Fathima Rifqa Bary, the Muslim teenager who converted to Christianity at least four years ago but who only recently ran away, has been taken away from the two good Samaritan Christian pastors who took her in and is now in state custody in Florida. On Friday, a judge will decide whether her case should be heard in Florida or in Ohio. Her parents have “lawyered” up, her father Mohamed Bary, a jeweler, insists that he never threatened to kill her, that he wants her to come home. The mainstream media is getting nervous. What if they believe what Rifqa says and they end up sued? Or worse?
After all, the Columbus police have challenged the girl’s claim that she is in danger. Sgt Jerry Cupp, chief of the Columbus police missing person’s bureau, has said that “Mohamed Bary comes across to me as a loving, caring, worried father about the whereabouts and the health of his daughter.”
So much for Ohio. But allow me to point out that for weeks, Mohammed Shafi and his second wife, Rona Amir Mohammed, wept, mourned, and generally carried on about the deaths of their three daughters and of Mohammed’s first wife–until the police arrested both Mohammed and Rona, along with one of their sons, for having been behind these heinous, heartless, murders.
Now, Florida Imam Hatim Hamidullah, with the Islamic Society of Central Florida, has informed us that the Muslim faith does not call for a father to hurt his child, should she convert to another religion.
“It is not Islam for the father to bring harm upon his blood daughter or any other human being because of anger,” he said. “Our position is to exhaust all measures that would bring peace and harmony back to the family,” Hamidullah said. “Being angry and threatening the life of someone is not one of those methods.”
Someone has got to explain the technique of taqiyya (the high Islamic Art of disinformation) to the Ohio police, to the judiciary in both Ohio and Florida, and to the mainstream media.
A Muslim is a human being who, like all other human beings, will lie to save his life. In addition, a Muslim might also lie to save his…honor. No Muslim is going to tell the world that “Oh yes, by the way, some Muslims (either due to their non-religious ethno-national-cultural traditions, their misinterpretation of the Quran–or to their very clear understanding of what the Quran says about apostates), might actually kill another Muslim. Or one of their own women. Or, for that matter, infidels in general.”
Thus, the attacks on 9/11 were really not Muslim or even Saudi “operations.” True, most of the hijackers were Arab Muslims from Saudi Arabia but that is entirely beside the point. These attacks were, rather, undertaken by a) Muslims who hijacked an otherwise “peaceful” religion; b) in fact, the attacks were an “anti-Islamic” operation undertaken specifically to give “peaceful” Islam a bad name; c) everyone knows that 9/11 was an inside CIA and Zionist plot meant to justify America’s attack on al-Qaeda/Afghanistan/Iraq.
This is taqiyya in action.
Therefore, when an honor killing of a daughter, wife, or female cousin occurs in the West, Muslim leaders almost immediately insist that the crime has absolutely nothing to do with Islam or with the Quran; that the murderer is just one more domestically violent man, just like the violent men who exist everywhere, even in the West.
This is not true.
According to my study, published in Middle East Quarterly, it is true: Most Muslims do not kill their female family members; but some Muslims do. Or rather: So far, the honor killings that we know about in the West, including in North America, have been committed mainly by Muslims. Muslim girls and women are killed when their actions are perceived as “too western,” “too independent,” “too assimilated.” Honor murders are undertaken by the entire family whose ability to totally control their women has failed and therefore, whose honor has been compromised and must be avenged.
Only blood will do.
Teenage girls in America and in Canada have been killed by their fathers for refusing to wear hijab; for having friends, both girls and boys, who are not Muslims; for having actual boyfriends; for refusing to marry their first cousins back in the Old Country; for wanting to choose their own husbands; for wanting to attend college; for wanting to assimilate into the West. Often, Muslim girls are kept in line by death-threats and by routine, normalized beatings. They are also kept in line when even one other Muslim girl or woman is honor murdered. These murders are meant to keep Muslim women cowed, careful, grateful to be allowed to live.
Honor killings are primarily Muslim-on-Muslim crimes.
In 2008, poor Amina and Sarah Said, teenagers both, were honor murdered in Dallas by their father Yaser Said, (with their mother Tissie’s complicity). They were beaten, threatened, and also sexually abused by their father. What was their ultimate sin? They finally fled Yaser’s tyranny at home–and they fled with Christian boyfriends. They did not convert to Christianity but, who knows? They might have ended up marrying a Christian. This is also shameful, forbidden. Their mother, an Christian convert to Islam, lured them back home with promises of reconciliation; within the hour both girls were murdered. Yaser has never been found.
All the above teenage “crimes” are not as important as converting to another religion, away from Islam. A boyfriend is bad enough. Another God? Unthinkable. Shameful. Christianity and Judaism are seen, at best, as lesser, earlier, failed religions which should have embraced Islam as the more “perfect” and perfected religion but which refused to do so. The serious persecution of Christians and Jews in Muslim lands is known.
Fathima Rifqa Bary apparently converted to Christianity more than four years ago. If so, it is impossible for the Pastors, Beverly and Blake Lorenz to have “kidnapped” or “influenced” her. According to one media report,
“Rifqa, a high school junior in well-off suburban New Albany, had been questioning her faith for several months, her father said. She attended church with friends from school and later attended services at another church, Xenos Christian Fellowship, a megachurch that emphasizes small groups meeting at home….After Rifqa proselytized with a Bible at school, Mohamed Bary said, the family asked her to stop because it wasn’t an appropriate activity in school. They also told her she had an obligation to study her original faith first, before choosing another.”
One wonders whether or not such an obligation to study Islam might not be considered a life-long obligation. All Muslims, even parents, have an obligation to kill any Muslim who converts to another religion. This is why many Muslim apostates write under pseudonyms.
Now, if Rifqa’s family were an assimilated, anti-religious or non-religious Muslim family with many non-Muslim friends, relatives, and business colleagues–perhaps with family members who themselves had converted to another religion–it might be a different matter. That does not seem to be the case here.
Religious freedom and religious tolerance are Western values. Such tolerance does not exist in Muslim countries, certainly not today. Also, no matter where a Muslim might have grown up, Islamic identity today, even among second and third generation immigrants, but especially among first generation and recent immigrants, (which the Barys are), is increasingly a globalized identity, and one which is highly radical.
One hopes that the Florida judge will seriously consider the information about how Muslims utilize taqiyya, treat apostates, as well as Christians in the Middle East and Asia, and why Muslims honor murder their daughters and female relatives. Based on such information, perhaps the judge will not return Rifqa to Ohio. If she or he does, one hopes that the Ohio judge will never return Rifqa to the custody of her parents.
We should trust what Rifqa says, and consider placing her in the equivalent of a federal witness protection program until she is an adult. Even then, she will never, ever be safe.
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