Nick Noorani Website

Visiting teacher at conference in wake of hijab teen’s death
By BRETT CLARKSON, SUN MEDIA
What to listen to — the imam or the iPod?
For families with Canadian-born kids and Muslim immigrant parents, it’s one of the many questions that can pervade the day-to-day life of trying to balance the trappings of Western culture and the traditions of Islamic faith.
But immigrant parents trying to live by their faith shouldn’t have delusions that their Canadian-born kids will be immune to Western culture and act as if they’re in a strict Islamic country, charged an imam at the Reviving the Islamic Spirit conference in Toronto yesterday.

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OTTAWA – Prime Minister Stephen Harper heaped praise on Canada’s record of both accommodating and integrating immigrants, rejecting the notion that the country is facing a crisis involving newcomers who won’t embrace Canadian values.
“Notwithstanding the debate in Quebec and some of the debate during the Ontario election campaign, I first of all think immigrants come to this country to belong to this country,” Harper said in a lengthy answer. “I also think that the Canadian approach to this, which is a mixture of integration and accommodation, for lack of a better term, is the right approach.”
The remarks, part of a year-end interview with The Canadian Press, put distance between Harper and the raging rhetoric among Quebec politicians over the limits of “reasonable accommodation” of immigrants in the province.

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A recently concluded study released last week reveals the government is ineffective when addressing rampant abuses of basic labor rights of new immigrants in the province of British Columbia.
The new study, released by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternative and the Philippine Women Centre, entitled Workerplace Rights for Immigrants in BC – The case of Filipino workers- details the low wage job cycle, and rampant workplace rights violations of Canadian employers.

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British Columbia’s attorney general has asked the federal government to look into a complaint that a Canadian immigration officer in India made derogatory comments about people from the Punjab region.
Skip Bassford, president of University College of Fraser Valley, was part of a Canadian delegation looking for ways to increase international student enrolment.
While there, he says he met a Canadian immigration officer who claimed that India’s Punjab region has a high number of criminals, serious problems with human trafficking and that residents from the area file a lot of bogus applications to come to Canada.

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Was the killing of Aqsa a Muslim act?
No culture has a monopoly on fatal disagreements between fathers and daughters
Lorne Gunter Freelance
For the past week, I have been in what, for a journalist, amounts to sensory deprivation — no papers, no Internet, no e-mail and only intermittent Spanish-speaking television.
I saw highlights of all the Champions League soccer matches in Europe, but only some of last weekend’s NFL scores and none of the NHL’s.
What North American news there was was spottier than the television reception.
But I could discern that at least two things happened on this continent while I was away: there was a terrific ice storm in the American Midwest and a Muslim girl was killed — in Ontario! — for refusing to wear a hijab.
For seven days I heard nothing of the goings-on in Parliament or the legislature or the think-tanks, advocacy groups or court houses. But even thousands of kilometres away, in a virtual news cocoon, I heard of the tragic death Tuesday of Mississauga teenager Aqsa Parvez from choking injuries she sustained Monday, allegedly at the hands of her father Muhammad Parvez, allegedly after the two clashed over her repeated refusal to wear the traditional Muslim headscarf for women.
The temptation is to write: “See, see, here is another example of the violence inherent in Islam,” to connect Aqsa’s murder to riots in the streets of Khartoum or Ramallah or Karachi over teacher’s naming teddies Muhammad or Danish cartoonists drawing pictures of the prophet.

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In the cacophony that surrounds the Aqsa Pervez tragedy, I have yet to find a better better commentary than this:
December 16, 2007 Haroon Siddiqui The Star
No sooner had the news of the Aqsa Parvez murder filtered out than cultural warfare broke out.
Some said the killing proved the backwardness of Muslims, indeed Islam, that retrograde and violent religion which subjugates women.
Quebecers complaining about the wretchedness of the hijab were right, after all: “These people” do not share “our” values.
Others said that the isolated incident was a family tragedy, an intergenerational feud gone horribly wrong, leaving a 16-year-old dead and her father charged with murder. No religion teaches dads to kill their daughters.
The media – forever entangled in clichés about immigrants, especially Muslims – seemed incapable of rising above mob mentality.
Left unexplored were the issues most pertinent to public policy. What measures can be implemented to help avoid a recurrence? If the hijab is indeed a matter of great public import, what should the government’s response be?

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