Aqsa Parvez memorial to be built in both Canada and Israel

Pamela Geller reports that since the Aqsa Parvez memorial in the Town of Pelham, Ontario, is being erected largely through donated work and materials, the fund Pamela has raised for an Aqsa memorial will be used to plant a grove of trees at the American Independence Park in Jerusalem.

In the second post linked above, Pamela includes a comment from Pelham Fire Chief, Scott McLeod who took the initiative in getting his town to build an Aqsa Parvez memorial, in face of the predictable PC onslaught about "Islamophobia". I think it's worth reproducing McLeod's comment as it shows us what it means for someone to take the initiative and personal risk in renewing our shared public culture, renewing our necessary sense of courage and honour, through a process of measuring, judging, recognizing, and giving names to, our shared reality in ways that illuminate the imperatives we might all need to recognize:

NOT HONOR KILLINGS

I have been giving a lot of thought to the events leading up to and the final resolution of the Aqsa Parvez memorial. I truly believe we need to rethink our comments regarding this and many other similar events.

In my opinion the term honor killing is not appropriate for these tragedies. The reality is they are narcissistic/shame killings and should be referred to as such.

More importantly the conduct of many organizations and individuals after the event certainly does not meet the term honor in any respect. The members of the family, academic organizations, and many others should also hang their head in shame over their conduct.

I have been fortunate that for most of my adult life I have worked with people who understand what honor really is. During my time in the military and my career as a firefighter I have seen on a daily basis, citizens and people in uniform performing honorably.

Honor, is the Soldier who gives up his life for a higher purpose, in defense of citizens of Afghanistan or Iraq. They are there, knowing that when they leave, some small bit of freedom which we hold dear is being left behind.

Honor is the Police Officer who goes to work every day knowing that he may not return to his family, when daily dealing with some of the worst elements of our society. While giving respect and in fact life to the most downtrodden.

Honor is the Paramedic who lay in a pool of gasoline trying to keep a survivor of a car accident alive, long enough to get to a hospital.

Honor is the firefighter who crawls through hell to bring a victim of a fire out of a building.

Honor is the residents of Pelham who have little tolerance for people who are afraid to act as they should, with respect for children like Aqsa.

I have been lucky enough to work with people like this and the truth is, we are surrounded by these heroes every day. If you look around yourself you will see honor and honorable acts.

What happened to Aqsa, was not and never should be considered in any way related to honor. It is shame and narcissism which caused this incident, the narcissism of her father who would not allow a child to become an ordinary teen of her country.

My friend Neo has a posting on his blog in which he describes the event as “Dying to become Canadian”, I can’t really state it any better than that.

The real heroes and the persons of honor in this incident are the Aqsa, who died for her beliefs, Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer who created the fund in her memory.

In addition my friend Norman, a fellow firefighter, who worked so hard to make this happen and was confronted with PC madness. I have to thank my personal heroes, Councilor Sharon Cook and John Durley who ensured that the memorial would be created.

I am not articulate enough to tell the story of the honor and shame of this horrible event, but I know what honor looks like, I truly believe it’s easy to see who carries the shame, and who acts with honor

Scott McLeod
Fire Chief, Town of Pelham

Of course, whether we call them shame or honour killings, we can recognize the paradoxical state of being in which a man does something horribly shameful in what he thinks is an act of protecting his and his family's honour, as his mind oscillates back and forth between attention to some pre-figured understanding of honour - perhaps some ritualized orthopraxy, perhaps less formal habits of mind - and a present and conflicting reality towards which he feels shame.

Can ritual- or habit-bound men learn how shameful will be their acting out violently on behalf of pre-figured notions of honour from the tribal past that Canadians who recognize individual freedom cannot respect? Maybe it depends on the rest of us. While recognizing the fundamental paradoxes of being human, while recognizing that there is always more than one imperative in play as our minds race between pre-figured notions and present realities, we need all act in the here and now by modeling and, at least for a time, choosing a truth (e.g. in respect to Aqsa Parvez's story), and acting on the imperatives this truth will ask us to honour, that we may govern ourselves in respect for the inescapable and unrenounceable freedom that comes with being Canadian. When we put memory of Aqsa Parvez at the front of our minds, we should reflect not only on who or what is implicated in the guilt of the murder, but also rework our own understanding of what it means to choose honourable actions.



And that is why the memorials are such a powerful idea, and why it is a shame that the guilt-ridden multicultural relativism of Toronto's (not Pelham's) public life has not allowed itself to embrace more roundly the idea of building an Aqsa Parvez memorial. Arguing whether Islam, properly understood, does or does not give license to kill your rebellious, possibly apostate, daughter, or whether the problem is that Islam simply inculcates some less specific honour/shame mentality that does not adequately prepare its members for living in the complex modern world of free persons, is not going to get us to the point where we can renew or build up our shared reality as we move beyond guilt: the question is how well are we prepared for acting honourably in the here and now as we argue over the need to transcend a certain multiculturalism's attempt to re-ritualize some fixed honour/shame code for governing interactions, and muting criticisms, among duly-sanctioned opinions and identity groups.

