Excerpt:
Are they willfully misleading? Or are Canadian Muslims who are fighting federal funding to investigate honor violence in the Muslim (and other) communities simply naïve victims of the same propaganda used routinely to explain away the religio-culturally-based murders of Muslim women?
Every year, according to United Nations reports, 5,000 women worldwide are killed for reasons of "honor" that relate to matters of modesty and obeyance, though most experts maintain the numbers are far higher. And the number of victims of honor violence, which can involve beatings, acid attacks, or locking a woman in her home, is literally incalculable. In the United Kingdom alone, more than 3,000 such honor crimes occurred just in 2010, according to a study by the Iranian and Kurdish Women's Rights Organization (IKWRO). The vast majority of those crimes, the organization states, were committed by Muslims, though Sikhs and Hindus have also been known to commit honor-related crimes.
In Canada, the decision to earmark funds to combat honor violence began in 2007, after a series of honor crimes over the previous two years resulted in the deaths of two women and one man. Soon after the program was announced, on Dec. 10, 2007, the father and brother of 16-year-old Toronto native Aqsa Parvez, strangled her to death. The reason: she had refused to wear the hijab, or scarf.