This morning the BBC reported as follows: “Certain communities in Britain are not reporting honour killings to the police.” Which, being interpreted, means, “Some Muslims murder members of their own families.” I confess, I had the impression that, disquieting as this fact is, the number of murders was very few. But police forces have revealed the tally: 2823 murders – sorry, honour killings – in Britain. And there I was – and I imagine many others believed as I did – thinking these appalling crimes were few and far between perpetrated by, to use the cliche, “the occasional bad apple.” But how many bad apples do we count before we discard the whole barrel?

The wickedness is compounded by the fact that these thousands of known murders are not only not reported to the police, but the murderers are being celebrated within the…do we call it “community” or “ghetto”? Not that there is any excuse for unlawful killing, but perhaps we should pause to ask what it is that the victims are doing to deserve – and that’s not the right word either – to be bumped off? The victims are mainly young Muslim girls who have committed the heinous crime of finding a non-Muslim boyfriend.

It is at times like this that I recall former Archbishop Rowan Williams’ suggestion that it would be nice to run a little sharia in our country alongside the traditional British legal system.

What I’d like to know is why the whole country is not in uproar against this scandalous disgrace? First of all because the media choose not to give prominence to the issue. And why not? Imagine the outcry if indigenous white middle class families in the stockbroker belt were slaughtering their offspring on anything approaching this scale. But the principal reason why prominence is not given to this widespread evil is because our rulers and the mass media have conspired in a decision that the overwhelming necessity is that the population at large must not on any account criticise Muslims. There is even a formal term coined to describe such criticism or disapproval: Islamophobia.

Now a phobia is defined as an irrational fear. But there’s nothing irrational about fearing the presence in our country of a minority of perverted religionists who murder the innocent and then rejoice that in so doing they are obeying the will of God.