In answering that question, we cannot talk seriously of honour and shame unless we make reference not simply to abstract philosophical or religious formulae but to specific events and persons of our times, the confounding events and free people that all ideologies fear. In this contest, let's salute those individuals and nations who ask, how do we recognize the imperative to honour and remember the freedom of every Aqsa Parvez? Aqsa could not avoid a reality that forced on her a choice to remain, or not, open to untold future possibilities. Neither can we.

Aqsa chose an open life and received death. Let us contest honour and shame accordingly, resurrecting her truth and honour when and where we can: we can resurrect something of our fallen victims because we all share in and carry with us a piece of our nation's real victims. That's what a truly liberal nation that strives to interpret its own particular history in relation to universal truths about free human will, and the sacrificial violence that grows out of that contested freedom, comes to understand and redeem. And if someone tells you, non-Muslim, apostate, etc., that you don't have a right to share in a victim like Aqsa Parvez, or if you don't feel any connection to some ideologue's counter-claims about who are the "real" victims in the contests over some "phobic" memory, you know someone somewhere is not being real. Honour, shame and narcissism are about knowing, or not, who is being real.

Memorial to Aqsa Parvez to be built

Atlas Shrugs: BARUCH HASHEM! AQSA MEMORIAL GOES FORWARD (HT: Walker)

Pamela Geller, who drew a lot of fire for proposing to erect a stone on Aqsa's unmarked grave, has apparently found the allies to finish this righteous job

Deepest thanks and gratitude to Atlas reader and Fire Chief, Town of Pelham, Scott McLeod, a wonderful man who contacted one of his Municipal Councilors regarding an Aqsa memorial. Councilor Sharon Cook presented a motion to offer an area in the Pelham Peace Park for a suitable Memorial. Sharon Cook, you are a righteous woman!

The Mississauga News reports

The Town of Pelham will install a bench and plant a tree at Peace Park to honour immigrants who are caught between cultures "and are challenged to conform to both." Pelham councillor Sharon Cook said the bench and tree will honour Parvez.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali on Lee Harris

You can't say the forces of freedom are making no progress when, of all places, the New York Times allows Ayaan Hirsi Ali to review Lee Harris' new book, The Suicide of Reason. Here's a bit of her review:

Harris extols American exceptionalism together with Hegel as if there were no contradiction between the two. But what makes America unique, especially in contrast to Europe, is its resistance to the philosophy of Hegel with its concept of a unifying world spirit. It is the individual that matters most in the United States. And more generally, it is individuals who make cultures and who break them. Social and cultural evolution has always relied on individuals — to reform, persuade, cajole or force. Culture is formed by the collective agreement of individuals. At the same time, it is crucial that we not fall into the trap of assuming that the survival tactics of individuals living in tribal societies — like lying, hypocrisy, secrecy, violence, intimidation, and so forth — are in the interest of the modern individual or his culture.

I was not born in the West. I was raised with the code of Islam, and from birth I was indoctrinated into a tribal mind-set. Yet I have changed, I have adopted the values of the Enlightenment, and as a result I have to live with the rejection of my native clan as well as the Islamic tribe. Why have I done so? Because in a tribal society, life is cruel and terrible. And I am not alone. Muslims have been migrating to the West in droves for decades now. They are in search of a better life. Yet their tribal and cultural constraints have traveled with them. And the multiculturalism and moral relativism that reign in the West have accommodated this.

Harris is correct, I believe, that many Western leaders are terribly confused about the Islamic world. They are woefully uninformed and often unwilling to confront the tribal nature of Islam. The problem, however, is not too much reason but too little. Harris also fails to address the enemies of reason within the West: religion and the Romantic movement. It is out of rejection of religion that the Enlightenment emerged; Romanticism was a revolt against reason.

Both the Romantic movement and organized religion have contributed a great deal to the arts and to the spirituality of the Western mind, but they share a hostility to modernity. Moral and cultural relativism (and their popular manifestation, multiculturalism) are the hallmarks of the Romantics. To argue that reason is the mother of the current mess the West is in is to miss the major impact this movement has had, first in the West and perhaps even more profoundly outside the West, particularly in Muslim lands.

Thus, it is not reason that accommodates and encourages the persistent segregation and tribalism of immigrant Muslim populations in the West. It is Romanticism. Multiculturalism and moral relativism promote an idealization of tribal life and have shown themselves to be impervious to empirical criticism. My reasons for reproaching today’s Western leaders are different from Harris’s. I see them squandering a great and vital opportunity to compete with the agents of radical Islam for the minds of Muslims, especially those within their borders. But to do so, they must allow reason to prevail over sentiment.

