The case was as grisly as they come: A wealthy television executive walked into
a police station last Thursday to report that his wife was lying dead at the
television station office where they worked in suburban Buffalo, N.Y. When
police arrived there, they found the decapitated body of Aasiya Hassan, a
37-year-old mother of two who recently had filed for divorce. Police say she
was beheaded by her 44-year-old husband, Muzzammil Hassan, whom they have
charged with second-degree murder.

In a media climate that operates by the dictum "if it bleeds, it leads," such a
gruesome murder could have been expected to make national headlines within
hours. Instead, the story took nearly a week get any traction. And early
reports about the beheading were oddly restrained, marked by a degree of
detachment and disinterest rarely seen in the sensationalistic world of modern
journalism.

It would be comforting to believe that the media executives responsible for the
initial blackout about the beheading were motivated by a sudden distaste for
using gory murder stories to boost ratings and sell newspapers. But the more
likely explanation is cowardice. After all, the back story of the beheading is
exceedingly politically incorrect: The accused murderer is a Pakistani
immigrant who had garnered flattering national attention just a few years
earlier for founding Bridges TV, a satellite-distributed news and opinion
channel dedicated to countering negative images of Muslims. Now he stands
accused of an apparent honor killing, a sadly common crime in some Muslim
societies in which women who "disgrace" the men in their families can face
execution while their murderers face lenient sentences, if they are prosecuted
at all.

The United Nations Population Fund estimates that some 5,000 women and girls
are slain each year in honor killings. Although widespread in the Middle East
and South Asia, such murders are making headlines in Canada, Britain, Germany,
Sweden and here in the United States, where two such murders occurred just last
year.

In Texas, teenage sisters Amina and Sarah Said were found shot to death in
their father's taxi after their father, Egyptian-born Yaser Abdel Said,
repeatedly had threatened to kill them for having non-Muslim boyfriends and
acting too Western. A similar fate befell 25-year-old Pakistani immigrant
Sandeela Kanwal last summer in Georgia, after she attempted to end her arranged
marriage. Police say her father, Chaudhry Rashid, confessed to using a bungee
cord to strangle her because, he told them, his Muslim religion did not allow
him to accept the disgrace that her divorce would bring on the family.

The vast majority of Muslim immigrants do not practice honor killing, of
course. Yet the condemnation of such killings within Muslim communities often
is disturbingly muted, taking a back seat to complaints about culturally
insensitive stereotyping. Those complaints influence mainstream media coverage
of these murders, which tends to be shallow and tentative — much like the
walking-on-eggshells coverage of violent Muslim reactions to the 2005 Danish
cartoon controversy and Pope Benedict XVI's 2006 Regensburg speech.

A similar timidity afflicts many Western feminists. Although some speak out
valiantly for victims of genital mutilation, sex-selective abortion and honor
killing, many are too steeped in their morally relativistic, multicultural
mindset to condemn even these atrocities.

The condescending silence of Western opinion leaders does not do Muslim
immigrants any favors. It only isolates them and signals to the most unstable
among them that there are two standards of human rights in the West: one for
Muslim women and one for everyone else. For the Aasiya Hassans in our midst,
caught between barbaric attitudes from the Old World and the perverse political
correctness of the New, that double standard is not simply insulting. It is
deadly.

Colleen Carroll Campbell is an author, television and radio host and St.
Louis-based fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Her website is
www.colleen-campbell.com.