Americans and Europeans have learned at least one unpleasant truth about unfettered immigration, even if government officials don’t want to admit it: many of the immigrants are criminals. European jails are full of North African Muslims. American jails are full of Mexicans and other Hispanic illegal aliens. Unhappily, however, another crime related to immigration is growing in the United States and Canada: honor killing.
The story of Rifqa Bary highlights the problem, but thankfully, the “honorable” murder has not occurred.
Honor killing is that Muslim practice of killing women because they misbehave. They might not want to wear the hijab, or Muslim headscarf. Perhaps they are “too” Western. Maybe a woman is dating the wrong boy. She could be a rape victim. Whatever the case, husbands, fathers, and brothers, sometimes assisted by women in the family, routinely kill wives, daughters, and sisters.
Young Rifqa, 17, is a convert to Christianity. She is an honor student and cheerleader at a high school. She escaped her family in Columbus, Ohio, and fled to Florida when she became convinced her father, having learned of her conversion, would kill her. She often went to school, a friend says, bearing the bruises of beatings at home.
Says Rifqa, “I had a laptop and he took that laptop and waved it in the air and he was about to beat me with it, and he said, ‘If you have this Jesus in your heart, you’re dead to me. You’re not my daughter.… I will kill you.’” As well, Rifqa says, “I can’t go back Ohio. You guys don’t understand.… I’ll die within a week.” Islamic defenders of the father say a “cult” brainwashed the girl, although her MySpace page shows she converted four years before she met her rescuers, a pastor and his wife. She is scheduled to appear in juvenile court in Orlando on August 21.
Rifqa is attempting to escape a fate that has been visited upon many other Muslim females. A few months ago, the media did what it could to suppress the truth about Muzzammil Hassan. Police in Buffalo, New York, allege that he beheaded his wife. The one question the media wanted to ignore was whether it was an honor killing, and so Hassan’s “money woes” became the story. In other words, he was stressed about the checkbook and therefore killed his wife. Most men stressed that way commit suicide, but in any event the truth eventually surfaced. Mrs. Hassan suffered years of beatings and abuse at the hands of her husband. The black humor of the story was that Hassan had started a cable channel, Bridges TV, that sought to combat negative “stereotypes” of his coreligionists.
In 2008, Yaser Abdel Said murdered his daughters Sarah and Amina, 17 and 18. In 1998, police investigated him for sexually abusing them, and schoolmates discussed his campaign of terror against them. He kicked Amina in the face over her choice of a boyfriend. Like Rifqa, Amina went to school with clear signs of physical abuse. Said is on the FBI’s Most Wanted List.
In 2007, Canadians witnessed the case of Aqsa Parvez. While Rifqa’s father only smashed her in the face for refusing to wear the hijab, Muhammed Parvez strangled Aqsa. According to Front Page online magazine, the media tried to cover up the religious aspect of this crime as well: the Toronto Star “disgracefully hid its own head in the sand“ and “avoided tackling head-on the issue of Muslim male intolerance and violence toward female family members who wish to establish their independence and lead their own lives. Instead, the Star published a story that, incredibly, accuses a supposedly racist Canadian society for being equally responsible for the cultural ‘tension’ in Muslim families concerning the issue of head coverings.”
Again, these crimes are spreading across Europe, as The New American reported in July:
Honor killings are so widespread that European police forces convened a meeting in The Hague in 2004 to discuss them. As Der Speigel reported, “The Turkish women’s organization Papatya has documented 40 instances of honor killings in Germany since 1996. Examples include a Darmstadt girl whose two brothers pummeled her to death with a hockey stick in April 2004 after they learned she had slept with her boyfriend. In Augsburg in April [2005], a man stabbed his wife and seven-year-old daughter because the wife was having an affair. In December 2003, a Tuebingen father strangled his 16-year-old daughter and threw her body into a lake because she had a boyfriend.”
In its article from 2006, the Globe reported that police in Germany and England are investigating cold-case murders. In 2005 alone, eight women in Berlin were murdered suspiciously, along with nearly 50 in the six years before the Globe article was published. In 2005, British police reclassified 18 murders as honor killings: “Scotland Yard has reopened probes into 109 suspicious deaths, covering a 10-year span, that seem to have been family conspiracies to kill Moslem women.” London’s metropolitan police began reviewing files as well. In 2004, they began reinvestigating 52 murders in London and 65 across England and Wales.
The common thread running through all these stories, of course, is Islam, which George Bush famously labeled the religion of peace just days after September 11, 2001. Sadly, like Mr. Bush, most Americans and Europeans, as Rifqa rightly avers, don’t understand Islam.
They’ve threatened to kill me. I don’t know if you know about honor killing.… You guys don’t understand. Islam is very different than you guys think. They have to kill me. My blood is now halal, which means that because I am now a Christian, I’m from a Muslim background, it’s an honor. If they love God more than me, they have to do this. And I’m fighting for my life, you guys don’t understand. You don’t understand.
Americans cannot understand this because they cannot imagine it. They cannot imagine that such misogyny is woven into the fabric of Islam. They cannot imagine a father’s killing his daughter for apostasy or a brother’s killing his sister for dating the wrong boy. They cannot comprehend that the rape of an Muslim woman brings shame not upon the rapist but upon the victim and her family. But this is what many Muslims believe.
More uncontrolled immigration, anyone?
AP Images: Rifqa Bary’s father Mohamed Bary and his wife Aysha.
