I can’t bring myself to call them “honour killings”:

Almost as soon as news broke that the murders of three Afghan-Canadian teenage sisters and their father’s first wife in Kingston, Ont., were possible “honour killings,” some in the Muslim community reacted in the most predictable fashion: defensiveness and denial.

Instead of voicing outrage at the murders, two Muslim callers to my CFRB radio show in Toronto slammed me for raising the subject, and suggested I had some hidden agenda. “This has nothing to do with Islam,” said one caller, despite the fact no one on the show had, to that point, even mentioned the word “Islam,” let alone accused the religion of sanctioning honour killings.

The callers were not alone. The head of the Canadian branch of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) told the CBC more or less the same thing – that the story was unrelated to Islam, which apparently does not permit honour killings.

They are both right and wrong. It is true that Islam’s holy book, the Koran, does not sanction honour killings. But to deny the fact that many incidents of honour killings are conducted by Muslim fathers, sons and brothers, and that many victims are Muslim women, is to exercise intellectual dishonesty. At worst, it is an attempt to shut off debate.

It seems that when a religion goes off the rails it becomes obsessed with sex. In Islam’s case the obsession is that men are so sexually fragile that a glimpse of female flesh will lead to an unrestrained spontaneous orgasmic frenzy: that may indeed be true for the purveyors of this view – demented mullahs. For their sake women are supposed to wear tents over their heads. This means that when there is sexual activity between a Muslim woman and someone other than her owner-husband, it must be her fault and she deserves to die.

Similarly for another derailed religion, Western Anglicanism, everything revolves around sex; except in our case the emphasis is on the freedom to copulate with anything with a nominal body temperature of 37 degrees regardless of gender or species (it’s coming), provided the coupling is in some way committed.

h/t: A Reasonable Faith