Every time I see a headline or a story with the term “honor rape,” I wonder how anyone could ever imagine such a violent act as being honorable or righteous.

In the latest incident, eight men kidnapped the woman, Fauzia Altaf, in the town of Chiniot in late June after the main suspect, Anwar Ali, got angry about an affair between her cousin and his daughter.

Ali was among the five men accused of raping and torturing the woman for two days. Two other suspects had absconded while one had turned himself in and been released on bail, Mumtaz said.

I also realize that here is the crux of the West’s problems with militant, fundamentalist Islamists: that a sub-culture could be so twisted as to believe that vicious, mean crimes could be honorable proves that their system of ethics is so completely out of line with ours that their is no way for them to coexist within the same regions and under the same law. For that matter, it proves the lie of cultural relativism.

I can’t imagine that any good, liberal Westerner would defend these acts, yet it’s really just a cultural difference, isn’t it? It’s really just how some folks want to live, right? And how could we possibly enforce our own ideas of morality and ethics on another culture? Such things just aren’t done.

Our society has progressively made being judgmental a bad thing, but discriminating judgment is precisely what we need in understanding those things about our enemies that we cannot tolerate. At the end of the day, they don’t have to look like good little Americans, but those there are elements of their society which cannot ever peacefully coexist with our own.

The same thought process that allows the honorable gang rape of a woman for any real or imagined offense is the same thought process that allows terrorists to brutally murder thousands of civilians while expecting God to give them some reward. That same, warped sense of justice and self-justification is what we cannot tolerate and why we render our judgment as forcefully as we need to in hopes of proving the point.