Robert Spencer
Jihad Watch
For the first time, the FBI has admitted that the murders of Amina and Sarah Said by their father may have been an honor killing on American soil.
What can we do to help make sure that there is never another such killing here? One thing we can and must do is call upon mosques and Islamic schools in America to institute comprehensive, honest, and transparent programs in mosques and Islamic schools, teaching against honor killing, and against the idea — which is enshrined in Islamic law — that a parent faces no penalty for killing his or her own child. We are forever told that this is a cultural practice that has nothing to do with Islam, but a manual of Islamic law certified by Al-Azhar as a reliable guide to Sunni orthodoxy 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).
But what do you think the odds are that any public figure will call upon Muslims in America to do anything like that? I would put them at, oh, about a billion to one.
"First Time FBI Calls Case an 'Honor Killing,'" by Maxim Lott for FoxNews, October 14 (thanks to all who sent this in):
Almost a year after two teenage girls were found dead — allegedly executed by their father — in the back seat of a taxicab in Texas, the FBI is saying for the first time that the case may have been an "honor killing."
Sarah Said, 17, and her sister Amina, 18, were killed on New Year's Day, but for nine months authorities deflected questions about whether their father — the prime suspect and the subject of a nationwide manhunt — may have targeted them because of a perceived slight upon his honor.
The girls' great-aunt, Gail Gartrell, says the girls' father killed them both because he felt they disgraced the family by dating non-Muslims and acting too Western, and she called the girls' murders an honor killing from the start.
But the FBI held off on calling it an honor killing until just recently, when it made Yaser Abdel Said the "featured fugitive" on its Web site.
"That's what I've been trying to tell everybody all along," Gartrell told FOXNews.com. "I would say that's a victory."
Here comes CAIR to worry about "stigmatizing" the Muslim community. There would be far less stigma attached to the Muslim community if they didn't indulge in this transparent denial and claiming of victim status whenever a Muslim commits an act of violence, instead of demonstrating that they are just as interested as is everyone else in actually working to head off that violence.
But some Muslims say that calling the case an honor killing goes too far.
"As far as we're concerned, until the motive is proven in a court of law, this is [just] a homicide," Mustafaa Carroll, the executive director of the Council of American-Islamic Relations in Dallas, told FOXNews.com.
He said he worries that terms like "honor killing" may stigmatize the Islamic community. “We (Muslims) don’t have the market on jealous husbands ... or domestic violence,” Carroll said.
The United Nations estimates that 5,000 women are killed worldwide every year in honor killings — mostly in the Middle East, where many countries still have laws that protect men who murder female relatives they believe have engaged in inappropriate activity. A U.N. report includes chilling examples of such cases.
“On the order of clerics, an 18-year-old woman was flogged to death in Batsail, Bangladesh, for "immoral behavior,” the report reads. “In Egypt, a father paraded his daughter's severed head through the streets shouting, ‘I avenged my honor.’”
And here comes the requisite "This has nothing to do with Islam" section -- which claim, by the way, makes it mysterious as to why Carroll would think anyone would stigmatize the Islamic community as a result of this completely un-Islamic practice:
But Islamic scripture in no way condones such actions, Carroll said.
"People have their own cultural nuances and norms from before they got their religion," he said. "This is not Islamic culture."
But it is Islamic law, as I explained above.
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