It was as swift and brutal an honor murder as any among the dozens committed in Germany over the years but with two noticeable differences.

First hit with baseball bats over the head by two Muslim men, the victim fell to the ground and was then viciously kicked to death. However, instead of the usual, crumpled form of a Muslim female lying lifeless before her attackers, who were out to restore their twisted notion of “honor”, the unfortunate victim this time round was male – and German.

While more western societies are waking up to the harsh and brutal reality of honor killings perpetrated against Muslim girls and women living in their midst, less attention has been paid to the fact that males are also subjected to this horrific and savage custom. This is probably because the numbers of men killed for reasons of “honor” are not nearly as high as those for Muslim women, about 48 of whom have perished in Germany alone between 1996 and 2006.

As well, some of the murdered males are also not Muslim and not from the Middle East or any Muslim country for that matter. These victims are sometimes killed for racial and/or religious reasons, which the liberal media do not like to report, let alone admit. In their eyes, only native European cultures can be racist and never the ethnic minorities.

But what the male victims of honor killings all seem to have in common, besides their gender, is that they were involved in a relationship or friendship, often secret or forbidden, with a Muslim woman. Such was the case with Yvan Schneider, who was only nineteen when he met a horrific death at the hands of his two, baseball bat-wielding assailants.

One of the killers, a Turkish-German named Deniz Eroglu, 20, is currently on trial for this male “honor” murder, which, German police say, is unprecedented in its savagery.

Schneider was a soccer-loving teenager, living in the town of Rommelshausen, when he got to know a teenaged Muslim girl named Sessen, whose parents had immigrated to Germany from Eritrea. So when Sessen telephoned him one day, asking him to meet her to help with school work, the German teen readily agreed. But it was this call, made at Eroglu’s demand, which set up the ambush that resulted in the innocent youth’s death.

What Schneider did not know was that Sessen had taken up with Eroglu, the murder plot’s ringleader, who now regarded the Eritrean female as his personal property. According to court testimony, the very jealous and controlling Turkish-German had forced the teenage girl to cut off contact with everyone but him and to reveal through threats of violence the names of any boys, with whom she had earlier been friendly.

Armed with this information, Eroglu then drew up a hit list of seven males with Schneider’s at the top, since the girl had told him the young German student had taken her virginity. This losing of her hymen to Schneider, the court was told, threw Eroglu into a frenzied, murderous rage. Since Muslim culture places such a high, obsessive value on female chastity, the price to be paid for the Eritrean girl’s missing, flimsy membrane, which is somehow supposed to define her “honor”, was Schneider’s life.

But extinguishing Schneider’s young life in such brutal fashion was still not enough for the depraved Eroglu. In his unrelenting savagery and ferocity of intolerance, he took the German’s battered corpse to his apartment where it was sawn into pieces and disposed of with the help of his father, who is also now facing charges. The limbs and head were cemented into flower pots before being dumped into a river, while the torso was disposed of in a wooded area.

In court, Eroglu’s lawyers are attempting to obtain a milder sentence for their client by saying the murder was the result of a deprived family background and a psychotic disturbance, for which psychiatric help is needed.

However, the Turkish-German feminist and author, Necla Kelek, strongly disagrees, calling the killing of Yvan Schneider “a cold-blooded, planned honor murder”, saying a mild sentence would be a “scandal of justice.” Eroglu, she went on to say, was brought up in “the spirit of Sharia law”, according to which the men are responsible for the purity of their women, mothers and sisters.

“Deniz regarded Sessen as his property, who was dishonoured and ‘dirtied’ by the German youth,” Kelek told a German newspaper. “The Islamic ‘law of revenge’ knows as atonement only pain or death in order to wash away the foulness.”

The testimony of one of Eroglu’s fellow jail inmates confirms Kelek’s analysis. In his courtroom testimony, he said Eroglu had told him he had only wanted to knock Schneider unconscious with the baseball bats and then take him to a warehouse his father was renting and torture him to death there. The prisoner also added Eroglu had related he is only pretending to be psychotic at his interrogations in order to get a reduced sentence.

While the Schneider case may be the most sensational male honor murder in Germany, there have been others. In another, current murder trial in Berlin, the prosecution is accusing two men of Turkish background, aged 21 and 24, of having shot and killed a Greek man, 21, because he was involved in a relationship with a cousin of one of the defendants.

According to the prosecution, the cousin’s family, who never approved of the relationship, believed the Greek youth had not only “dirtied” their daughter’s honor but stood in the way of an arranged marriage to another Turk. The two accused are claiming self-defence, saying the murder victim had attacked them with a knife.

Besides those resulting in death, there were also several attempted male honor murders in both Germany and France last year.

In Munich, A Turkish father tried to kill both his 18-year-old daughter and her German boyfriend on a busy downtown street in broad daylight because he did not like his daughter having a relationship with a German. Police intervention saved the girl’s life only at the last moment.

Also in Munich, a father, mother and son kidnapped a nineteen-year-old German youth who was living with their twenty-year-old daughter. She had moved out against their will and was living with her chosen partner. The young woman’s family wanted the boyfriend to divulge her whereabouts or the father said he would kill him. The youth managed to escape at a gas station.

A similar kidnapping occurred last year in France where, French police believe, they averted a male honor murder.

Four brothers, originally from Morocco, kidnapped another young Moroccan from the parking lot of his work place for conducting a relationship with their sister, which, they believed, harmed their family’s reputation. A police helicopter followed their car to the Spanish border where officials found an axe and chopping block in the car’s trunk. The brothers were taking the boyfriend, whom they had beaten, back to Morocco by ferry for “an explanation.” Two other sisters received jail sentences in this case for threatening their “dishonoured” sister with death and other forms of violence.

Until sectors of the Muslim community realizes there is much more involved to “honor” than a woman guarding her genitals, then the barbaric practice of both male and female honor murders will continue. Only when some Muslim men understand that honor involves respecting a woman’s dignity, her individuality, and her free will, that it denies the exploitation of women and girls by such practices as forced marriages, only then will these savage killings of both men and women finally stop.

But since words like human rights and freedom of choice have no meaning, and are even despised, among these men of “honor”, and some women too, the horror and tragedy of honor murders are, unfortunately, here in the West to stay.