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Don’t Look! You Might See What’s There

Here we go again: Authorities are saying that they are not treating the shooting of three people in Mission as an attempted “honor killing.” The suspect Talal Nimer is facing attempted murder charges after shooting his estranged wife, their daughter and their daughter’s boyfriend. Mission police the gunman’s Muslim faith did not play a role […]

Here we go again:

Authorities are saying that they are not treating the shooting of three people in Mission as an attempted “honor killing.”

The suspect Talal Nimer is facing attempted murder charges after shooting his estranged wife, their daughter and their daughter’s boyfriend.

Mission police the gunman’s Muslim faith did not play a role in their investigation.

But when quizzed on why he did it, the Lebanese man admitted that he didn’t like that his daughter was dating someone who’s not Muslim.

The story quotes cops as saying there are other reasons that help explain why the alleged shooter did what he did. No doubt there are. But why, aside from political correctness, would you rule out religious belief as a contributing factor?

A few years back, when a Muslim cabdriver allegedly shot and killed his two teenage daughters in an honor killing — he thought they were becoming too Westernized, bringing shame to the family — a number of people said you can’t blame the man’s religion for that. But according to a friend who was at the mosque funeral for the girls, the imam told the congregation in his sermon that the lesson of this tragedy is clear: Muslim parents, you need to have better control of your children.

It would not be fair or accurate to blame “Islam” for what that man (who is still on the run) did to his kids. But it would be idiotic to ignore the role that the kind of Islam that man may have practiced, and the kind of Islam his particular community taught, played in forming his murderous mindset.

Religion motivates lots of things — good deeds as well as bad. Are we only supposed to focus on the good things inspired by religion, and not the bad? If these police were investigating the death of the snake-handling preacher who expired after having been bitten by his reptilian prayer partner a couple of weeks ago, would they be satisfied to say that the man died because of his unsafe herpetological techniques, and leave it at that?

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