I think Ali is right that we have to engage in a war for the minds of Muslims (but also for those in the West trapped in the irrationalities of White Guilt) and that over time we will find that more and more of them will want to be free like Ali, and not slaves to traditional forms of society, especially when they see that is not tribalism that can hope to feed them and keep them comfortable and healthy, but only our global modernity, without which the human population must greatly diminish.

However, Ali, and perhaps also Harris, though I haven't yet read his book, continues to pit reason against faith in objectionable ways. Of course there is a lot in the Western tradition of unreason to oppose. This blog never tires of berating the Gnostic left and its incoherent preaching on multiculturalism, for example. However, Ali seems to be largely unaware of how Western individualism has been in good part an outgrowth of Judeo-Christian religion, and Romanticism, and not simply of the "Enlightenment" which is best understood as a secularization or codification of what has always been a potential of a Western religious tradition that separates the moral and (the tribal) ethical, emphasizes individual moral conscience and conversation with God, as well as a history of progressive, unfolding revelations into our humanity to be discovered in human time. Furthermore, ours is a religion that, especially in the case of Christianity, calls on us to maximize human reciprocity, to see individuals as sacred centres/traders in their own right, freed of any particular social hierarchy or periphery, in a way that has led us to the free global market of secular modernity.

Similarly, the Romantic movement cannot be seriously summed up with a one-sided, good or bad, polemic, however much violence has arisen from it, both in the form of leftist political movements and resentful individuals defining their humanity against "the system" or the establishment. The modern individual, who uses the arts of consumer society, and also some reason, to endlessly differentiate individual sacred centres within a larger free market modernity, is as much a Romantic figure as is the anti-modern philobarbarist or supporter of one or another totalitarian fantasy. Furthermore, Romantic interest in the primitive can be a form of anthropology, a mix of reasoning and art that attempts a better understanding of our human origins, an improved understanding that can have liberating potential in our modernity. It is all too simple to see Romanticism across the board as an unquestioning embrace of the primitive.

It is incumbent on us to work through such contradictory possibilities in the major intellectual and artistic currents of the modern West, to foster the positive forces therein, so as to defend our modernity. This defense cannot be seriously achieved by those who would simply write off large parts of our cultural heritage as unreasonable. The Enlightenment's caricature of Reason is not alone the salvation of anything. It leads to forms of positivism which become crude Gnostic religions in their own right: see Marxism, or the French Revolution, for example, where reason and romanticism embraced in ways I don't think Ali yet knows how to separate.

I greatly admire Ayaan Hirsi Ali for showing the West what Islam is, for being a whistle blower, an informer, for insisting we hear the kind of stories that can only come from those who have lived under the oppressive tribal codes of the Islamic world. And while she seems to be someone whose escape from Islam has left her faithless and unsure how to deal with the human need for good faith, as the guarantee of our freedom, of our ability to perform for others an act of good faith, an acting that "reason" alone will never conquer, she may at least give us the courage to fight harder against those, like Mohamed Elmasry, who are actively targeting the forces of freedom in the West, as in Elmasry's recent campaign to silence Mark Steyn, or to make him unpublishable in Canada. Elmasry is the man who was widely quoted in the media for claiming that the murder of Aqsa Parvez was just a "teenager issue":

"I don't want the public to think that this is really an Islamic issue or an immigrant issue," said Mohamed Elmasry of the Canadian Islamic Congress. "It is a teenager issue."

Thanks to voices like Hirsi Ali's, fewer and fewer Canadians are falling for such rhetorical sleights of hand. Islam is an inherent part of certain tribal societies and tribal society is arguably an inherent part of Islam, though whether there can be some kind of accommodation of Islam and modernity remains to be seen. We will only begin the serious work of finding out what can and cannot be made of Islam and modernity when we stop listening to and appeasing the anti-freedom Islamists like Elmasry, who is invited to all kinds of conferences by leftist Canadian elites, and champion those Muslims who so desperately want greater freedom for their people. Ali has rejected Islam, others are trying to reform it. Let that debate play out, let's give our attention to those Muslims interested in change and progress, and not in a defense of tribalism masked as a denial that Islam is profoundly allied with tribalism.

The debate we need will be well served if we renew our interest in Western culture and history so that it does not become a sources of easy polemics and caricatures for those fighting for freedom and modernity. We only really defend freedom and modernity when we are not unnecessarily casting out parts of it, but grasping the greater mystery by which so much has and can be held together as a network of free individuals making their lives sacred in any number of ways.

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Muslims and free humanity against Sharia

I am happy to find a comment from Muslims Against Sharia at one of our November posts.

