Posts
since Wed, 26 Dec 2007 20:04:17.
by Joachim Martillo (ThorsProvoni@aol.com)
Muzzammil Hassan, who is the founder of Bridges TV, confessed to killing his wife Aasiya on Feb. 11 or 12. Fairly quickly Islamophobic scare-mongerers like Robert Spencer were scribbling about the Islamic threat to women.
Bridges TV originally declared that its intention was to “fuse American culture with the values of Islam in a healthy, family-oriented way.” However, there were indications at the outset that it might not have been as moderate as many assumed. Bridges TV from the beginning had ties to the Council on American-Islamic Relations, an unindicted co-conspirator in a Hamas terror funding case, and Islamicity.com, which retails rabid anti-Semitic literature. In 2006 Arab News reported that Hassan was trying to raise money for the network from Saudi investors.
And now comes the clearest, most harrowing indication of all that Bridges TV’s founder was not the moderate he appeared to be, but was rather a man who had imbibed deeply the traditional Islamic understanding that women are possessions of men, to be punished severely when they get out of line. Of course, this singular lesson of the beheading of Aasiya Hassan, who apparently had raised Muzzammil’s ire by filing for divorce, is the one that the mainstream media and the American Muslim community is doing its best to obscure. Immediately after the killing, Khalid J. Qazi of the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC) chapter of Western New York, declared: “There is no place for domestic violence in our religion — none. Islam would 100 percent condemn it.”
Unfortunately, all too few Muslim men seem to share Qazi’s view. 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.
Bridges TV was hardly an Islamic station. It broadcast a rather secular sort of Pakistani culture. Pakistanis themselves cover the whole spectrum from religious to secular as well as from traditional to modern. (See Who Killed Benazir Bhutto?)
According to his biography Muzzammil was not overly religious. Because he was already divorced twice, we can probably assume that he understood that one divorces one's wife and does not kill her in the face of irreconciliable marital problems.
I met Spencer at an extremist Zionist Newton Jew gathering at a Boston-area synagogue a few years ago. I am unable to determine whether he is a complete ignoramus or has simply realized that one can make a lot of money telling Jewish racists what they want to hear.
While vast majority of religious Christians, Muslims, and Jews understand scripture through the lens of their respective hermeneutic traditions, which come to almost exactly the same conclusions about relations among women and men, the plain meaning of the Quran represents a moderation of the Biblical opinion (Genesis 3:16).
אֶֽל־הָאִשָּׁ֣ה אָמַ֗ר הַרְבָּ֤ה אַרְבֶּה֙ עִצְּבֹונֵ֣ךְ וְהֵֽרֹנֵ֔ךְ בְּעֶ֖צֶב תֵּֽלְדִ֣י בָנִ֑ים וְאֶל־אִישֵׁךְ֙ תְּשׁ֣וּקָתֵ֔ךְ וְה֖וּא יִמְשָׁל־בָּֽךְ׃ ס
King James BibleThe Quran limits male chastisement of a woman to a beating (and in one possible interpretation does not restrict female chastisement of men at all). In contrast the Hebrew phrase יִמְשָׁל־בָּֽךְ (he shall rule over thee [feminine]) gives a man essentially royal authority to torture, to kill and to do as he pleases with his wife.
Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.
Salon writerLynn Harris addresses the attempt to market the killing of Aasiya as an honor killing in Murder While Muslim.
Despite Chesler's claim about honor killings, not only is gruesomeness absent from the general profile as Fawaz Turki's account of the klling of his sister indicates, but honor killings are hardly unique to Islam as I have previously pointed out in Honor Killing in Iraq?Phyllis Chesler, interviewed by Fox and writing at greater length here, argues, for one thing, that the "extremely gruesome nature" of the crime fits the "honor killing" profile. "Leaving the body parts displayed the way he did, like a terrorist would do, that's very peculiar, it's very public," Chesler said. "He wanted to show that even though his business venture may have been failing, that he was in control of his wife."
Not so fast, says an article in the New York Times -- which, like the other pieces, noted that the couple, Aasiya and Muzzammil Hassan, had founded a satellite channel dedicated to countering negative images of Islam. And that they apparently had a history of domestic violence.
"The gruesome death of Ms. Hassan prompted outrage from Muslim leaders after suggestions that it had been some kind of 'honor killing' based on religious or cultural beliefs," reported the Times. "Dr. Sawsan Tabbaa, a Muslim community leader who teaches orthodontia at the State University at Buffalo, said, 'This is not an honor killing, no way ... It has nothing to do with [her husband's] faith." His wife was "more of a practicing Muslim" than her husband, according to Dr. Tabbaa's son. "She really believed in the cause, wanting to present her faith in an accurate light and now people are blaming her very faith for her death."
Just to be clear: "Honor killings" are about culture, not religion. (And yes, they do happen in the U.S.) Pappas and Chesler are right to put Aasiya Hassan's murder -- like so many other domestic killings -- in a cultural context. Just not this one. Murder "rooted in cultural notions about women's subordination to men" -- and stemming from the desire to "control" one's wife: how, exactly, is that different from "regular" domestic violence? Yes, there are crimes and "hate crimes," violence and "domestic violence," killings and "honor killings"; we can argue about the usefulness of this kind of taxonomy in the first place. But here, it's hard to argue that Mr. Hassan was not, at first and by some, found guilty of killing while Muslim.
I spoke with Muzzammil a few years ago about movie funding. As far as I could tell, his mentality was no different from that of any American with a background in banking and finance.
For a supposedly religiously inclined Pakistani American Muslim, Aasiya had a suspiciously friendly relationship with a local Rabbi according to the NY Times in Upstate Man Charged With Beheading His Estranged Wife.
Rabbi Bradley Hirschfeld, the president of the National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership in New York, worked with Ms. Hassan, who was a programmer at the station, for three years and said he and she were good friends. He said that when he first met Mr. Hassan, he considered him smart and charming.
Rabbi Hirschfeld said that Ms. Hassan had confided in him a few years ago about incidents of domestic abuse, but at the time she insisted that her husband was getting counseling. She later told Rabbi Hirschfeld that the counselor had told her she was safe.
“I knew there were issues in the marriage,” Rabbi Hirschfeld said. “I didn’t know it was this bad. My immediate response is horror and incredible sadness.”
A public filing from Bridges TV indicates that Bridges TV was co-owned by Muzzammil and Ropart Asset Management LLC and that he was trying to raise $1 million in equity investment during the 2006-2007 time frame.
In general, by 2008 lots of small satellite content providers were probably in trouble.
A reporter genuinely covering this story might investigate the possible hypothesis that Muzzammil was stressed by irate investors. He seems to have been growing fat really fast. Perhaps he was on an anti-depressant. Obesity as well as suicidal or homicidal feelings are common side effects for which doctors are supposed to check very carefully as they try to find the right dosage.
If Muzzammil and Aasiya divorced, he would probably have to surrender a good chunk of his equity interest in Bridges TV to his wife. The investors could easily have been threatening him with loss of the firm, and in his mind, Aasiya might have been helping.
Possibly drug-induced paranoia might have led him to kill Aasiya and then to construct a murder scene with an apparent beheading in such a way that he would totally negate the value of Bridges TV as a channel dedicated to countering negative images of Islam.
The possibility of drug side-effects might explain why Muzzammil has been charged with 2nd and not 1st degree murder.
From the standpoint of crime-reporting, there could be a most interesting story in the murder of Aasiya but simply not the one that the Islamophobes are hyping in their ongoing effort to demonize and marginalize Muslim Americans.
Sphere: Related Content
