AN AMERICAN 'HONOR KILLING' - Will you ignore another one?

By JOHN P. AVLON
Posted: 4:02 am
July 23, 2008

ON July 6, police say, a Pakistani named Chaudhry Rashid strangled his 25-year-old daughter San- deela Kanwal with a Bungee cord in her bedroom because she wanted to end her arranged marriage. This "honor killing" came not in Pakistan, but in Jonesboro, Ga. - a suburb 16 miles outside Atlanta.

When a blonde girl goes missing, cable networks stop in their tracks - but when a Muslim woman is murdered by her father, there's not a ripple of sustained interest. Where's the outrage?

... multiculturalism hits a crossroads when honor killings come to America.

... the greatest danger to civil liberties in the world today comes not from the United States, but from a medieval tribalism that's still murdering people around the world under the guise of enforcing piousness.

"America is an assimilating nation," affirms author and exile Ayaan Hirsi Ali, "and so when immigrant Muslim men assimilate into American society they are applauded for it. But when some immigrant Muslim women assimilate into American society, they find themselves ostracized - beaten and even killed by their own families. And the American public ignores their plight to protect the immigrant Muslim community from stigma."

There should be wall-to-wall coverage when Rashid's pretrail hearings begin tomorrow in Atlanta. By any standards, this is a sensational crime.

These rationalizations cover up a discomfort with wading into cultural judgment - and a desire to avoid the risk of violence that always comes with criticizing radical Islam.

There's a cost to such squeamishness. In England, Lord Chief Justice Phillips, the country's top judge, has said that sharia law should be incorporated into British law, while the Archbishop of Canterbury described such incorporation as "inevitable."

This slippery slope threatens to undermine liberal democracy and even the concept of civilized norms. America must make a stand, because many Europeans either can't or won't.

As Ayaan says: "As an immigrant Muslim woman running for your life, from your own family, I think America is a better place for us, because we know that Americans are individualist enough that they will ultimately choose to protect us - while Europeans choose to stick their heads in the sand and pretend nothing is going on."