Shafia Family Members Found Guilty Of Honour Killing But Murder Trial Exposes Canadian Racism & Prejudice Against Muslim Canadians.
Three innocent teenage girls Zainab, Sahar, and Geeti sought out social workers, teachers, and the police to help them escape from their violent father Mohammed Shafia. Sadly, the Shafia sisters died on June 30th 2009 due to male violence. The fourth victim Mr. Shafia’s first wife Rona Amir Mohammed also perished.
Yesterday, justice finally prevailed because Mohammed Shafia, his other wife Tooba Yahya, and their twenty-one year old son Hamed were found guilty of first degree murder.
However, the Canadian social service sector failed these young women because they were women of colour and not white.
Unlike Americans the Canadian public is still afraid to discuss the issue of race. The ambivalence of the Canadian social services sector for the Shafia sisters is due to racism.
The police knew the Shafia sisters were terrified about their father but they looked the other way too.
The white press will not admit that Muslim culture is constructed as existing in an anterior time. The racist discourse of the white press is Muslims Canadian immigrants have not progressed towards
modernity. I have read many comments on the internet that Muslim people need to respect “Canadian values” and “Canadian culture”.
Does Canadian values and culture also mean subscribing to white supremacy?
The mainstream media have pathologized the Muslim community due to racism, indifference, and prejudice. The language used in numerous articles condemn Islam as “barbaric”, “medieval”, and
“uncivilized”.
Isn’t Canadian society also at fault? If Zainab, Sahar, and Geeti, were white middle class girls would their cries for help be ignored?
Zainab fled to a women’s shelter, Sahar threatened to attempt suicide in order to flee her violent father, and Geeti wanted to enter foster care.
The Shafia sisters did seek out support from the Canadian social services system but due to their race, religion, and skin colour the Canadian system failed them.
No one listened to these three young Afghan females because they are the other. It is easy for racists to condemn misogyny in another culture while claiming white Canadian culture is perfect.
White women are also victims of domestic violence but white men are not demonized in the Canadian media or on the internet because they are white.
Whiteness is not treated as though there is an “essence” inside of white men to murder and kill white women due to their race.
However, the racist essentialism of the white media to construct the Muslim culture as having an “essence” for violence against women is pernicious and deleterious.
Brown Muslim men are now treated as sadistic, violent, males that want to kill Muslim women. The media are wrong to generalize the entire Muslim community and depict all Muslim men as violent
oppressors.
The white journalists and the racist bigots on the internet refuse to acknowledge that Canadians are uncomfortable with difference.
I believe the real culprit here is the white media’s refusal to acknowledge that some Canadians have anxieties about non whites immigrating to Canada.
Canada is changing and some people have a problem with it.
Immigration is an incendiary issue and I believe when women immigrate to Canada there should be mandatory education sessions.
Women need to know their human rights and men need to know violence against women will not be tolerated on Canadian soil.
It is simple for racists to condemn the Muslim culture to find an excuse to pathologize an entire community yet refuse to look hard to look beneath the surface.
Four women died because Canadian society didn’t give a damn about their existence because they were not white Canadian women.
The Canadian government certainly isn’t doing enough to support victims of male violence. Yes, there are shelters for battered women but where is the prevention?
Instead of condemning Muslim culture for the actions of a few where are the solutions? What can be done to help women flee male violence and prevent these violent deaths?
No one seems to care about that which is the real issue.
Gayblackcanada 
I think everyone was at fault here. On one hand, the right seems to portray honour killing as an exclusively Muslim phenomenon, although it also takes place in other ethnic groups from the general area. For example, a Sikh woman and her brother in British Columbia are accused of killing the woman’s daughter because she (daughter) shamed the family by marrying a man without her family’s consent. However, the left falls short by pretending there’s anything that comes close to honour killing – as in the Shafia case – in Western society. At worst, ‘wayward’ daughters/sisters/female cousins in the West who ‘disgraced’ their families were sent to places like the Magdalene laundries in Ireland. Nothing to be proud of (especially for me; I’m of partly Irish ancestry), but to compare even the Magdalene laundries to honour killing is absurd to the point of being obscene.
In this specific case, yes, perhaps mainstream Canadians didn’t care enough for the Shafia women because they weren’t white. On the other hand, I think some Canadians may have been so scared of being labelled racist that they didn’t want to go too hard on the father of the family.
Emilia, you make a strong argument that both the left and the right have at fault. It seems to me in Canada people are still a bit reticent to discuss race relation issues. I sincerely hope the Shafia honour killings wake Canadians up to the plight of South Asian women. Women of colour encounter multiple barriers when they are victims of domestic violence. The Canadian legal, social service sector, courts, and schools need to do more to help women.
It might be a good idea if social service agencies, hospitals, etcetera provided services in immigrant women’s native languages. I remember reading a story once about a woman from the former Yugoslavia (I don’t know what exact country it was) who came to Canada with her husband and was abused by him. She was basically isolated here, because he (husband) was her only contact with the outside world. However, when she went to the hospital to have her second child, she met a German nurse (German was a second language for many people in the former Yugoslavia) who listened to her situation and helped her escape her abusive husband. So I think culturally appropriate services would help many abused immigrant women, no matter what their nationality.