A note about the murder of a Coptic Christian family last month in a possible revenge killing for their proselytizing activity among Muslims:
After the Hudson County Prosecutor Edward DeFazio stated that “the FBI does not think that, based on the information gleaned from the scene, it’s based on religious extremism,” the situation looked exceedingly bleak: there were numerous reasons to suspect that important leads were not being investigated, and that the Prosecutors Office was bowing to pressure from jittery officials, American Muslim advocacy groups, and possibly even the Egyptian Consulate to soft-pedal the case.
But then the relatives of the slain family held a press conference. The Rev. Dr. Keith Roderick of the Coalition for the Defense of Human Rights declared: “The central issue here should not be about communal disputes, but the fact that the perpetrators of this vicious crime are still at large. To avoid pursuit of what may be the most obvious motive of the murder for fear of maligning one part of the Jersey City community or creating a backlash against that community is irresponsible.”
And lo and behold, things started moving. Almost a month after I filed a report, I was contacted today by an investigator with the Prosecutors Office, asking about what I had learned from my conversations with a close friend of the Armanious family and others. I am glad to know that this information has not fallen through the cracks, and is in fact being investigated; soon, I believe, it will begin to come to light. And I have heard from others that there has finally been movement on other leads we feared had been lost or ignored.
The lesson here is that public pressure works. Maybe it’s just coincidence that I got a call after the press conference, and not before. Maybe it isn’t. But America is still a relatively open system, and the more we can draw public attention to injustice, the better chance there is that justice will come. And that, indeed — drawing attention to the depredations of jihad violence and Sharia, in the name of universal human rights — is the purpose of Jihad Watch.