What Does Abdulhakim Muhammed, the Little Rock Shooter, Have in Common With Hasibullah Sidiqi, the Ottawa Shooter, and the Riverdale Four?
Her brother was outraged. How could his sister — his own sister! — conduct herself like a whore? How dare she choose her own husband and worse yet, how dare she carry on a relationship with him prior to the marriage that should never have taken place? Both he and his family felt as if she had deliberately attacked them. Killing them was only an act of self-defense.
No, I am not talking about the Afghan-Canadian brother, Hasibullah Sadiqi, who has just been found guilty in Ottawa, Canada for having killed his sister and her fiancee and who has just been sentenced to 25 years to life. Rather, I am talking about the Pakistani-Dane Akhtar Abbas, who in 2006 shot his sister Ghazala Khan to death and also shot her husband, Emal Khan, who survived the deadly shooting.
There are many similarities between these two cases, and one very important difference. First, the similarities:
— Both cases involved Muslim brothers who shot and killed their younger Muslim sisters, aged 18 and 20, and who shot their Muslim brother-in-laws as well — only one brother-in-law died of his wounds.
— Both sisters were deemed guilty, not only of marrying men of their own choosing but of being intimate with them before marriage.
— Both victims were lured to their deaths by promises of false reconciliation or understanding.
— Both victims did not want to “believe” that their brothers or their families would really kill them.
— Both brothers and their sister-victims had essentially grown up in the West.
— The fathers of both victims had lived either in Canada or in Denmark for thirty to forty years.
— The prosecution in both cases recognized the murders as “honor killings” and prosecuted them as such.
Thus, some long-time Muslim immigrants in the West and their children, who have either been born in the West or who grew up here from a very young age, retain certain Old Country values and behaviors which constitute crimes in the West. Interestingly, the young women who chose their own husbands seem to have assimilated more into Western ways and were killed for this reason.
Here’s the crucial difference between these two cases. In Denmark, the designated shooter was tried — but so were eight other family members who decided that Ghazala must die. Ghazala’s father, a taxi driver who had lived in Denmark since 1970 and who had ordered the “hit”, received life in prison. Ghazala’s brother, who was 30 years old when he pulled the trigger, (he was also a taxi-driver), received 16 years in prison.
Here is where it gets interesting. Perveen Khan, Ghazala’s aunt-by-marriage who kept in contact with Gazala, and who arranged a “fake” reconciliation meeting, received fourteen years to be followed by permanent banishment from Denmark. Other Ghazala relatives and contacts — a maternal uncle, two paternal uncles, and three family friends — were also convicted of facilitating and collaborating in the murder and were sentenced to terms ranging from ten to sixteen years to be followed by permanent banishment from Denmark.
No doubt, Ghulam Abbas, the Pakistani-Danish father, sees himself as a noble martyr who sacrificed his own freedom for the sake of family honor so that his daughers and granddaughters and other relatives would remain eminently “marriageable.”
However, in Canada, only the brother, who was 23 years old at the time of the murder, was tried, convicted, and sentenced. But it is clear to me that Hasibullah Sadiqi’s father, whose name has not been released in the media, was also behind this murder.
Even though this father had abused both his wife and children, Hasibullah, who had once functioned as Khatera’s protector, now wanted Khatera to ask their abusive father for permission to marry and he wanted her to invite him to the wedding. Perhaps Hasibullah had been directly ordered to do so by his father — in which case the father should also stand trial. Perhaps Hasibullah had incorporated his father’s way of thinking and needed to avenge his father’s honor even more than his own. Perhaps Hasibullah was also abused by this father and sought, finally, to win his respect and even love.
Honor killing families are a lot like Mafia or crime families. They plan and collaborate in assassinations, they intimidate juries and witnesses (this happened in the Danish case and in other cases in North America), they commit cold-blooded murders without guilt, but rather, with pride. Their potential victims, if saved, require federal witness protection programs just as those who testify against organized crime often require.
Going forward, the West will have to start trying all the conspirators and collaborators involved in Islamist crimes committed on our soil.
And here’s where it gets even more interesting.
As we know, four African-American male converts to prison-Islam were recently arrested in a plot to bomb two synagogues in Riverdale and a military base. Yesterday, yet another African-American male convert to Islam (allegedly when he was a teenager, not in prison), Carlos Bledsoe, now known as Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammed, purposely shot one American soldier dead and wounded another at an Army recruiting station in Little Rock, Arkansas. He has been quoted as saying that he was “angry about the killing of Muslims in Afghanistan and Iraq” (If so, he should be killing Muslims because alas, they are the ones who most frequently kill other Muslims, in both Iraq and Afghanistan). According to ABC News, Muhammed had recently returned from Yemen and was under investigation by the FBI Joint Terrorist Task Force.
Who helped the Riverdale Four plant the bombs? And don’t tell me that the FBI made them do it. If a federal agent had approached me and offered me fine food, money, and weaponry to bomb an American military installation and some synagogues I would have turned him down.
Are those who preach prison-jihad and prison-Islam responsible for “turning” these four men? Did Saudi Arabia and other such countries provide the prison literature? Did CAIR or other such groups vet and fund the mullahs and prison chaplains? Can they be charged in this case?
More to the point: Who and what was behind Muhammed’s shooting American soldiers in Little Rock? Al-Qaeda? An Al-Qaeda offshoot? The government of Yemen which legally recognizes such groups as Hamas and Palestinian Islamic jihad, and which allows such groups, including the Islamic Army of Aden, the Yemen Jannubi, to flourish? Or, did Muhammed connect with al-Qaeda and its offshoots in Somalia? Apparently, Muhammed had been arrested in Yemen with a Somali passport. Shall we hold the Somalis responsible?
Why not?
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