I'm not sure which member of the group posted that, but it recalled to mind a Front Page interview with Khalim Massoud, president of Muslims Against Sharia:

Most of American mosques are financed and run by Wahhabis. Wahhabi imams are anything but moderate, hence most of religious leaders are radicals. So-called "civil rights" groups, i.e., CAIR, MPAC, ICNA, MAS, etc. that comprise Muslim establishment are nothing more than offshoots of the Muslim Brotherhood and fronts for Hamas and al-Qaeda. They are very well financed and are extremely skilful manipulators of the media. And most of the people in government and media truly believe that those groups are moderate, because they are either too lazy to do research or they choose to ignore terrorist ties.

As a result, when either the government or the media needs an Islamic point of view, Muslim establishment groups are go-to "experts" by default. With the "expert" seat being filled, moderate Muslims are left out.

Another problem with moderate Muslims is they are scared and not organized. They are scared because they cannot speak up in mosques for fear of being kicked out and there are virtually no organizations that represent their views. They are not organized, because, unlike the radical, they do not receive tens of millions of dollars in financial support, therefore they have to work for a living.
[...]
Their strategy is very simple. They constantly claim that they are peaceful and moderate, and Western media is more than happy to repeat that nonsense. They do not praise terrorism in public, but they justify it by playing the Muslim victimhood card. And they are very effective at it.

Many radical organizations have already been exposed by counter-terrorism researchers like Steven Emerson, John Loftus, Rachel Ehrenfeld, Joe Kaufman, Paul Sperry, Zeyno Baran, and many others. The proof that the Muslim establishment is anything but moderate is widely available. However, the government and the media either for political reasons or out of sheer stupidity completely ignore it.

Front Page's Jamie Glazov went on to ask:

I would like to touch on your intriguing point that “the Koran has been corrupted over the centuries, and all we want to do is to revert it as close as possible to the original." Is there any textual support for such a notion? And doesn't this notion run counter to the Islamic doctrine of the perfection of the Qur'an, which insists that the Qur'anic text is the same as it was in the time of Uthman? In light of these considerations, do you think you will gain much support in the Islamic world?

Massoud: We do not have any direct evidence that the Koran has been corrupted over the centuries. However, there is some circumstantial evidence supporting our point. First, if you take two English Korans translated by two different people, the difference could be very substantial. Substantial to the point that the same verses could have completely different meaning. Case in point: a recent arrest of Ghows Zalmay, who, according to the fundamentalists, misinterpreted some verses in the Koran.

Based on these facts, it is reasonable to conclude that when the Koran was copied many times over, the mere mortals who did the copying might have "adjusted" the texts to reflect their personal views, or the views of their superiors.

Second is deductive reasoning. The Koran contains verses that represent mutually exclusive concepts, i.e., human 'life is precious' vs. 'kill the infidels wherever you find them' or 'respect the People of the Book' vs. 'do not take Jews and Christians for friends'.

Allah is infallible and cannot contradict himself, which means that some of those verses are not the literal word of Allah. Also, how can Allah, who is the Most Merciful, the Most Compassionate be a source of "kill them [infidels] wherever you find them"?

The only logical explanation is that the Koran we have today was significantly altered.

Glazov was not convinced that Islam could be reformed, pointing out that the violence in the Koran is not incidental to the transcendent meaning of the text, but fundamental to it, a fact confirmed by all the schools of Islamic jurisprudence in their calls for the Muslims to subjugate the infidels to the Ummah. Glazov also notes that Massoud's arguments about contradictions in the Islam seem to be answered by the mainstream's doctrine of abrogation - the later verses of the Koran supersede the earlier, more pacific, ones. Read the rest of the interview, to decide whether Kalim Massoud gives answers that are likely to convince a large number of Muslims who want to live in peace with modernity and its freedoms.

In any case, the comment we received yesterday is full of links to the project of Muslims Against Sharia to provide a reformed version of the Koran, rid of all verses "that promote violence, divisiveness, religious or gender superiority, bigotry, or discrimination". They want readers to check out their reformed version of the Koran and to let them know (koran@reformislam.org) if they are failing in their mandate to rid the Koran of violence. There's a project that could make use of certain bloggers we know.

As anyone who has read the Koran knows, this will not be an easy task. The curses directed towards the unbelievers are ubiquitous in that book, and the more explicit denunciations of the infidels are common.

In any case, Muslims Against Sharia left us with a link,
In Memoriam of Aqsa Parvez.

The recent Canadian media coverage of the Parvez murder is full of all the sins that Massoud discussed at the opening of the Front Page interview; the media seemingly take the words of Islamist front groups that this was "just a horrific incidence of domestic violence" that Muslims condemn, and "nothing to do with religion or Islam", at face value. For example, even when the media reports they are being manipulated, so as to not be able to attend and report on Aqsa's funeral, they still take the blather of CAIR at face value: ""We're not here to talk about religion or culture - it has nothing to do with it - we're just here based on the fact that she lost her life and we just want to work toward stopping this from happening in the future," Ms. Dadabhoy said."

