Tuesday, November 30, 2010

National Post: Criminal Code should not be changed to include ‘honour killings’: symposium panel

“Is this inherently a cultural thing? Yes. It’s a culture of patriarchy. It’s not a South Asian or Muslim culture.”

The feminists are in denial. They looked at their Duluth Wheel of Patriarchal oppression used in all DV shelters and said its those bad men and has nothing to do with culture. So all you white guys you are now being blended in with the primitive cultures of extreme Islamists, Hindu's and Sikhs. Be prepared for more misandry based on these cretins.

This is nothing more than a whitewash of primitive cultures and another feminist hive creating new myths about patriarchy implicating all males.

"Woman are revered", one of the participants says. What a load of absolute crap. Are they the women following two steps behind their man, some wearing tents, are they the girls aborted because some South Asians prefer males, are they the ones unable to pray with their man, are they the approximate 20,000 women killed world wide in dis-honour by a culture of contempt for women?

How can anyone have any respect for the feminists running these DV shelters when they continue to try and foist pure unadulterated nonsense on the unsuspecting public. It is no more than misandry wanting to put all men into a category of patriarchs trying to oppress and kill women.MJM







  November 30, 2010 – 6:08 pm

 
RICHMOND HILL — So-called ‘honour-based crimes’ should not be viewed as distinct from mainstream violence against women and the Criminal Code should not be amended to include a separate ‘honour killings’ charge, a panel agreed at what was believed to be the first-ever symposium on the subject in York Region.

“When you use the term ‘honour crimes’ the way we do in Canada, it becomes a way of saying ‘those barbaric practices’ done by ‘those barbaric cultures,’ as if the West’s hands are somehow clean,” said panelist Farrah Khan, a therapist with the Barbra Schlifer Commemorative Clinic. “Is this inherently a cultural thing? Yes. It’s a culture of patriarchy. It’s not a South Asian or Muslim culture.”

The panel — which featured self-proclaimed Muslim feminist, social worker, and beauty queen Tahmena Bokhari, and which also included Det. Christina Baker of York Regional Police, lawyer and activist Zarah Danani, and Anita Khanna, of the Council of Agencies Serving South Asians — agreed that the term ‘honour killing’ wrongfully suggests so-called honour crimes are somehow different from the crimes of yore
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“I think it’s important that we don’t buy into the hype: We’ve got to stop creating legislation — as is going on around the globe — that targets Muslim people,” said lawyer and panelist Zarah Danani. “It’s fear-based hype finding its way into the law because we have a right-wing Conservative government.”
The symposium — entitled Honour Based Violence and the Canadian Context and hosted by the Sandgate Women’s Shelter of York Region — drew 50 or so mostly female community members, activists, and social workers to Richmond Hill’s Elgin West Community Centre.

Although ‘honour killings’ — widely understood as culturally motivated killings carried out by relatives in order to “cleanse” the family name and restore the family’s so-called honour — remain relatively rare in this country, several high-profile cases have sparked heated discussion about what event organizers called an “upward trend” in honour-based violence in Canada.

Just this month, an Ontario Superior Court judge decried the “extremely reprehensible” mindset behind so-called honour crimes, and sentenced a Scarborough man to five years in prison for speeding his minivan into his teenaged daughter, her boyfriend, and his son-in law. The Tamil man had disapproved of his daughter’s boyfriend, who was of a lower Sri Lankan caste.

The notion of ‘honour killings’ is most often associated with the Muslim community, though Canada and the United States have also seen many cases involving Sikhs and Hindus.

Ms. Danani lamented that there is an element of Islamophobia in “how these things keep getting labeled,” and said that the use of the term ‘honour killing’ is simply a bid to muster a new “phenomenon” out of an age-old offence.

“When you create a new term, you get to create a phenomenon,” she told the crowd, who shouted and clapped in agreement from their chairs in a multi-purpose room at the community centre. “You get to take it out of the everyday, and make it sound new.”

“Honour killings need not be placed ‘out there,’” echoed Det. Baker, adding that amending the Criminal Code would be a “bad idea.”

Whether Ottawa will amend legislation to include ‘honour killing’ is yet to be seen; speculation reached a fever-pitch this past summer.
In July, Rona Ambrose, Minister for the Status of Women, told a news conference in Mississauga that the government was “looking at” adding a separate charge. Later that very day, however, her statement was hastily rejected by the Justice Department.

The Criminal Code flip-flop came on the heels of a Frontier Centre for Public Policy report, which said “honour/shame codes are rife” in the non-Westernized segment of Canada’s South Asian community.
Still, Jehan Chaudhry, executive director of the Sandgate Women’s Shelter, said on Tuesday that “there is no room for discussion” as to whether so-called honour crimes — when perpetrated by members of the non-westernized South Asian community — are at all distinct from domestic violence.

“Whether it’s a brother killing a sister, the victim at the end of the day is still a woman — there’s no other way to look at it,” Ms. Chaudhry said in an interview. “What I know of Islam, what I know of Sikhism, what I know of Hindu, there is no room for ‘honour-based violence.’ Women are to be revered.”

The symposium — which offered Urdu, Mandarin, Farsi, and Tamil interpretation — convened almost precisely one year after the Conservative government released a toughened-up citizenship guide that explicitly condemned “barbaric cultural practices” such as so-called honour killings.



Read more: http://news.nationalpost.com/2010/11/30/criminal-code-should-not-be-changed-to-include-honour-killings-symposium-panel/#ixzz16ode2a1u