From rabble.ca's front page: http://www.rabble.ca/news/memory-aqsa-parvez-and-future-feminism
"Eve Hoque, Assistant Professor in Languages, Literatures and Linguistics, at York University, notes that media representations surrounding Aqsa's story reflected a "white-settler national narrative of oppressive vs. liberating cultures; it reduced multiculturalism to how 'we' can tolerate 'them' and solve their problems."
Such rhetoric was recently revived in an inflammatory Toronto Life article, against which Muslim feminists and their allies mounted wide public action, and which was subsequently defended by TL editor Sarah Fulford as bringing attention to confrontations between 'New' and 'Old World' values.
As it happened, the week this debate was raging, two white Toronto women were killed by their husbands - one a police officer. "When cases like that occur, we think, oh, what went wrong there?" says Hoque, "it's confounding and inexplicable. But in Aqsa's case it's easily dismissed as an 'honour killing', testing the limits of toleration."
The Montreal Massacre took place before the term 'multiculturalism' had earned its recent mint as a catch phrase for race-relations in Canada. The term became especially freighted and cumbersome after 9/11, and lately has begun to chafe. Feminism, meanwhile, has not enjoyed much sympathy in my own lifetime, but I see it rehabilitated, dusted off and soundly misused often enough in mainstream culture when the situation calls for it.
When certain persons must be imprisoned without trial, when certain countries must be invaded, when certain communities must be ostracized, even the vilest patriarchs are all too happy to invoke 'feminism' - or their weak understanding of it. Conservative leaders seem to have few qualms about vilifying feminism as the source of all things anti-family and awful, and then raising a feminist flag to front an amorphous 'war on terror.' It would be almost funny if not for the perplexing ways in which so many feminists - inevitably white feminists - willingly participate in such posturing. The sound heard from mainstream feminist camps in the wake of Aqsa's murder was a combination of racist muttering and bewildering silence."
A great article from rabble's front page.