNews, followed by CNN.

Back in 2001 or 2002, CNN was doing a piece where they had this guy from the Boston Globe who was pleading with the public to accept that CNN was fair in their newscast. Carol Lin from CNN was the anchor for that show. At some point, the Boston Globe apparently forgot his role and strayed to where he begun to say that we must remember that the Palestinians were also Christian. Carol Lin abruptly cut him off with; "I am sorry but we have to go" And Carol Lin is oriental to start with. The media here is content with the majority public believing that it is only Muslims and not Christians also who are abused by the Israelis.

Fair reporting is not as fair as you may think.

Like Krishna ain't drink laxatives today?

Family tragedy no time for cultural warfare



Dec 16, 2007 04:30 AM
Haroon Siddiqui

No sooner had the news of the Aqsa Parvez murder filtered out than cultural warfare broke out.

Some said the killing proved the backwardness of Muslims, indeed Islam, that retrograde and violent religion which subjugates women.

Quebecers complaining about the wretchedness of the hijab were right, after all: "These people" do not share "our" values.

Others said that the isolated incident was a family tragedy, an intergenerational feud gone horribly wrong, leaving a 16-year-old dead and her father charged with murder. No religion teaches dads to kill their daughters.

The media – forever entangled in clichés about immigrants, especially Muslims – seemed incapable of rising above mob mentality.

Left unexplored were the issues most pertinent to public policy. What measures can be implemented to help avoid a recurrence? If the hijab is indeed a matter of great public import, what should the government's response be?

Violence against women knows no bounds of race, religion, culture or class.

The Parvez murder was also a clash of immigrants' old country cultural/religious values versus their children's evolving ones in Canada.

That has been so throughout our history and will be in the future.

Intergenerational clashes, too, transcend race, religion and ethnicity, notes Vivian Rakoff, former director of the Clarke Institute of Psychiatry, and an eminent author.

"It's the story of almost every single immigrant group adhering to the strict values of their past or indeed their present. I've heard this from Greek families, Italian families where the daughter wants to go and be with friends on the Yonge St. strip and the father calls her a ***** and kicks her out and she gets beaten up."

The Parvez case parallels one in British Columbia, where a Sikh was convicted two years ago of killing his daughter for pursuing an interracial relationship.

The law will take its course in the Mississauga case as well.

The murder comes at a time when the hijab is "suddenly freighted with immense political significance," in the words of Charles Taylor, co-chair of the Quebec commission on reasonable accommodation. In an article written before the hearings, the eminent Montreal philosopher attributed the phenomenon to the rise of "block thinking" about Muslims in the post-9/11 era.

All Muslims are seen as one, global events are conflated with local and the hijab is deemed part of "an ominous `hidden agenda.' That agenda is `Islam,' which many imagine to include all the terrible things that we read about" – stoning, honour killings, suicide bombings, etc.

"It is virtually impossible to talk about head scarves as an issue in its own right. All the sociological evidence about the girls' motives, which are very varied, is swept aside as irrelevant. All that matters is the threat posed by Islam."

Muslims have different opinions on the hijab, like people of any faith about some part of their theology. A majority of the world's 600 million Muslim women do not wear one. Clearly, the right to wear a hijab includes the right not to.

There has been a rise in its use, including among those born or raised in Europe and North America. Arguments in Muslim homes are not confined to parental pressures to wear one; in many cases, it's the reverse, with the girls donning the hijab when their mothers don't.

For some women, a scarf has a cultural, not religious, connotation.

All this is lost in "block thinking."

Taylor could never have known that many of the hysterical witnesses parading in front of him would prove him right.

The role of the state cannot be anything but neutral.

It cannot take sides between mullahs who decree the hijab and secular mullahs who decree otherwise, both wanting to dictate to the Muslim woman and granting her no individual sovereignty. The state cannot intervene any more than it could in cases of the Sikh turban or the Jewish yarmulke, except when coercion crosses the line of the law.

The need of the hour is to comfort Aqsa's mother and seven siblings. The public policy imperative is for education, counselling and support services for gender equity and domestic violence, and also for an early warning system to avert such horrors.

It's certainly no time to be scoring points in cultural warfare, the antithesis of the common good.

Haroon Siddiqui, the Star's editorial page editor emeritus, appears Thursday in World & Comment and Sunday in the A section. hsiddiq@thestar.ca

quote:

Originally posted by Chief:
Like Krishna ain't drink laxatives today?

Translation: He na talk sh1t:):)

quote:

Originally posted by Abu Jihad:

quote:

Originally posted by Chief:
Like Krishna ain't drink laxatives today?

Translation: He na talk sh1t:):)

and i guess you guys are they ones who are enlightened!!

Haroon Saddiqui said NOTHING in that article. Just a waste of a half page.

quote:

Originally posted by ksazma:
Haroon Saddiqui said NOTHING in that article. Just a waste of a half page.

"The Parvez case parallels one in British Columbia, where a Sikh was convicted two years ago of killing his daughter for pursuing an interracial relationship."

The man saying the sister had a black man?

quote:

Originally posted by Terry Ishmael:
"The Parvez case parallels one in British Columbia, where a Sikh was convicted two years ago of killing his daughter for pursuing an interracial relationship."

The man saying the sister had a black man?

Notice how he had no trouble identifying the religion of the case in BC?