RUTHFULLY YOURS

I wrote about the murders of Zainab, Sahar and Geeti Shafia and their father’s first wife Rona over two years ago, when their bodies were found in the Rideau Canal in Kingson, Ontario:

Three or so weeks back, a submerged car was found in the Rideau Canal in Kingston, Ont., containing the bodies of three teenage girls and their aunt — a story initially reported as Mysterious Death Of 4 Quebecers Baffles Kingston Police. When it emerged that the four female Quebecers were, in fact, Muslim, the tearful parents offered up a strange tale of an impromptu midnight driving lesson gone tragically wrong (Driving Lesson May Have Led To Drowning).

La Presse is now reporting that the girls’ father, mother, and brother have been arrested en route to Montreal Airport, and that the deceased “aunt” or (alternatively) “cousin” was, in fact, the girls’ father’s first wife. The words “crime d’honneur” are beginning to creep into newspaper accounts.

Not over at The Atlantic Monthly, where a certain snippy dweeb whose name is too boring to type thought Phyllis Chesler and I were getting too worked up over North American “honour killings”.

The girls’ father, mother and brother are all now on trial for their murder, and we’re a long way from “midnight driving lessons” gone “tragically wrong”:

Later in July, detectives placed a bug in the family minivan, and were soon listening to conversations where Mr. Shafia called his daughters whores and exhorted the devil to “s— on their graves.”

That telling detail is from Christie Blatchford’s fine trial coverage, and it gets to the heart of why “honour killing” is too disturbing for the multiculti diversity-celebrating relativists even to acknowledge. The body count at Kingston is “29 per cent of the Montreal Massacre“, but the feminists who happily used Gamil Gharbi/Marc Lepine to indict the massed ranks of Canadian menfolk are disinclined to dip their toes into the waters of the Rideau – even though this mass murder is far more telling about a culture of misogyny. The Kingston Trio plus the first Mrs Shafria weren’t victims of a crime passionnel committed by a momentarily angry father unable to bear what he saw as his daughters’ disobedience, but of a cold, pre-meditated, well planned act of quadruple murder in which pretty much everyone in the family who wasn’t a designated victim was in on the crime. Think about it: This is a world in which a father and mother sit around the kitchen table with their son plotting how to kill their three daughters. At a certain level, such people are not fully human.

But they are fully Canadian, at least in the legal sense. They came to Quebec from Afghanistan in 2007. And, for all the sympathetic media murmurings about the difficulties of transitioning from a highly traditional culture to a First World society, the Shafias did find certain uses for modernity: In planning the killing of his sisters, Hamed used a Google search – “where to commit a murder“.

It’s hard to see what Canada has to gain from admitting significant numbers of people from the culture that spawned the Shafias. Perhaps in time one could make functioning western citizens of them, but it would be a slow process and, even if we had the stomach for it, would be unlikely to justify itself in cost-benefit terms. So instead they come and settle into a culture that asks nothing of them. And slowly but remorselessly we adapt to them: Police departments learn to tiptoe round touchy subjects like “honour killing”; hospitals evolve from “FGM” (the pejorative “female genital mutilation”) to “FGC” (the less judgmental “female genital cutting”); and a courthouse in Ontario discreetly reorders its day in order not to inconvenience the translators that “Canadian citizens” now require:

On Fridays, the judge told the jurors, the lunch schedule will be shifted so the interpreters, all male, can get to mosque for prayers.

The multicultural experiment is not worth it. By the time those who foisted it on the post-war west acknowledge that, it will be too late.