A wrongheaded legal strategy. “Rifqa Bary Facing Shariah, Deportation,” by Pamela Geller at Newsmax, March 11:
Rifqa Bary is the 17-year-old girl who converted from Islam to Christianity and fled from her family in fear for her life. For over nine months now, the Islamic machine has been trying to make an example of her, as a warning that even in the U.S., those who try to leave Islam will fail.
Rifqa’s entire legal strategy, meanwhile, has hinged on ignoring the Islamic aspects of the case, although Islam’s death penalty for apostasy is the only thing that makes sense of why she is in danger.
Instead, they’re trying to obtain for her Special Immigration Juvenile Status (SIJS). And in this, yet again, her parents’ aggressive and manipulative attorney, Omar Tarazi, has outfoxed them.
This was her lawyers’ objective, the end run: If they could keep Rifqa out of her dangerous home environment and secure immigration status, then it didn’t matter how they did it, as long as the goal was achieved.
What her legal team did not understand was the nature of the threat and the enemy Rifqa faced. They were playing by a set of rules that were inapplicable to the challenge they faced. By pretending that Shariah was not the elephant in the room, they were out-strategized….
I think that’s what CAIR and the Barys want: for the whole family to go back to Sri Lanka, which was the plan after members of the Noor mosque spied on Rifqa and told her parents of the conversion. The bags were packed.
And in Sri Lanka, as Rifqa herself has said, she could be killed or institutionalized with no unwelcome scrutiny interfering in the application of Islamic law.
Rifqa is still not eligible for Special Immigration Juvenile Status, and the Rifqa’s legal strategy has been reactive, not pro-active. They are being kept busy responding to motions Tarazi, who was chosen for the Barys by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a group under suspicion of funding the terrorist group Hamas.
The worst example of how Tarazi fooled Rifqa’s lawyers was that he compelled them to have Rifqa plead guilty to “unruliness” to secure dependency, and then reneged on his part of the deal once the guilty plea had been entered.
The guilty plea continues to have negative ramifications for those who love Rifqa and helped her. Using the “unruly” plea as a pretext, criminal investigations are proceeding and charges are pending against Brian Williams and Blake and Beverly Lorenz, who helped Rifqa when she fled from her home.
Why hasn’t Rifqa’s legal team demanded an investigation by child services into the abuse and death threats in Rifqa’s home? The eligibility requirements for Special Immigrant Juvenile Status demand it. The immigrant minor must not be able to reunite with her parents “due to abuse, neglect, abandonment, or a similar basis found under state law.”
All Rifqa’s lawyers have is a guilty plea to unruliness from Rifqa, and no establishment of abuse at all. In fact, in the stipulation to dependency, the lawyers on both sides were at pains to put on the record before the court the fact that the stipulation was not based upon abuse or neglect.
To support Rifqa’s abuse claim they’d have to get into Islamic apostasy law, and they don’t want to do that.
And Pamela has more, including a statement from Rifqa’s friend Jamal Jivanjee, here.