A tough job

The Cap’n called my attention to a recent news item about a Muslim television executive who set out to combat negative images of Muslims in the media through programming on his Buffalo, NY, station.  It seems that since 9/11, Muzzammil Hassan was distressed at the stereotypes and bad press Muslims were getting in the West.  Supported by his wife Aasiya Hassan, this couple hoped to pave the way to a kinder, gentler image of Islam in the United States and Canada.

That is, until the other day, when he reported to the police that his wife was dead at the TV station.  Police arrived at the station to find his wife’s body on the floor, with its head nearby.

So much for THAT project.

In the restrained early press releases, no one is pinning this murder on culture or religion.  Law enforcement is limiting itself to calling this an extreme case of domestic violence.  One Muslim interviewed says that this sort of behavior is strictly forbidden by Islam.  The fact that Mrs. Hassan had recently filed for divorce and a protective order against her husband is being seen in a Western light (he was upset) rather than an Oriental one (he was pissed off and wanted to save face).

That this was very likely an honor killing was ignored or denied by everyone mentioned in the articles except Marcia Pappas, New York president of the National Organization for Women.  Plenty of people will look at Pappas’s statement and think, “She’s a Westerner.  She doesn’t understand Pakistani culture.  She’s a hysterical feminist.”

But one doesn’t have to be a hysterical feminist to point the finger at barbarism practiced by Muslim men against women.  From where do female suicide bombers come?  Out of the midrasas?  There are no women studying in midrasas.  What would inspire a woman to strap explosives to her body and blow herself up?  Two possibilities that come up in recent articles about women suicide bombers include depression and rape.  The BBC and the Huffington Post report on a woman arrested recently for her work cooperating with Islamic militants in Iraq, recruiting young women to act as suicide bombers.  Seeking out women suffering from depression, or counseling women who had been raped and then sent to her for “matronly advice,” she would try to persuade all of them to become suicide bombers—to give their lives deaths meaning, or to reclaim their lost honor.

These stories, combined with the abuse of civilians by Hamas in the recent Gaza War (i.e. booby trapping their homes, using them as human shields, dragging screaming children to the front with them in the hope of producing “collateral damage” at the hands of the IDF), show that it ain’t easy to make Muslims look good in the press.  But it would be a lot easier if they actually WERE good.

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