Of course anyone who thinks an honor killing over a daughter's desire to escape from the Islamist dress code has nothing to do with religion is being intentionally disingenuous. The media should just dump the commentators from groups like CAIR, and make people like Khalim Massoud their go-to guys when they need an example of moderate Muslim opinion. And let the CAIR warriors cry to they're wet that people like Massoud are not real Muslims.

As David Warren comments, there are other girls in Canadian society trying to free themselves of Islamic strictures who, like Warren's friend "Harata", know full well "That [Aqsa] could have been me." Anyone with a grain of integrity will want to protect these girls. And that means stopping in their tracks the Saudi-funded apologists for orthodox or "radical" Islam that pervade North American mosques.

Dag wrote a long post on this topic on Saturday at No Dhimmitude.

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Feminists and Multiculturalists: A Failure to Covenant Part II

Covenant Zone meets every Thursday, 7-9pm, in the atrium of the central branch of the Vancouver Public Library, in front of Blenz Coffee. Look for the blue scarves. Please join us if you would like to discuss the health of the Canadian national covenant. Some potential material for discussion follows:

Don't watch this video unless you are prepared to witness acts of extreme violence towards women, a revelation into life for women under Islam (ht: Suicide of the West):


Writing about the murder of Aqsa Parvez, Barbara Kay argues:

We have this week two news items of tragedies involving girl victims. Both will serve to reinforce the belief of many Canadians -- count me in -- that the alliance of feminism with multiculturalism has created a two-tier sisterhood.

The top tier, Western women, have achieved full equality rights. Any and all male aggression against a top-tier woman triggers a public outcry and a million lit candles. The second-tier women -- those from other cultures -- are not so fortunate. Feminists exploit multiculturalism to justify their moral abandonment of the women who most need them: girl victims of dysfunctional or socially unevolved cultures
[...]
Multiculturalists would have us believe that the hijab is merely a religious symbol, like the Sikh kirpan or the Christian cross, freely embraced by the girls wearing them. It isn't, as many Muslim commentators, including Tarek Fatah and Farzana Hassan in these pages yesterday, have frequently explained. The hijab is rather a public sign of supervised sexual modesty, and marks those wearing it as chattel, leashed to their fathers and brothers as surely as if they were wearing a dog collar.

But you'll never hear a feminist murmur a word of complaint about these girls' lack of autonomy

Athos notes:

Ostensibly [Islam] claims revelation that supersedes both Judaism and Christianity; surreptitiously, Islam is a petulant, chip-on-its-shoulder "negative imitation" of both, always cocking an eye to see its model-rival in near-hilarious attraction/revulsion ... if it weren't so murderous.

But like all conventional expressions of the primitive Sacred, Islam cannot let go of its primary motivating force: the religious dread and awe of needing victims -- yes, human victims. Girard calls this essential element of conventional religion, anthropologically speaking, the "single victim mechanism" (Robert Hamerton-Kelly calls it the "Generative Mimetic Scapegoating Mechanism," and with good reason, but I won't get into all that now).

Needless to say, if the duck walks and talks and looks like a practitioner of human sacrifice, it is a form of quacking paganism. Period. Judaism long ago had to be pulled out of it -- ask the Major and Minor Prophets. Christianity has always ruefully dabbled in it, enjoying a good Sunday afternoon hangin' on the town square. But both listen to a biblical Spirit that says an unequivocal "NO!" to it as a raison d'etre.

There is too much gathering evidence that Islam is far, far away from such an unequivocal message. Especially when Mum and Dad want to take the daughter out back and slit her throat unless stopped by the authorities.

Islamophobia? you might say so...

Janet Levy on Lee Harris (ht: Dag):

The principle of honor is of primary importance in radical Islamic cultures. The honor of the community must be protected at all costs and far exceeds any notion of the individual or of individual rights. Religious leaders, who view the world across a long-term time horizon, operate for the good of the ummah, the propagation of Islam over time and the enforcement of Islamic law.

Tribal success hinges on the inculcation of a uniform system of steadfast shared values and of a sense of shame so deep and visceral that it is impervious to reason and makes death preferable to tribal code violations and the accompanying loss of collective honor. It solidifies a rigidly imposed “us vs. them” mindset in which “the other” is a cursed object of abject enmity. The faithful are indoctrinated and prepared to sacrifice themselves for furthering fanatic tribal goals. Martyrs for the cause are celebrated and elevated to a position of honor.

Tribal cultures thrive on the vacuum that chaos presents. It is a boon to fanaticism and totalitarian control. In a state of chaos, all behaviors become permissible and extreme measures are easy to enforce on desperate populations.

