As far as Homa Arjomand is concerned, official multiculturalism belongs in the prisoners’ box along with three Ontarians on trial for the honour killings of four female family members.
Mohammad Shafia, 58, his second wife Tooba Mohammad Yahya, 41, and their 20-year-old son, Hamed, stand accused of four counts each of first degree murder. They have all pleaded not-guilty to killing Shafia and Yahya’s daughters - Zainab, 19, Sahar, 17, and Geeti, 13, along with Shafia’s first wife, Rona Amir Mohammad, who lived with the family in Montreal, where she pretended to be the girls’ aunt, rather than Shafia’s first wife in a polygamous marriage.
The bodies of the three daughters and first wife were found on June 30, 2009, in a submerged Nissan at the bottom of the boat locks just outside of Kingston, Ont.
Arjomand, a prominent Canadian-Iranian activist, says but for official multiculturalism and the cultural relativism it breeds in Canada, those three teenagers and one woman might be alive today.
It was revealed on Wednesday and Thursday in the Kingston, Ont., courtroom where the Shafia clan stand trial that, despite clear signs that the girls were in physical and emotional danger and despite at least one-dozen crisis workers being involved in their cases - including teachers, social workers and police officers - the girls received very little help and support.
In fact, evidence presented in court shows that after the girls contacted the authorities, police actually then interviewed the girls again in front of their abusive parents. Not surprisingly, the terrified teens recanted their stories immediately. It’s gut wrenching to think about.
“Obviously (people) killed them,” says Arjomand, a transitional support counsellor in Ontario. “But multiculturalism is at fault too.”
“If these girls didn’t have brown skin and weren’t born in Afghanistan, if their parents were born in Canada and could speak the language, then they all would have been removed from the home and the father and mother would have had restraining orders placed against them to stay away from the children,” says Arjomand, who helps immigrant women and their children flee abusive homes.
“If Canadian children - and by that I mean children who are born here to Canadian-born parents - approached child welfare authorities with the stories of fear and abuse that these girls did, then the child welfare workers would not have hesitated to take them to a safe place and start legal proceedings against the parents,” adds Arjomand.
So, is it a kind of racism that helped do in the three girls and woman?
Arjomand takes a while to answer that. Official multi-culturalism tells immigrants that when they come to Canada they can keep their own culture - that their culture has as much right and validity as the Canadian culture, she explains.
“In Canada’s attempt to be tolerant of all people what ends up happening is they are tolerant of intolerable things. They hold newcomers to a lower standard and expect less of them, rather than teaching them Canadian values before they come here, so they understand,” adds Arjomand.
As a social worker herself, Arjomand says all social workers, and police officers are trained to be culturally sensitive.
“I have heard in training that we mustn’t get too alarmed if the women in a Pakistani or Bangladeshi home gets beaten a lot or are kept from leaving the home or kept from attending school, and they joke, ‘if we removed everyone who was beat up in those homes, there’d be no one left.’ We have to be sensitive and tolerant to their culture and beliefs, we are told.”
Arjomand sniffs. “It’s tragic. It really is. It makes me very angry and very sad.” Arjomand was instrumental in the Campaign Against Sharia Court in Canada, which successfully fought Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty’s plan in 2005 to allow family, business and marriage disputes to be resolved by sharia law in Ontario.
Arjomand, 59, says she knows of the fear those girls lived in. She herself was forced to flee Iran in 1989 with her husband, sixyearold son and one-year-old daughter on horseback. As a women’s rights advocate, Iran’s Islamist government started targeting people who pushed for gender equality. She was tipped off by a friend, who worked as a spy for the Iranian government, that the authorities were coming to arrest her.
Every single one of her colleagues who also advocated for women’s rights and didn’t flee were eventually arrested, tortured and ultimately killed. Arjomand and her family made it into Turkey and then immigrated to Canada two years later, where initially she was thrilled by the idea of multiculturalism.
“Now I hate it. This is the result,” she says of the mass honour killings. “I came to Canada for freedom and Canadian values, not sharia values.”
Arjomand has a solution to help prevent the murders of girls like the Shafias who only wanted to wear western clothes and be like the other kids.
“The first thing the government needs to do is to stop cultural sensitivity training,” implores Arjomand. “In Canada, women are equal to men. Period. Teach that.
Train the social workers in Canadian values, not sharia values and those girls would be alive today.”
It is Arjomand’s sincere hope that if guilty verdicts are rendered against the three accused, Canadians will realize multiculturalism is guilty as well and that cultural relativism gets a life sentence.
