Honor killing in Canada

In Kingston, Canada, a man, his son, and his second wife are on trial for the honor killing of the man's first wife and three daughters. At Front Page Magazine, a piece about these horrendous crimes:

It is believed Mohammad Shafia, a prosperous businessman who owns a shopping mall, killed his daughters for the same reason that Aqsa Parvez’s father murdered her: They were living too Western a lifestyle. Shafia’s daughters would wear Western-style clothing, have boyfriends, disrespect traditions such as the hijab, and be defiant of his authority. They also apparently suffered the same mistreatment at their father’s hands that Aqsa Parvez did for behaving so. One daughter was even kept out of school for a whole year when it was discovered she had a boyfriend. Shafia, however, was apparently particularly hostile to the friendship and alliance the three had formed with the childless Rona, which was probably the reason she was also killed in this mass honor murder.

“They committed treason on themselves. They betrayed humankind. They betrayed Islam. They betrayed our religion…they betrayed everything,” Shafia told Tooba, the murdered children’s mother.

To show perhaps he isn’t completely unfeeling, Shafia also told his second wife he becomes “consoled” over his daughters’ deaths whenever he views the cell phone photos Zainab and Sahar took of themselves, posing in their underwear or with boyfriends.

“I say to myself, ‘You did well.’ Were they come to life, I would do it again,” the wiretap recorded him saying....

The Shafia family is typical of some immigrant families from Third World countries with strict religious cultures. They arrive in the West but never actually live here. They want to take economically from their new environment but still want to live their lives by the laws, rules, customs and values of their country of origin. They want to adopt nothing in this respect from their new society, believing in some cases their new country’s culture inferior to their own and that it even poses a threat. For them, integration is simply out of the question and no attempt is ever made, choosing self-segregation from the host society instead.

But problems often arise when their children attend school and encounter values that contradict those of the family’s, especially if a strict religious, patriarchal culture reigns at home. Girls face heavy restrictions in such homes, particularly in Muslim ones, and therefore can be especially affected by a school environment where equality between the genders is stressed, and they notice female classmates from other cultures enjoying unheard of freedoms. Wanting to fit in with the others and enjoy life, these girls then rebel against their restrictive home environments, but sometimes with deadly consequences.