Against such beliefs and behaviors, the enlightened societies of the West are ill equipped to do battle, Harris says. In Western societies, like America, elites serve as critics of the status quo and are often opposed by the populace. They keep any impulses toward fanaticism by the masses in check. Chaos is anathema to reason or order, which must be maintained at all costs. Indeed, the fear of anarchy often leads to appeasement and repudiation of beliefs.

Harris defines America today as a “carpe diem feel good” society in which the happiness of the individual is placed above responsibility to the community, world or future. Rights are cherished above duties, the present valued more than the future, and material acquisitions deemed more important than hard work.

Shaming is used as an effective tool in the enlightened West but with a different twist from that of the Islamic world. People are shamed into thinking the “right” thoughts and ostracized for intolerance and aggressive behavior. This serves to dilute cultural values and life-preserving warrior behavior necessary for survival. In America, people are generally unwilling to make the ultimate sacrifice and will do anything to avoid death and loss of property. The society operates under the notion that all differences can be resolved with negotiation rather than bloodshed. Potential warriors, such as alpha males are feminized, drugged and shamed out of existence. Essentially, mandatory multiculturalism enforces respect for other cultures and disrespect for American culture, Harris argues.

Harris further suggests that America’s Protestant tradition of independent thought and action has been replaced by programmed thought, further weakening our ability to deal with fundamentalist Islamic societies. America’s teachers are “salesmen of a particular ideological brand” and enforce a groupthink mentality of the “correct” opinions. For example, instead of critically evaluating multiple points of view about women in society, students are told that women are oppressed and that they must be purged of their anti-feminist views. Politically correct values and attitudes religiously demand tolerance for different points of view. It is deemed contemptible to view our American culture, our nation or any religion as superior and practically de rigueur to be tolerant of the intolerant and odious, such as Muslim fundamentalists and 9/11 conspiracy theorists. Thus, Western civilization is stripped of the notion that anything precious and worth protecting or fighting for exists.

In summary, the West is suffering from an insidious ideological assault from the outside by fundamentalist Islam that could result in profound societal damage, while at the same time we are, from the inside, undermining our core values and traditions. We are not experiencing a clash of civilizations, but an overt attempt to dismantle the worldwide status quo. The West is vulnerable, because it has failed to recognize that survival hinges on being intolerant to the intolerant and acknowledging the superiority of our way of life and the exceptionalism of America. We will probably be unable to change the Islamists and alter their three-pronged prescription for non-Muslims – death, subjugation or conversion – but we can prevent them from changing us. Through our “enlightened” democracy and lack of cultural protectionism, we are inadvertently aiding their cause. Our ability to fight has been severely weakened by the enlightened principles of tolerance and multiculturalism that we have grown to cherish and by a lack of group cohesiveness and respect for our common values and accomplishments. While we think short-term and teach our children to have contempt for our culture, the Islamists think long-term and teach their children to die for Islam.

According to Harris, our success in fighting the threat of radical Islam will depend on a willingness to defend ourselves against that most potent weapon for survival: fanaticism. Societies that are the most fanatical about their preservation will prevail. America’s best hope is that the struggle for our survival may cause us to awaken and recognize the nobility of our culture as something worth fighting for. We must return to our core traditions and values, take pride in our ethical superiority and exceptionalism and recognize a sacred duty to instill Western ethos in future generations and as widely throughout the world as possible.

Covenant Zone exists to remember the superiority of our Western way of life and to help us become better able to articulate and defend our stake in the covenant of Canadian nationhood.

Theodore Dalrymple:

The new atheists are quite right to see the threat of theocracy in Islamism. But in attacking all religion, they are like the French government which banned not only the wearing of the headscarf in schools, but the wearing of all religious insignia whatsoever, despite the fact that wearing a Star of David or a crucifix has and had a completely different social signification from wearing a headscarf. In the name of non-discrimination, the French government failed to discriminate properly: and proper discrimination is, or ought to be, practically the whole business of life. If there were large numbers of Christians or Jews who were in favour of establishing a theocracy in France, who had a recent record of terrorism, and who terrorised each other into the wearing of crucifixes and Stars of David, then the banning of those insignia would have been justified too. The wearing of the headscarf should be permitted again when Islam has become merely one personal confession among others, without the political significance that it has now.

In attacking all religion so indiscriminately, the atheist authors are, I am sure inadvertently and unintentionally, strengthening the hand of the Islamists. In arguing, for example, that for parents to bring up a child in any religious tradition, even the mildest of Anglicanism, is to abuse a child, with the natural corollary that the law should forbid it (for how can the law permit child abuse?), some of the authors are giving ammunition to the Islamists, who will be able with justice to say to their fellow-religionists, See, it is all or nothing. If you give the secularists an inch, they will take a mile. No compromise with secularism is possible, therefore; cleave unto us.

