Waleed Aly Talks Sense on "Honour Killings"

This blog is normally no fan of Melbourne Lawyer Waleed Aly, Executive Member of the Islamic Council of Victoria and sometime spokesman for pandering to Muhammadan sensibilities. But this article, makes a great deal of common sense:

VERY little of what I was taught in my second-year criminal law class remains in my memory, but I will never forget the day we encountered R v Dincer. This was a homicide case in which a man became so enraged with his daughter's premarital relationship that he killed her.

[...]

Dincer's lawyers implored the jury to consider how offensive his daughter's conduct would have been to her father. They argued that an ordinary Turkish Muslim might be provoked to execute their daughter in these circumstances, and that accordingly, his crime should be reduced from murder to manslaughter. Worst of all, it worked. A rotten exploitation of a rotten defence.

The Common Law doctrine of Provocation was used to justify obnoxious cultural practices that must be seen as simply wrong in any functioning society. Aly considers the recent case of MSK in which Senior Counsel for the convicted rapist blamed cultural and religious influences for his client's brutality. According to Aly:

It won't do. No law or moral code of decency, least of all an Islamic one, tolerates the deplorable murder or rape of people, irrespective of the culture or religion of the assailant. One must sink to the depths of egotism and immorality to lay the blame for their barbaric criminality at the door of a rich cultural tradition, or worse still, God.

Credit where credit's due. In this instance, Aly is right.