Not for the first time, a Guardian news story blurts out an inconvenient truth that other media avoid. The horrific case of the ‘honour killing’ of Banaz Mahmod, whose father and uncle were convicted of her murder after she was strangled with a bootlace and her body stuffed into a suitcase, has been reported almost universally as if such a monstrous practice is an ‘Asian’ phenomenon. The BBC Radio Four Today programme (0820) said the reason for the murder was that Ms Mahmod wanted to marry someone from another Kurdish clan, giving the misleading impression that it was a specifically Kurdish problem. Meanwhile the Metropolitan Police have launched an inquiry into why they failed to follow up Ms Mahmod’s repeated and desperate pleas for help. Yet no-one spells out why the police might have failed in this way. Only the Guardian gets near it by reporting:

Police are failing to protect young women at risk of being murdered by their families in so-called ‘honour’ killings, despite a high-profile prevention scheme set up four years ago, senior officers have told the Guardian. They say a raft of measures aimed at saving lives have been shelved, delayed or ignored by Scotland Yard…. One detective, who asked not to be named, said that if the Met prevention scheme had been in place Ms Mahmod might be alive today. He said: ‘We started to learn lessons and then stopped learning them as a result of political correctness. And then Banaz died and that should never have happened.’… Jasvinder Sanghera, director of Karma Nirvana, a group that supports victims of ‘honour’-based violence, accused police of ‘fumbling in the dark’. ‘There is a lack of confidence among women that police will protect them,’ she said. ‘There is a misconception that forced marriage and “honour” killing is part of our culture - but these are criminal activities and they need to be treated as such.’

The elephant in the room here — as so often — is that ‘honour killings’ are largely a Muslim phenomenon. The reason the police failed to follow this up is because they are paralysed on two fronts. First, the doctrine of victim culture they now so lethally espouse ordains that minorities are always victims of the majority; so when the police are faced with evidence that a minority might be victimising one of its own (or anyone else, for that matter) they simply cannot deal with it and so look the other way.

Second, they are utterly terrified of doing anything that the Muslim community will take to be an assault on their way of life. And honour killings, the need to avenge the shame caused by a loss of honour, are rooted in values intrinsic to the way of life of many Muslims. There are the usual claims that they are in fact ‘un-Islamic’, but whatever the theology may say the brutal fact remains that honour killings — which do occur in other cultures —are most prevalent within the Muslim world, particularly in certain societies. According to The West, Islam and Islamism by Caroline Cox and John Marks, a paper on honour killings written by Mussurut Zia of the Lancashire Constabulary Pennine Division’s Hate Crimes and Diversity Unit says honour killings are

most prevalent in Muslim communities across the world.

Cox and Marks go on to say:

This can also be linked to traditional Islamic Shari’a law, where there is no equality between men and women, between Muslims and non-Muslims. This makes women especially vulnerable in cases involving sexual issues, where they are disadvantaged in a Shari’a court, or where the family takes the law into its own hands. Such responses may be reflected in, as Mussurut Zia suggests: ‘domestic violence, forced marriage, suspicious suicides (the victim may have been under immense pressure to commit suicide, or felt they had no other alternative) and traffic accidents and missing persons’.

Another book, Islam in Britain, published two years ago by the Institute for the Study of Islam and Christianity, says

Scotland Yard claimed there were twelve honour killings in Britain in 2002, but other observers believe there are many more that go unreported.

Yet the Today report, long as it was, did not mention the words Muslim or Islam once; and the papers have been hardly any better, mostly burying it as an aside if they mention it at all. Indeed this society, which makes such a fetish out of demonising men in general over the issue of domestic violence, is suddenly struck dumb when it comes to the subjection and terrorisation of Muslim women. Ms Mahmod, it turns out, was not the first woman in her family to have been terrorised in this way. The Guardian reports:

Banaz’s older sister, Bekhal, 22, told the Old Bailey how she was subjected to a campaign of physical and verbal abuse by her father, and placed in foster care for her own protection. After she moved out she was battered over the head with a training weight in what she alleged was a murder attempt ordered by him. Her uncle Ari also told her she deserved to be ‘turned to ashes’. Bekhal told the court that she still fears for her life.

Banaz Mahmod’s fate was sealed when she left her arranged marriage — within which she claimed she had been raped and beaten — for Rahmat Sulemani, who was not a strict Muslim. Mr Sulemani had it spelled out to him in brutal terms:

On January 22 2006 henchmen tried to abduct Mr Sulemani from a street in Hounslow, west London. He was protected by friends, but was warned: ‘We’re going to kill you and Banaz because we’re Muslim and Kurdish. We’re not like the English where you can be boyfriend and girlfriend.’

The sheer incompetence of the police seems to have been astounding. Not only did they appear not to realise that the Bekhal had been removed from this family for her own safety, but incredibly, as the Times reports, the officer who responded to Banaz’s desperate 999 call for help

also approached Miss Mahmod’s father to ask about her [sic] daughter’s allegations of attempted murder, a move that is forbidden in police guidelines because it alerts the family that the victim has approached officers.

Much hot air is expended on how to integrate British Muslims into British society. But look what happens when the women try to do just that. Some of them end up murdered. The Times reports that the Home Office and senior police officers are promising fresh action to ensure that the police recognise

the complex issues facing women who are accused of dishonouring their families, often by adopting Western values by rejecting arranged marriages and traditional – often religious – dress from their home countries.

Complex? It’s quite simple. Integration can lead to murder because of the concepts of honour and shame embedded in Muslim culture. The only civilised response is to demonstrate in every way that this will not be tolerated and to come down on the subjugation of Muslim women like a ton of bricks. But our pc police are paralysed by a doctrine which makes minorities untouchable. Thus their preposterous ‘diversity’ and ‘hate crime’ units are shown to be so much politically correct humbug — and worse. Britain’s multicultural orthodoxy does not protect women like Banaz Mahmod. It signs their death warrant.