Islamism is a worthy target, of course, but by now one that has been pretty well aimed at (though I recommend very strongly the forthcoming book from Encounter Books, Brother Tariq: The Doublespeak of Tariq Ramadan, by Caroline Fourest). To suggest, however, that all forms of religion are equal, that they are all murderous and dangerous, is not to serve the cause of freedom and tolerance. It is to play into the hands of the very people we should most detest; it is to hand them the rhetorical tools with which they can tell the gullible that our freedoms are not genuine and that our tolerance is a masquerade. It is to do what I should previously have thought was impossible, namely in this respect to put them in the right.

See also: the fate of street girls in Cairo

Dad kills daughter over not really "competing" cultures

I had this post, written too quickly, up earlier. I'm not sure I got started on this story with a correct idea. I wanted to take to task the headline writer at the Vancouver Sun, for his or her multiculti posturing. But maybe what I was responding to was less posturing than a reflexive deferral to the words of the supposed authority quoted in the Sun story. I took the post down, but Charles tells me it is worth keeping up. So here it is with a few more edits, if something can still be of interest in my angry response to a horrible murder....

I was responding to this headline in the Sun: “Muslim girls struggle with 'competing' cultures”.
[original post begins now]
You see those scare quotes around “competing”? That’s to imply that kids who grow up with Muslim fathers who might kill them if they “dishonour” their family by refusing to wear the hijab – as has just happened in Toronto to 16-year old Aqsa Parvez, a cold fact the headline shamelessly dances around - kids who want to dress and look like normal kids at their public schools, are not caught in a totally real clash of competing cultures.

But of course they are caught in a cultural competition, a competition that necessarily implies value, and judgment of what is of lesser value. We, as a postmodern liberal society, live in fear of the reality that conflict and value judgment is inherent to the human condition. And so we put simple references to reality in quotation marks.

You see, it is a matter of unquestionable religious faith, for the liberal-Gnostic Canadians who rule opinion in this country, that in this country there is no fundamental clash of cultures, just a lack of good people willing to live by the singular dictates of “multiculturalism,” i.e. the insistence that all people can get along in Canada just as long as they respect each others’ differences and let the multiculti authorities settle all differences from on high. How such pieties apply to Muslim fathers who think they must brutalize daughters who shame the family among pious friends, and to daughters who want to look normal by Canadian standards, no one really explains, and the article to which this headline refers is full of the usual posturing from liberal elites about how hard it is for girls caught between two cultures:

Many Muslim girls in Canada lead something of a double life when it comes to reconciling religious traditions while living in a secular, Western society, says a researcher at Wilfrid Laurier University.

"At home they're the good Muslim kid, they pray and they fast and go to mosque," said Jasmin Zine, a professor of sociology at the Waterloo, Ont., school. "When they go to school they become a different person. They create a persona to fit with the competing cultural demands of home and school."

The fundamental questions behind such sentiments are never raised: e.g. just how, exactly, is killing your daughter for bringing shame on the family a “religious” tradition? It’s only “religious” in the sense of conformity to an all-encompassing ritual code – a “total way of life” - that is centuries apart from the Western idea of religion rooted in the separation of church and state, of private religion and “secular” culture.

The Sun’s article also provides us the opinions of

“Ausma Khan, a human rights lawyer and the editor-in-chief of Muslim Girl Magazine.” “The decision whether to don the hijab is not always difficult for Muslim girls... But, she acknowledges, the hijab has become a flashpoint.

"It can so easily be taken for a signal of difference and otherness and alienation, but it doesn't have to be read like that," she said. Khan, 38, is now based in Los Angeles, but grew up in Canada. "There is definitely an American-Islam or a Canadian-Islam that has imbibed the reality of growing up in a pluralistic society that accommodates difference, that respects difference," she said.

"I think we see that. We see this in the practice of this generation of young women. They are accommodating. Just as they want to put their own view point forward, have their religious freedom and be protected, they are equally willing to recognize and respect the rights of others."

I first became familiar with Muslim Girl magazine a couple of months ago when I saw a fellow bus rider, a Muslim educator at Simon Fraser University - with whom I had previously discussed matters covenantal and “religious” when he first saw me on the bus with Israeli and Canadian flags on my Covenant Zone blog hat - showing an edition of the glossy mag with pride (it looks like the Muslim educators want to provide girls with an alternative to the ilk of Cosmo) to what looked like two SFU women students. One was wearing a hijab and the other, of European ancestry, who clearly knew the educator and respectfully deferred to him, may have been a convert to Islam or to the leftist-Islamic (global intifada) alliance.

