Video of the Week: Ezra on Shafia verdict and grotesque CBC apologetics

Why shouldn’t Mohammad Shafia have been arrogant and hubristic? It would have been more surprising if he had not been. Just look at how Islamic supremacist spokesmen in the West always deal with anti-jihadists: not with legitimate discussion, not with honest engagement with legitimate concerns, but with exceeding and almost incredible arrogance, endless torrents of abuse, and reflexive charges of “bigotry,” “racism,” and “Islamophobia.” Just look at how the mainstream media and Western governments are endlessly compliant, endlessly accommodating to Islamic supremacist demands, endlessly turning a blind eye to Islamic jihad activity, violent and stealthy, with endless gullibility swallowing the ever more fantastic claims that underneath the behavior of Islamic jihadists who quote Qur’an to support their views and position themselves within the Islamic community as the exponents of Islamic authenticity, it really is a Religion of Peace.

If Mohammad Shafia had not been arrogant and hubristic, it would have been a miracle.

Join us for the first annual AFDI/SIOA Jessica Mokdad Human Rights Conference on Honor Killings.

“How arrogance and mistakes led to Shafia’s murder conviction,” by Timothy Appleby for the Globe and Mail, January 29 (thanks to JW):

Even after murdering his daughters and his first wife a few hours earlier, the millionaire businessman haggled over the motel bill.

One view of the guilty verdicts in the Shafia “honour killings” trial is that they were the final act in a kind of morality play that pitted 21st-century technology against ancient, twisted concepts of right and wrong.

The other connecting thread in the police investigation was the almost unfathomable, small-minded stupidity and arrogance of the three Afghan-Canadian defendants, borne out of a lifelong sense of entitlement.

Mohammad Shafia, 59, was wealthy and had essentially bought his residency in Canada under the federal investor-immigrant program. He owned a $1.6-million mall in Laval, Que., and was having a big, custom-designed home built in Brossard, a Montreal suburb. He had cars, property, assorted business projects, and had travelled widely.

In sum, he belonged to a tiny minority of privileged middle-class Afghans, both before he and his family fled the advancing Taliban in 1992, and later abroad.

From the trial testimony emerged a portrait of the man he was at home: A crude, brutal patriarch who terrified his children including those he’s convicted of murdering.

He, his co-accused second wife and their eldest son Hamed were not only clumsy killers. They were also bad liars, offering the jury wildly conflicting accounts of what happened on the night the four victims died.

From the first hours of the investigation, the trio struggled to dig themselves out of the hole they were in, weaving an ever-less credible tangle of lies and obfuscation. Steadily the hole got deeper.

And yet, in his hubris, Mr. Shafia appeared convinced they could get away with it.

“You guys aren’t hit men, you don’t know how to cover your tracks,” Kingston Police detective Mike Boyles told 18-year-old Hamed Shafia, shortly after he and his parents were charged with the four murders in July, 2009….