If you go through all the comments in this thread, and thread from the original article, you can see that pretty much everything to be said has been said. There have been posts from knowledgeable people, giving some of the context and background, and there have been posts from pretty clearly not very knowledgeable people beating their various drums and bigotries. About now, all that is left is squabbling and invective.

But I did want to share a little personal experience. Currently, I have I think about 8 Muslims on my staff. Two of the women, from Syria and Iraq, wear the Hijab. They do not strike me as being particularly oppressed, on the contrary. They are strong, professional, well-educated, well-spoken, and in their own context, clear feminists.

Three of the other women, from Egypt, Pakistan, and Kuwait, do not wear the Hijab (except when/if they go to Mosque). They are actually all friends, as they are with a young Afghani Christian convert (pretty bad from a Muslim point of view) woman who regularly has to be taken aside and talked to about the "inappropriateness" (ie scantiness) of her clothing. They all relate to me, as a male, just fine too, and certainly aren't scared to push back at me on occasion. That's my real world, which doesn't seem to intersect much with the world of the Muslim bashers here.

I also have a male Sikh employee. As a devout Sikh male, he wears a turban, in order to conceal his hair, which can only be seen by his immediate family (he also carries a kirpan, ie a dagger, as he must). Incidentally, he gets along with the women just fine too. Is even directly supervised by a woman, which doesn't cause problems.

Personally, I don't think either the women or he are particularly oppressed by their head-coverings or lack thereof, and if it empowers them, well, I haven't inquired, but it well might for all I know.

So let's give it rest, shall we?

Can I please remind everybody that WE DON'T KNOW MUCH about this case? The cops aren't talking much yet. We do not actually know that it was a matter of a fundie Muslim dad trying to impose his religion on his daughter (the sole source for that are comments by her classmates). All we know is that there was family conflict and violence, hijab and general modesty of clothing was involved (but may well not be all that was involved), and her brother was involved somehow or other too (we don't know how).

We should not be jumping to conclusions that the conflict was necessarily driven by religion or tribalism. It might well have been. But it might not, for all we know the family, outside of modest dressing, could have been remarkably progressive, and still had family violence leading to death; it wouldn't be the first time, family violence is no respecter of class, politics, or religion.

People need to start reading beyond the headline and sensational lede.

A good example of this is the recent BroadSheet story about the Haliburton employee gang-raped in Iraq and locked in a container; pretty shocking stuff, right? Well I've been following that story since, and it is getting remarkably more complicated and confused. But one example of the spin: the container she was "locked" in was actually the only secure place to sleep for her other than the all-male dormitory that she had been sleeping in before, which was where the incident occurred. She wasn't "locked in," she was able to lock herself in, for her own protection. Until they could get her home, which they did as soon as they possibly could. Most of the other facts in the story are highly confused (one assaulter or a gang? boyfriend or stranger(s)? very confused accounts of the rape-kit and paper-trail, etc.), and there are a slew of criminal investigations and civil suits going on, and it is hard to make head or tail of. It is the opposite of the Parvez case: too much information perhaps, rather than almost none at all.

I hope BroadSheet does a follow-up on both, once more becomes known.

But there has been a lot of generalizing and ranting here, in an almost complete absence of facts, and it is getting tiring and irritating. Much like all the other commentary on the Parvez case, and there has been a lot of it here in Canada, mostly people seem to want to grind their own axes on the back of this poor girl's story: atheism, Israel, internecine Muslim squabbles, Arab bashing, Pakistani bashing, Muslim bashing, liberal bashing, feminism bashing, conservative bashing, you name it.

I've had it.

I found this link, published today:

http://www.canada.com/edmontonjournal/story.html?id=4b0875ae-dada-4e47-8cd7-10d8e62aa614&k=93596

When she left her family, she went to stay with her best friend, Lubna Tahir. Ms. Tahir has stated that "the traditional Islamic clothing was not a major factor and that other girls in the family did not wear the hijab." [my emphasis added]

"Lubna Tahir, at whose house 16-year-old Aqsa Parvez was staying after leaving her own home in Toronto's Mississauga suburb, branded as "rumours" news stories that Parvez's father allegedly killed her for not wearing the Muslim headscarf.

Tahir insisted the girl was religiously observant but mainly had wanted to be more independent and "to get more out of life," and had asked to move in with the Tahirs in the same neighbourhood.

"She was satisfied, she was relaxed that somehow her parents understood that this is what she wanted to do, and they didn't push her to come home," Tahir told CanWest News Service."

Told ya'll so.