Previously, this man had been keen to point out to me the apparent hypocrisy that Westerners think they can separate church and state, when in fact they can’t, or so he alleged – and therefore how can anyone expect the same of Islam? – a question provoked by my comments on Western nationhood being founded in covenants that were once religious, but are now largely secular or constitutional. Canada, and our constitutionally-based freedom, I pointed out, owes a historical debt to the first nation and first covenanters, Israel; and it is to remember this that I have the flags on my hat. I don’t think he appreciated the historical subtlety of my point – he didn’t even know the word “covenant” - that just because everything cultural can be given a genealogy that links it back to some ancestry in religion, it is therefore not hypocrisy to say we have progressed to the point where we choose to differentiate church and state, as Jesus did.

Since Canadians’ sense of nationhood is rooted in the Judeo-Christian tradition, therefore we can’t really separate the religious and secular, he seemed to want to argue as I was getting off the bus.

I bring this up because the particular cover of Muslim Girl Magazine that I saw on the bus featured two young and attractive girls, one in hijab, one without, as if to say either is ok, or there’s a debate going on. But that’s the point the Vancouver Sun headliner will (or so it first appeared to me) only recognize in scare quotes. All culture is about conflict, since all signs of culture come into existence to defer humanity’s foundational potential for destructive, intra-specific violence. At least that is the hypothesis, very convincing to me, of Generative Anthropology. So, for example, a hijab was originally "designed" to defer men's violence over women’s sexuality, just as the latest in sexually-charged Western fashion is also a way of deferring conflict over sexuality by making it and its signs mundane. We can’t avoid the realization that there is a conflict, if yet largely non-violent, in our society about which approach (including others) to deferral is better, more valuable, than the other.

This argument from anthropology has all sorts of consequences for how we choose to face, or not, the global intifada that is out to destroy the basis for free constitutional democracies and the global economy that presently feeds over six billion people. Because... there is one sense in which there is not a “clash of civilizations” ongoing, and that is the sense that there is now only one global civilization, one world economy, from which no one and no society can be walled off, and in relation to which all the angry losers and marginal “cultures” in the global intifada are expressing a confict *internal* to the single civilization, and not one between truly independent civilizations.

Because of this, there is no way we can just leave Muslims to their own devices if we have any respect for their lives. There is already a far greater population in the Islamic world than could be fed by Islamic withdrawal from the global economy into some Sharia-bound backwardness. Either we welcome the prospect of a mass die-off (and all the guilt and conflict it would create in the West), or we admit that we are bound to Muslims for the foreseeable future, in which case it would be best if our conflicts were faced and not hidden in scare quotes.

Even those of my friends who clearly see the conflict out there, but who characterize it by claiming that Islam cannot be changed and cannot be negotiated with, are suggesting that we have no choice but to conquer and defeat Islam by force of arms, isolate and starve Islam, or give in to the Jihad. But precisely because they take this line, they have very little to offer by a way of a vision for what might transcend the coming final conflict between us and them. Once we defeat the Muslims in battle, then what?

I wish that they could see that there is value in already anticipating that question in today’s world, and that we need give up nothing by facing it now, if we are confident about the value of Western civilization. By highlighting the question now, maybe we can defer some of the violence they anticipate as inevitable. What if there is another way to conquer “Islam” by forcing it to acknowledge its dependence on the global economy and the covenants guaranteeing the individual freedoms by which this economy operates? In other words, what if we make it our explicit policy that we will only be at war with that part of “Islam” that refuses to play by the rules of the global economy - for example that part which thinks it can come to Canada and still brutalize its women. Only then can we learn what “Muslims” really believe, when they must choose between freedom and death, when the fantasy of a global caliphate, or of a world of second-class women, is truly revealed as an impossibility, if six or ten billion are to be fed?

But then, my friends say, you will not be dealing with Islam” as my friends insist Islam must be, i.e. supremacist and totalitarian, following Koran and Sharia to the letter. That would be fine with me. What if we face up to the reality that a global economy entails, and force Muslims in Canada to do the same? Then we might admit that the editor of Muslim Girl is not simply lying or being un-Islamic when she sees the young Muslim woman as the possible vanguard for a reformation: “Just as they want to put their own view point forward, have their religious freedom and be protected, they are equally willing to recognize and respect the rights of others." If this is true, then “Islam” cannot survive, but maybe something else Islamic can. It’s not for us to decide.

UPDATE: What is a lie is this:

A spokesman for the Canadian Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR-CAN) said he is dubious of opinions that the girl's death resulted from a clash of cultures.

"Teen rebellion is something that exists in all households in Canada and is not unique to any culture or background," CAIR-CAN's Sameer Zuberi said in an interview. "Domestic violence is also not unique to Muslims."

The death of Aqsa "was the result of domestic violence, a problem that cuts across Canadian society and is blind to color or creed," echoed Shahina Siddiqui, president of the Islamic Social Services Association.

Does anyone really think domestic violence just happens? Surely it is always a sign of some underlying conflict. Sure, the nature of that conflict will be different from case to case. But in this case, it seems from all the evidence so far that the underlying conflict in this murder was between Islamic and Western values.