The first British honour killing victim? I don't think so

The Daily Mail seemed ambivalent about an article that might have graced its first page along with its headline, Is this Britain’s first white honour killing victim? It was on page 37 as part of the Saturday Life supplement; the website link to the article was underneath old news.

I imagine the editors wouldn’t have known what to do with it because "white" seems to be used as a synonym for British. Although by far the majority of people in Great Britain are white British, to use "white" to mean British is as misleading as using "Asian", "south Asian" and "Middle Eastern" for "Muslim": the article uses all three terms in that sense.

Author Jane Corbin informs us at least 10-12 honour-based killings occur per year in Britain. Some of these must be British: the children, for instance, of naturalised immigrants. For the state to stand by as British women and children are denied justice because of their ethnicity is apartheid. Defined by Marxist historian Eric Hogsbawm as a system where, when ethnicities mix, some are granted fewer rights than others, it is a phenomenon the aforementioned white British are also familiar with when sharing facilities and services with beard-and-burqa imperialists.

Surely people, in our supposedly enlightened age, have the right to fall in love with whoever they want to, and to have the parents which accidents of birth place them with? Not when the the Sharia court is an Enlightenment-free zone, where there is "neither control over the appointment of 'judges' nor an independent mechanism for monitoring them".

Two courses of action suggest themselves: first, to work to make Britain a Sharia-free zone. And secondly, to oppose the rehashing of sinister, outmoded views on race that are uncharacteristic for the Daily Mail, and have made a cackhanded mess of a life-and-death issue.

Go to the website for Jane Corbin's Britain's crimes of honour, a Panorama documentary to be broadcast at 8.30pm on Monday 19 January

Click to go to 300 words: Panorama: Britain's Crimes of Honour