This article is a lot of rationalisation by a fool. Badar certainly did intend to promote honour killing, as if Australia was subject to sharia law.

Richard King, Honour killings are murder, there is no sanitization whatsoever of murder. There can be no explanation for this kind of murder, thousands of women and some men are murdered every year in the name of this dreadful so called religion. No one should be interested in anything Bader had or wanted to say, he has twisted his story around as usual blaming someone else.

the Christophobic academic left are the only ones that could come up with such a dangerous idea. As Gerald Henderson said imagine their outcry if the idea was 'stone the gays'. The left are very selective and perverted in what constitutes and offense.

btw I noticed that Rolf Harris was said to have regularly fed on porn. The very thing that the perverts seem to defend.

I actually contacted Uthman and asked him whether he is interested in writing on the subject for OLO. From what I can see he was going to make a "plank in the eye" style argument, not necessarily defending honour killings, but taking offence at criticism of them whilst not criticising other things.

I agree with the author of this piece. Better to have these things out in the open where they can be exposed for what they are, rather than hiding away in the recesses of sectional debate.

Brendan O'Neill has an interesting piece on Spiked on the same theme http://www.spiked-online.com/freespeechnow/fsn_article/censorship-is-being-outsourced-to-the-mob#.U7H-BpRmM3g as this article.

I fully agree with the author. Honor killings are reprehensible, but if we are to kill any debate on ideas and practices with which we disagree, how can sunlight ever get through to those ideas and practices and expose then for the dangerous nonsense they are?
Silencing one's opponents merely gives them the oxygen they need to prosper. The organisers of the 2014 Festival of Dangerous Ideas have not only made two mistakes in the last week, they have created a martyr. How will that benefit anyone?

There's no such thing as censorship in 2014, if I want to watch a video of a cute kitten chasing a ball of wool or a video of an Iraqi christian being publicly tortured and crucified by ISIL both are just a few clicks click away.
There's also something extremely fishy about this current "honour killing" furore, did anyone see the piece about the latest Pakistani outrage on SBS late news last night? The clip featured a cast of people representing themselves as family members of the young couple lynched for having an affair, all of whom were clearly reading lines from a script in their hands.
Every time an issue like this crops up we have to ask ourselves the question "Why now?".
As Walid Shoebat says about Islam "What part of the word kill don't you understand?" Anyone who disobeys Islamic law or flouts tradition must be killed, that's how Islam sustains it's hegemony and it's a tradition handed down from the prophet himself, it's not open to interpretation.
So why the outrage now?