I can't see the video until I'm back to work on Monday. My at home computer is too slow. So, I'll be back then to comment on the actual video.

But, as to the comment (symbol guy) that questions what the Q'uran really says--I cannot answer with complete accuracy because I do not read medieval Arabic. Of the people who do, a certain large number are patently dishonest, like the French Imam profiled on Salon a year or so ago.

But I have read a few English translations that are time tested and considered authoritative.

The Q'uran does not mention, and cannot be said to endorse, female circumcision. Males are to be circumcised in the ceremony known as Akikah, which takes place at different times in the boys' lives in different cultures. Male circumcision is a Muslim universal; female circumcision is a North and East African tradition which has gained some limited traction among Arabs who have contact with that part of the world. There are African communities who circumcise girls who are not Muslim, I should point out.

The question of honor killing is more fraught. In the strictest sense--meaning to kill a woman to restore your tribal or family honor--honor killing is not a Q'uranic concept either. But executing women who have committed fornication or adultery certainly is; as we can see it merits the death penalty under Sharia. So when a girl is found with a boy and her father finds out about it and kills her, he can claim that this is allowed by Islam.

He will especially get sympathy in those parts of the world where there are no Sharia courts to arrest the girl and execute her in the interests of the Islamic state. I mean, there is a mindset that feels any secular court system is a colonial yoke imposed on them by the West, and Muslims must take their own law into their own hands in order to live as good Muslims. There are those who feel this way once they migrate to the West, too....hence we have that guy in MI who shot his two daughters for being seen with boys and left the bodies in the back of his cab. He would claim, quite rightly, that since there is no Sharia in America to deal with his case, he had to do it himself. Pretty much anybody can function as a Sharia judge or Imam in Islam--it's pretty egalitarian that way. Very little central authority (hence, also, the divergent opinions within Islam. It's not like they have a Pope who says: this is what our belief is).

Anyway, that's why, sometimes, you get these weird rulings in Europe from German judges trying to work in line with Sharia, so as not to alienate the Muslim immigrants. The trouble is, it doesn't work very well once you get a case concerned with human rights.

If some Imams are saying that the Q'uran endorses honor killings and FGM, they are wrong but you have to remember who their congregation is--very low literacy in many communities. In rural Pakistan, just to give an example in a place where honor killings are common, illiteracy runs 60% among the men and 97% among the women. So if the Imam is wrong, nobody would know it. So the real villian, at least where these two practices are concerned, is ignorance.

Now once you are literate and can read the Q'uran, you find that is says you can lock women in the house and beat them with a stick. But that's a topic for another day.