Why we can't condemn honour killings

While Walt was away, the father and brother of a 16-year-old Pakistani-Canadian girl pled guilty to her murder. Click here to read "Honour killings, family values and 'accommodation'", written last July.

At the hearing in a Brampton, Ontario court, the Crown attorney read into the record an agreed statement of facts. The motive for the killing, he said, was that father Parvez was upset that his daughter wouldn't conform to the strict rules of their Muslim household, making her father look bad in the community. "She made me naked", he explained.

Parvez the son felt obliged to do the needful, so lured his sister home from school and then strangled her.

The Crown accepted the Muslim men's plea to second-degree murder, which strikes me as pretty lenient seeing as how the murder was, on the Crown's own statement, clearly premeditated. Both of them were sentenced to life without the possibility of parole for 18 years.

Much argument has ensued over whether this was truly an "honour killing" and whether Islam requires or at least condones such violence against women who won't conform to the rules of Islamic culture.

Walt concedes that it's not only Muslims who kill their wives, sisters and children for transgressions such as wearing western clothes. Hindus and Sikhs do it too. See "Guilty plea in honour killing" and "'Honour killing' follow-up", both written earlier this month. And there's another case -- the four Indian ladies who somehow drove their car into a canal and drowned -- which has yet to come to trial.

Agent 2 says someone should teach these immigrants the Ten Commandments before they're allowed to enter the country. But that's just the point. We who believe in the Ten Commandments and the Golden Rule are not allowed, even in our country, to impose our beliefs and value systems on others, even those who choose to come to our country.

To insist that Muslims, Sikhs, Hindus or what have you accept and live by our Judeo-Christian laws and codes of conduct would not be in the spirit of pluralism and multiculturalism which is now an article of faith for all progressive and right-thinking [surely left-thinking! ed.] people.