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opinion B A C K PA GE BY EZRA LEVANT Honour killings on the rise surprising sanctuary city: Calgary, once known as a tough-on-crime town. The latest victim is the same as they H all are: a young girl who was acting too Canadian for her medieval parents. In some ways, they even look the same, these girls, at least in the fresh-faced hope they exude in the Facebook-style pho- tos they leave behind. Like Mississauga, Ont.'s Aqsa Parvez, Calgary's Aminat Magomadova was the same as every other Canadian girl trying to fit in at school. In other cities, with other girls, honour killings are punished hard, as they should be. They are one part terrorism, one part domestic abuse, one part hate crime, and 100-per-cent murder. To excuse them in the name of multiculturalism isn't just an attack on our own liberal values such as the rule of law, the separation of mosque and state, and the equality of men and women. It's far worse than that: to excuse the murder of Muslim girls in the name of cultural accommodation is another bigotry itself; the soft bigotry of low expectations. It's to say, we can't expect anything more civilized from Muslims. Which might as well be heard by Muslim girls as: they can't expect anything more from Canadian justice than they could if they were still in the Taliban backwoods of Pakistan. Canada has generally passed the ter- rible test of honour killings. Aqsa's mur- derous father and brother were sentenced to life in prison, with no chance of parole until 2028. But Aminat's murderer was her moth- er Aset Magomadova. In July, a Calgary court convicted her of second-degree murder — the same as in Aqsa's case — but declined to order even a day in cus- tody. "Showing mercy does not mean we approve of the act. It simply means some- times a particular situation may demand onour killings of Muslim girls are on the increase in Canada, and their murderers now have a court. After all, according to her counsel, she had a really tough go of things back in Chechnya. Then there's the accusation that Aminat had been promiscuous with boys. And I hear rumours she listened to rock and roll. Chechnya's president, Ramzan a slightly different solution," explained Justice Sal LoVecchio. Ah yes, mercy for a grieving mother who has just lost her daughter. It's a new take on the old joke about murdering your parents and then asking for leni- ency on the grounds that you're now an orphan. "Deterrence and denunciation may also be addressed without a period of incarceration," explained the judge. Perhaps that's why he ordered Aset to take grief counselling. Let that be a stern warning to you would-be child killers. Aset claimed she killed Aminat in self- defence, because Aminat had attacked her with a knife. That's quite something, given the mother strangled Aminat with her hijab. Knives generally beat head scarves in fights, but not this time. Alas, there were no fingerprints found on the knife; it was a lie. And even if Aminat had attacked the 300-pound Aset with a knife, she obviously disarmed her and set about killing her by strangula- tion — something that takes a long time to do, long after the victim loses strength and even consciousness. Hold it tightly. Hold it tightly. Keep holding it. Longer. Longer still. Not done yet. Count to 100. Aset didn't deny killing her daughter. Her feeble excuse of self-defence was thrown out by the judge. She was con- victed. Yet Aset walked straight out of 46 SEPTEMBER 2010 www. C ANADIAN Law ye rmag.com Kadyrov, would approve of Aset's sense of religious hygiene, and Canada's new tolerance for the intolerable. He recently defended the honour murders of seven Chechen women found lying in the street. Like Aminat, they were nothing more than chattels, owned by their families. LoVecchio surely found the murder distasteful. But he found punishment distasteful, too. "At this point, putting her in jail would speak more to ven- geance than anything else," he said. Is there really no role for vengeance in criminal justice? When did we remove penalties from the penal system, and by whose authority? And if there really is room for no room for retribution, doesn't that mean the deterrent func- tion of the law is gone, too? Mustering our national opprobrium ought to be easy in the case of murder, but apparently it's not. If we can't do that, how can we speak out against the creeping degradation of Muslim women in Canada, from the flourishing practice of polygamy, to illiberal Sharia divorces, to the proliferation of one-woman pris- ons, called hijabs? Oh, one last question. Where is that chorus of official women who have turned the Montreal massacre into a national day of grieving? Why are they stony silent on Aminat? Is it because their sense of feminist outrage — indeed their revulsion at murder itself — takes second place to their political correctness, Calgary-style? Ezra Levant is a Calgary lawyer and author. He can be reached at ezra@ezra- levant.com. SCOTT PAGE