In Muslim communities, it is overwhelmingly women who are targeted for punishment — murder, beatings, torture, death threats, acid attacks, sexual or verbal abuse — when religious laws and traditional customs are broken.

Here’s a typical example, from yesterday’s Telegraph:

A Muslim teenager was kidnapped, beaten and threatened with hammers and knives by her brother and sisters after kissing a white man, a court heard yesterday.

Shamima Akhtar, 18, was bundled into a car, called a whore and a prostitute and had her waist-length hair cut to her neck by her two older sisters, Nadiya, 25, and Nazira, 29, and brother Kayum Mohammed-Abdul, 24.

They had “screeched” in the car park of a restaurant in Basingstoke, Hampshire, when they saw her kissing Gary Pain on April 1 last year as she celebrated her 18th birthday, Winchester Crown Court was told.

An “extremely aggressive and threatening” Mohammed-Abdul grabbed Mr Pain by the throat as Miss Akhtar was “firmly escorted” to the car and thrown in, Peter Asteris, prosecuting, told the jury.

The case centred on “honour-based domestic violence”, the court heard, in which Miss Akhtar was punished for breaking her family’s rules.

Miss Akhtar came from a strict Islamic family and was controlled by her siblings, but she considered herself Westernised, the court heard. All three defendants deny kidnap, actual bodily harm and false imprisonment.

Though many Muslim women live in daily terror, the silence of Government and most feminist organisations on this issue has been deafening. But now activists have begun to emerge from those communities — the so-called ‘New Muslim suffragettes’ — to challenge brutality and demand freedom.

We should support these courageous women in their efforts to escape the shackles of violent, mysogynistic Islam, not only because it is the right thing to do, but because it could be our best hope for civilising Europe’s Muslim minorities.

(Hat tip: Stephen Tweed.)