From The Corner
Mark Steyn, here with Pamela Geller from Atlas Shrugs
Mark Steyn is not the only one who has become increasingly fed up with the gutless wankers from our so-called ‘free press:’
Just asking, but are beheadings common in western New York? I used to spend a lot of time in that neck of the woods and I don’t remember decapitation as a routine form of murder. Yet the killing of Aasiya Hassan seems to have elicited a very muted response.
When poor Mrs Hassan’s husband launched his TV network to counter negative stereotypes of Muslims, he had no difficulty generating column inches, as far afield asThe Columbus Dispatch, The Detroit Free Press, The San Jose Mercury News, Variety, NBC News, the Voice of America and the Canadian Press. The Rochester Democrat & Chronicle put the couple on the front page under the headline “Infant TV Network Unveils The Face Of Muslim News”.
* Pakistan Dawn, the Nation, the Daily Times … Pakistan’s media seems less timid about covering a New York state beheading than does media in the US. Meanwhile, a gem of understatement from Croatia:
Muzzammil Hassan established his own TV network to show Muslims in a good light. Decapitation charges will not help.
But, when Muzzammil Hassan kills his wife and “the face of Muslim news” is unveiled rather more literally, detached from her corpse at his TV studios, it’s all he can do to make the local press – page 26 of Newsday, plus The Buffalo News, and a very oddly angled piece in the usually gung-ho New York Post, “Buffalo Beheading: Money Woe Spurred Slay“.
Oh, really? He beheaded her for some goofy clause in the insurance policy? Not exactly:
An upstate TV exec who set up a channel promoting Muslims as peace-loving people was stressed about his failing business in the days before he allegedly chopped off his estranged wife’s head, a friend of the couple said today.
Ah.
“He was worried about the station’s future,” said Dr. Khalid Qazi, a friend of the couple and president of the Muslim Public Affairs Council of Western New York, who last spoke to the Hassans a week ago…
“Domestic violence is despicable, and Islam condones it in no way whatever,” he said.
“Murders are being committed in the US every day by people of all faiths.”
Well, maybe. But for sheer news value you’d think this one might stand out. Look at this picture. That’s the very definition of “moderate Muslim”. Look at the late Aasiya Hassan, beautifully coiffed, glossy-lipped. On countless occasions since 9/11, I’ve found myself at lunch or dinner in New York, London, Washington, Paris or some other western city, sitting next to a modern Muslim woman like Mrs Hassan telling me how horrified she is at how hijabs and burqas, honor killings and genital mutilation, forced cousin marriages and the disproportionate number of Muslim wives in European battered women’s shelters, how all these have come to define Muslim womanhood in the 21st century. Yet Aasiya Hassan ended up no differently – all because her husband’s TV network had a cashflow problem?
The media’s lack of curiosity is in marked contrast to their willingness to propagandize for the launch of Mr Hassan’s station. It also helps explain why the US newspaper business is dying.
(More from Michelle Malkin, and Ed Driscoll)
He cut her head off for disobeying him
District Attorney Frank A Sedita III said “Obviously, this is the worst form of domestic violence possible” -The man is clueless.
And now for the obligatory mainstream media exoneration of Islam:
It would be a mistake to link an act of domestic violence to the couple’s religion, he added.
“There is no place for domestic violence in our religion — none,” Qazi said. “Islam would 100 percent condemn it.”
The Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences has determined that over ninety percent of Pakistani wives have been struck, beaten, or abused sexually — for offenses on the order of cooking an unsatisfactory meal. Others were punished for failing to give birth to a male child. Dominating their women by violence is a prerogative Muslim men cling to tenaciously. In Spring 2005, when the East African nation of Chad tried to institute a new family law that would outlaw wife beating, Muslim clerics led resistance to the measure as un-Islamic.
Why do things like this happen?
Because Islamic clerics worldwide have spoken approvingly of wife-beating.
In 2004, an imam in Spain, Mohammed Kamal Mustafa, was found guilty of “inciting violence on the basis of gender” for his book Women in Islam, which discussed the methods and limits of administering “physical punishment” of women.
Muslim men bring this religiously sanctioned violence with them when they immigrate to the West, even to the United States. The prominent American Muslim leader Dr. Muzammil H. Siddiqi, former president of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), has said that “in some cases a husband may use some light disciplinary action in order to correct the moral infraction of his wife…The Koran is very clear on this issue.”
In 1984, Sheikh Yousef Qaradhawi, who is one of the most respected and influential Islamic clerics in the world, wrote: “If the husband senses that feelings of disobedience and rebelliousness are rising against him in his wife, he should try his best to rectify her attitude by kind words, gentle persuasion, and reasoning with her. If this is not helpful, he should sleep apart from her, trying to awaken her agreeable feminine nature so that serenity may be restored, and she may respond to him in a harmonious fashion. If this approach fails, it is permissible for him to beat her lightly with his hands, avoiding her face and other sensitive parts.”
Why do they say such things?
Because the permission to beat one’s wife is rooted in the Islamic holy book, the Qur’an, and Islamic tradition.
The Qur’an says: “Men shall take full care of women with the bounties which God has bestowed more abundantly on the former than on the latter, and with what they may spend out of their possessions. And the righteous women are the truly devout ones, who guard the intimacy which God has [ordained to be] guarded. And as for those women whose ill-will you have reason to fear, admonish them [first]; then leave them alone in bed; then beat them…” (4:34)
The Islamic prophet Muhammad was once told that “women have become emboldened towards their husbands,” whereupon he “gave permission to beat them” (Sunan Abu Dawud, book 11, no. 2141). He was unhappy with the women who complained, not with their husbands who beat them.
Muhammad even struck his favorite wife, Aisha. One night, thinking she was asleep, he went out. Aisha surreptitiously followed him. When he found out what she had done, he hit her: “He struck me on the chest which caused me pain, and then said: Did you think that Allah and His Apostle would deal unjustly with you?” (Sahih Muslim, book 4, no. 2127).
Nothing in there about beheading, no. But the man was talking aboutdomestic violence.
Why does this matter? Because as long as no one has the courage to call Muslim leaders like Qazi to account for statements like this, and ask them about the clear justifications for domestic violence that do appear in Islamic tradition, what can possibly be done to combat the prevalence of domestic violence in Islamic communities? Ignoring the Islamic justifications for domestic violence harms Muslim women.
