By Haroon Siddiqui

TORONTO, ONTARIO, CANADA — 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?

Violence against women knows no bounds of race, religion, culture or class.

The Parvez murder was also a clash of immigrants’ old country cultural/religious values versus their children’s evolving ones in Canada.

That has been so throughout our history and will be in the future.

Intergenerational clashes, too, transcend race, religion and ethnicity, notes Vivian Rakoff, former director of the Clarke Institute of Psychiatry, and an eminent author.

“It’s the story of almost every single immigrant group adhering to the strict values of their past or indeed their present. I’ve heard this from Greek families, Italian families where the daughter wants to go and be with friends on the Yonge St. strip and the father calls her a whore and kicks her out and she gets beaten up.”

The Parvez case parallels one in British Columbia, where a Sikh was convicted two years ago of killing his daughter for pursuing an interracial relationship.

The law will take its course in the Mississauga case as well.

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Note: Haroon Siddiqui, the Star’s editorial page editor emeritus, appears Thursday in World & Comment and Sunday in the A section.

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