It's happened again. Another Muslim man. Another dead Muslim daughter. For honor.
That, at least, is what police believe about the murder of 20-year-old Jessica Mokdad. Police allege her stepfather, Rahim Alfetlawi, shot her in the head because she had jettisoned the religion of Mohammed. He is charged with first-degree murder. He shot Jessica, police allege, at her grandmother's in Warren, Michigan, just outside Detroit.
Alfetlawi, 45, turned himself in, claiming that the shooting was an accident. But police believe otherwise.
According to NBC television affiliate WDAM:
"He indicated he wanted her back in Minnesota, so she could [practice] a more conservative lifestyle," said Det. Cpl. Stephen Mills, with the Warren Police Department.
Alfetlawi allegedly left his home in Minnesota on Friday and stopped in Grand Blanc, MI, where Mokdad had been living with her biological father. But he was not able to find her.
"She wasn't wearing a scarf anymore and was becoming more Westernized, more American," Mills said.
The Fox News affiliate describes yet another Muslim patriarch obsessed with controlling every move of his daughter's existence, except in this case the young woman was only his stepdaughter. No matter, Jessica had to obey. Her mother, Wendy Alfetlawi, explained her former husband's Islamic absolutism. According to Fox:
"He was too overbearing, over controlling — things I thought that were just normal, strict parenting really. Now, when I look back, I say no, it was too much," Wendy Alfetlawi said.
He forced [his stepdaughter] to wear a traditional head scarf instead of allowing her to make that decision on her own, and when she stopped wearing a scarf, friends say he became furious.
"She just wants to express herself the way she wants and not what he wants," said friend Kayla Chuba.
Thus, Fox reported, Jessica's friends "helped her escape."
"She packed up all her stuff. She told me she put it in a bush. She acted like she was taking out the garbage so he wouldn't see all her stuff packed," Chuba said.
Jessica left Minnesota and moved to Michigan, but despite the hundreds of miles between them, friends say he tracked her every move.
"Every time he would call her, it would just seem like he had just like some sick obsession. It wasn't just like a stepfather-daughter relationship. It was something else," one friend said.
According to the Associated Press, the Muslim suspect awaits a preliminary hearing on May 12.
Just the Latest
Jessica Alfetlawi's murder is just the latest in a string of honor killings in the United States. It is at least the second honor murder in Michigan since 2009. As The New American reported last week, yet another Muslim butchered his wife in in Sterling Heights. One news account said, " [Police] found [the Muslim murderer] standing outside his apartment, covered in blood. Inside, his wife lay in a pool of blood, dead from multiple stab wounds."
Indeed, 2009 seems to have been the year for honor killings. A Muslim mowed down his daughter in a car outside a welfare office in Arizona, while the prominent Muslim founder of a Muslim television station, ironically meant to dispel stereotypes about Muslims, beheaded his wife.
Last week, a Louisville, Kentucky court convicted a Somali Muslim for murdering his four children. After beating his wife senseless with a hammer, he slashed the throats of his children. Hard-boiled homicide detectives blanched at the gore they encountered.
Media Coverup
Although media outlets in Michigan, to varying degrees, fingered Islam as the religious accomplice in the murder of Jessica Alfetlawi, Robert Spencer, editor of JihadWatch.com explains what is at work by noting that the "the mainstream media tell us that honor killing is a cultural practice that has nothing to do with Islam —- despite several facts indicating the contrary."
It is no accident or coincidence that Muslims commit 91 percent of honor killings worldwide. A manual of Islamic law certified as a reliable guide to Sunni orthodoxy by Al-Azhar University, the most respected authority in Sunni Islam, says that "retaliation is obligatory against anyone who kills a human being purely intentionally and without right." However, "not subject to retaliation" is "a father or mother (or their fathers or mothers) for killing their offspring, or offspring's offspring." ('Umdat al-Salik o1.1-2). In other words, someone who kills his child incurs no legal penalty under Islamic law.
The media would do well to explain why, if honor killing is merely "cultural," all the honor killers seem to be Muslim.
Feminists, writes Emory University psychologist Phyllis Chesler, believe these honor killings are just another example of "domestic violence," as she observes in The Middle East Quarterly. She quotes a leader of the National Organization For Women, who equates Muslims with Catholics and Jews and doesn't see that honor killing is nearly uniquely Islamic:
Is a Muslim man in Buffalo more likely to kill his wife than a Catholic man in Buffalo? A Jewish man in Buffalo? I don't know the answer to that, but I know that there is plenty of violence to go around — and that the long and sordid history of oppressing women in the name of religion surely includes Islam, but is not limited to Islam.
Photo: In this May 2011 photo provided by the Warren Police Department, Rahim Alfetlawi, 45, is shown in Warren, Mich.: AP Images
