America's Most Wanted whitewashes honor killing in the U.S.

America's Most Wanted did a story on the honor killings in Texas of Amina and Sarah Said by their father, Yaser Said, but -- not surprisingly -- they glossed over the honor killing angle. As long as the mainstream media keeps doing this, instead of calling the American Muslim community to some accountability, more Muslim girls will be murdered for honor in the United States.

Pamela has a heartbroken letter from the girls' Aunt Gail about the shoddiness and inaccuracy of the America's Most Wanted presentation.

You know, the facts were all wrong. Why? I know that I have spoken to this producer for months now! So has Joyce Boucher as well! Let me do a reality check! Here are the facts they misrepresented: My niece is not Arabic nor, is she Hispanic looking! She is pale skinned and blue eyed! They represented this as an Arabic family with a dictator father and husband. Another fact totally avoided...ISLAM, the brother and son of the parents from hell. The very one who promises to kill me? Where was Yasser's and Tissy's beloved son who spied on these girls and bullied his mother? To me, this was an intentional omission! To have added a character as radical as Islam, this might have given CAIR the wrong impression! God forbid!

Another, Amina DID NOT come home on her own! No way, as she told Connie that she would rather be dead than ever go back home. She meant that too! Amina was coerced by my own niece to go back. This, after hours of calling Amina and telling her to come home. Tissy went as far as to put Yasser on the phone but, Amina knew death was awaiting her if she returned. When Amina did return, she and Sarah were taken into Yasser's cab and she did not go into that kitchen and rummage through the fridge. Give me a break! One of the biggest misrepresentation of the facts, Amina was in the front seat and Sarah was in the back seat. Amina, was sitting facing Yasser as a friend saw them and said so. If you simply listen to the 9-1-1 phone call from the cabbie who found them, he says there are two women, one in the front seat and one in the backseat! He describes what he sees in this call as he was asked too. He saw a woman in the front seat, "I have not seen her hand move, there is blood coming from her ear and she is slumped over." THESE ARE EYEWITNESS FACTS!

Yasser also knew exactly where to park that cab! It could not be seen by the cameras which are on the Omni Mandalay. No mention of this premeditated fact! I could go on and on about how they misrepresented the facts and truth about this tragic HONOR KILLING of my sister's granddaughters.

And at FrontPage, Phyllis Chesler has more:

Patricia, the girls' mother, is and was a white, blonde, blue-eyed Texas-born Christian woman, a child really, when Yaser first married her. The dramatization chose to portray her as an Arab- or Hispanic-looking woman. Although the program has an on-camera interview with the real Patricia, their choice of an Arab-looking actress to play Patricia accomplishes the following:

Viewers might think that the girls really were rebelling against their culture when, in fact, their mother and her extended family are Christian-Americans whose customs the girls were choosing. Second, by failing to show the real Patricia as she enticed her daughters to come home, promised them that their father only wanted to make up, the program blurs, renders indistinct, the fact that this was a classic honor killing, one which always involves a family collaboration. That is probably why they did not include the girls' older brother Islam. He would have also visually and verbally confirmed the concept that an honor killing is characterized by family collaboration. Of course, Islam may also have cursed the producers and threatened to kill or sue them if he was included. Nice guy.

In other words folks, the producers did not want to inflame any white "ethnic" or "racist" passion by showing an Arab Muslim male tyrant dominating a white Christian American woman (his wife) and their daughters. The program wanted no part of the long, historical stench which has attended the usually false, but sometimes true allegations about "Indians" or "blacks" raping white women, and the terrible lynchings that have occurred thereafter.

But, even more: The producers did not want to be charged with 'Islamophobia" by showing what a real, full-blown honor killing looks like. Further, they wanted to appear and present a "balanced" re-creation even if they had to make things up in order to do so. Thus, they showed the two girls as plotting revenge or preemptive self-defense against their father. If only Sarah and Amina had followed through on this imaginary course of action, they might be alive today. But, knowing how American law works, they might also be in jail for life.

While the program tried to pack a lot of information into a limited amount of time, they did not show how brutally and continuously Yaser physically and verbally assaulted his daughters, tapped their phone lines, monitored their computers, watched them and had them watched.

Finally, to be extra careful, the program chose an exceptionally soft-spoken Muslim boy, Zohair Zaid, the girls' friend, who said some strong, true things but who also presented such a peaceful face of Islam. It does exist and yet--what a perfect foil to Yaser Said's cold-blooded murderousness. One cancels the other out and we are left with ... confusion.

Zohair advised the girls to take their fathers' threat to kill them seriously and to go to the police. He also told them that "once you run away, you can never come back. He will become totally insane once he's lost control of you...His honor and dignity (will be) scarred."

What a shame they did not listen to Zohair but instead listened to their murderous mother. On camera, a subdued, soft-spoken Patricia, actually defends Yaser. She says that when she would punish or ground the girls, that Yaser would try to protect them, go easy on them. When she was asked whether Yaser was upset when he discovered that his daughters were dating Christian boyfriends, Patricia says: "I don't think so. He always said that we could work (everything) out as a family."

Either Patricia is dull-witted, exceptionally passive, even mentally retarded; was battered, brainwashed, primed to turn against her own daughters; is one hellava cunning criminal; or, long ago, converted to Yaser's brand of Arabian-Egyptian Islamism, shares Yaser's view that disobedient daughters should be punished, even killed. A typical Islamist mother.

I want to know why the police have not arrested her and why America's Most Wanted has failed to portray her accurately.

I asked Gail Gartrell, the girls' great-aunt, what she thought of the program. Viewing it made her angry and it broke her heart. Gartrell feels that the program failed to present this double homicide as a full-blown honor killing. She quotes John Walsh who said: "Some people say this was an honor killing. But, there's no honor in this."

How dare he. I have worked hard to educate and get the word out about honor killings and he diminished what honor killings entail. You know, they are usually well planned out in advance and others in the family involve themselves as well.

How about this? Yaser shoots the girls, gets out of the cab without a single drop of blood on him, after 11 shots were fired at close range, and simply walks away. Who picked him up? He did not leave there on foot. Someone picked him up and fled with him.

How about it? Who could have driven Yaser away?

I have to give them credit for one thing. They had the means (Was it money? Or attention?) to get the otherwise reclusive Patricia to talk to them on camera. Check her out for yourselves. As I said she's soft-spoken, passive, subdued.

But this is also how an honor killer looks.

Perhaps this is also another face of jihad. Think about it. What if an American-despising Yaser was also interested in marrying Patricia in order to get a green card, become a citizen--and biologically produce American citizen jihadists? Might the fifth column we have long feared, come from such a source? Yaser is known to have owned many knives and guns, known to have taken his family to "Jihad military camps." At least, they are posed wearing keffiyehs and brandishing weapons. Maybe he was only joking. Maybe his annual visit back home to Egypt was only to visit another wife and family. Maybe Yaser is just a petty criminal and woman-hater.

But what if Yaser married as a form of jihad? What if his daughters were in turn expected to marry other Egyptian jihadists who would pay dowries for them?

I hope the FBI is considering all these questions.
Dr. Phyllis Chesler is the well known author of classic works, including the bestseller Women and Madness (1972) and The New Anti-Semitism (2003). She has just published The Death of Feminism: What’s Next in the Struggle for Women’s Freedom (Palgrave Macmillan), as well as an updated and revised edition of Women and Madness. She is an Emerita Professor of psychology and women's studies, the co-founder of the Association for Women in Psychology (1969) and the National Women's Health Network (1976). Her website is www.phyllis-chesler.com.