Is This Latest Honor Killing Different?

Mark Steyn writes about the latest honor killing:

Noor Almaleki, whom I wrote about over the weekend, has died, the latest western victim of a Muslim honor killing. If there were a Matthew Shepard murder every few months, Frank Rich et al would be going bananas about the "climate of hate" in our society, but you can run over your daughter, decapitate your wife, drown three teenage girls and a polygamous spouse, and progressive opinion and the press couldn't give a hoot. Indeed, as The Atlantic notes, it's merely an obsession of us right-wing kooks.

During the IRA's long campaign against Her Majesty's Government, British officials had a cynical phrase about containing Northern Ireland to "an acceptable level of violence". I wonder what the silent US media will settle on as the "acceptable level of violence" against Muslim women. Ten honor killings a year? A couple dozen? A hundred?

In this case though the silence that is most noticeable is not the silence of the media so much as the silence of the usual defenders of honor killings. According to Phyllis Chesler:

What’s missing from the coverage (at least so far) is the usual Islamist spin. No hard-line representative of the Islamic community is insisting that this was not an “honor killing” or that if it was, it has nothing to do with Islam or with Muslims. That’s it’s a typical ‘teenage” thing or a typical case of domestic violence.

Maybe it is just the circumstances. Chesler writes about another honor killing--a Muslim woman's attempt to kill her husband.

Let's see what the response of the Muslim world is to that.

Technorati Tag: Honor Killings and Islam.