Toronto Star: Don't judge Karla Homolka. She loves her sister Tammy more than you do
To all of you who dare criticize Karla Homolka, the Toronto Star's Jim Coyle knows better.
Karla and her husband Paul Bernardo love Karla's sister Tammy, even if they did rape and murder her.
Coyle is appalled at the raw hatred out there for Karla Homolka. So here's what he wrote about those angry friends of Tammy who would dare criticize Karla. It's a Star column entitled "A lesson worth learning for Tammy's grieving pals" and it actually ran in Canada's largest newspaper. Some excerpts:
Surely, Karla Homolka and Paul Bernardo need all the comfort they can get these days – not the kind of cruelty spat on them...
"They're ridiculous," one teen said. "They have no respect for what other people think."
No, child. What they are is human, and hurting. And perhaps the fault, if any, was the opposite – that of caring too much for what other people thought.
"They weren't her family," another reportedly said, claiming that status, instead, for Tammy's high-school pals.
Oh, child, may you never hear such words visited on yourself.
Pain and anger seldom come out in pretty packages. But this was the heaping of insult on injury.
What a lot of teachers and parents have this week, as occasions of heartbreak often provide, is an opportunity to make the lessons of the ages relevant to the current news cycle.
There's much that those young people need to understand...
There are plenty of ways for Tammy's friends to honour her memory. One, if love is what they feel for her, is by showing it to those she surely loved herself.
They'd do well to consider the sort of things that contribute to tragedy of this kind. It doesn't excuse a ghastly act in trying to understand it.
They need to understand that family violence is unique to no time, no place, no culture, no religion.
They need to understand that crimes of passion are called that for a reason. They happen in intimate relationships, between the closest of people, in the places where love is fiercest and fears most great.
Actually, I changed a word in the above. The murdered girl Jim Coyle was writing about wasn't Tammy Homolka, it was Aqsa Parvez. And the murderers weren't Tammy Homolka's sister and brother-in-law, but Aqsa's brother and father.
Other than that I didn't change a thing.
How do you feel? How do you feel about a repulsive excuse for humanity like Jim Coyle telling you that the murderers are full of love? And that their deliberate, calculated murder of Aqsa was a "crime of passion", the only time the word crime is used. And that this was not a morally reprehensible act, but a "tragedy". That's just a step over from the word "accident", isn't it. A bridge collapsing is a tragedy. Not a cold-blooded murder.
Would Coyle dare write this way about Tammy Homolka? Of course not. Even the craven Star would not publish such a desecration. And if, by some fluke, it had gone to print, he'd be fired the next day.
But not so for defaming the memory of Aqsa Parvez. Why? Is the murder of a brown Muslim girl less odious than the murder of a white Christian girl? That's pretty much Coyle's argument, actually. He's racist. Here's the rest of his column, this time with no words changed:
They need to understand how generation gaps exist at the best of times, in the best of families – and how wide one might be between a 57-year-old father and 16-year-old daughter.
They need to understand how profoundly disorienting is the experience of immigration – the risk taken, the price paid by someone moving to the other side of the world, almost always in the interests of the next generation.
The stakes are huge, just like the aspirations, just like the certainty of divided loyalties and conflict to come.
It's for their perennial resonance that stories of the intergenerational culture clash are so frequently retold – in recent times in Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club, in Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake, in Bend it Like Beckham, in a library's worth of stories of shtetl Jews arriving in America.
Most of the time, compromises made, the story works out. Occasionally, it even inspires art, brings out the best in us.
And sometimes, the worst.
Can you believe this disgusting man, comparing Aqsa Parvez's murder -- an "honour killing" because she refused to dress like a chattel owned by the males in her family -- to the heartwarming, light-hearted culture clashes in Bend it Like Beckham or Yiddish stories?
Honour killings? It's a problem every immigrant has! It's part of the great American dream, really!
Other than the 3% of Canadians who are Aboriginal, the rest of us are immigrants or children of immigrants. Have you ever heard of this sort of honour killing before, in our nation's 400-year history?
Or Coyle's claim that the 41-year age gap between father and daughter was the cause?
Is he serious?
Jim Coyle and the Toronto Star are racist. Abiding honour killings is racist. It's sexist. It's anti-feminist. It's precisely the thing the Star claims to be against. But they're not. They'd rather be politically correct than stand up for the rights of women and children.
They'd rather be politically correct than stand up for secular values like gender equality.
They'd rather be politically correct -- and for Aqsa Parvez to be dead -- than to offend Parvez's murderous brother and father.
Even after the murder is done, even as the grave was still fresh, the Star still clings to their bigotry.
And it is bigotry. Accepting this extreme, deadly misogyny is bigotry: the soft bigotry of low expectations. Jim Coyle and the Star don't think Muslims can be any better. They don't think they can hold them to higher standards. So they excuse and explain.
Poor Karla Homolka. Poor Paul Bernardo. If only they were clever enough to be Muslim. They'd probably be on the Star's "community editorial board" by now, and Jim Coyle would have tut-tutted all of Tammy Homolka's closed-minded friends.
Absolutely disgusting.
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