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MSNBC’s Kari Huus comes out in favor of honor killing, smears AFDI’s anti-honor killing conference

May 2, 2012 5:58 am By Robert Spencer

Hamas-linked CAIR talking points presented as a news article by MSNBC. “Dueling in Dearborn over murder of a 20-year-old woman,” by Kari Huus for MSNBC for April 29:

In Dearborn Mich., a Detroit suburb known for its concentration of Muslim Americans, anti-Islam leaders from around the country are gathering to discuss how to rescue women from that faith. The “Jessica Mokdad Human Rights Conference on Honor Killings” on Sunday is named for a local Muslim woman murdered one year ago.

Huus misrepresents the Conference in her lead paragraph. The Conference was about rescuing women from honor killing, and speaking honestly about its root causes and justifications in Islam. Not a single word was said about “how to rescue women from that faith.”

But Muslims, civil rights groups and other religious leaders say the conference is merely another event put on by well-known bigots to attack the minority religion. Their response was to schedule a town hall meeting just a few miles away on Sunday called “Rejecting Islamophobia: A Community Stand Against Hate.”

These first two paragraphs are a classic example of how the mainstream media frames the narrative to portray freedom fighters as villains. Huus could just as easily have framed the story as people standing for the human rights of Muslim women versus Islamic supremacist bigots and hatemongers who were trying to deflect attention away from honor killing and prevent investigation into its causes and remedies. But that is a perspective you will never see in the mainstream media.

The honor killing conference, organized by Pamela Geller, who became nationally famous for her vocal opposition to the Ground Zero Mosque, aka Park 51 in Manhattan, is based on the premise that Mokdad, 20 years old when she died in April 2011, was the victim of an honor killing justified by Islam.

Mokdad’s family maintains that the killing was a tragedy that has nothing to do with their Islamic beliefs, according to a report in the Detroit Free Press.

“It’s not a case based on honor,” Macomb County Assistant Prosecutor Bill Cataldo, chief of homicide, told the Free Press on Friday.

In court, prosecutors have said the motive for Mokdad’s killing was that her stepfather, Rahim Alfetlawi had “been sexually abusing her,” Cataldo said, according to the report. They argue that when she threatened to go public about the abuse he killed her.

Cataldo said the family strongly objects to the conference using Mokdad’s killing, which they say was a tragedy that had nothing to do with their faith.

From Pamela Geller comes this comparison of news reports. Cataldo in April 2012: “On Friday, Macomb County Assistant Prosecutor Bill Cataldo, who is chief of homicide, told the Free Press that Mokdad’s death was not related to Islam or culture. ‘It’s not a case based on honor,’ Cataldo said. ‘The family objects to them using her name.'” Cataldo in April 2011: “Macomb County Assistant Prosecutor Bill Contaldo [sic] said: ‘He thought she was becoming too Westernized. I think this was a very nice young lady wanting to experiment with Western culture without control and without abuse.’ The Detroit Free Press reported: ‘Mokdad’s mother told police that Alfetlawi felt so shamed by her daughter’s Western ways. He killed her in an honor killing, Warren Police Sgt. Stephen Mills said.'”

Geller insists this was an honor killing carried out by a devout Muslim because his stepdaughter was not following Islam, and that the family is covering it up. She alleges that law enforcers systematically cover up honor killings here and elsewhere under “stealth enforcement” of Islamic shariah law.

Geller doesn’t allege this; Jessica Mokdad’s close friend Darwin Jiles alleges this. Jiles, who spoke at our Conference, has said: “Jessica would wear [the Islamic headcovering, the hijab] it when she was with her family, and when she wasn’t with her family, she let it be very known that she didn’t want to wear it, that she did not want to be a part of this forced Islamic religion….It was Islam that caused her death.”

On her web site, Geller says: “Despite pressure from the media and members of Jessica’s family who want to cover up the honor killing aspect of her murder, we are not going to change the name of the conference. Unlike those closest to her, we are going to honor Jessica’s memory and stand up against the brutal practice that took her life.”

The Dearborn conference will feature speeches by Geller and Robert Spencer “” author of the blog “Jihad Watch” “” as well as several like-minded legal and religious figures. They have also invited a young man who says he was Mokdad’s friend to offer “firsthand testimony” that she was a victim of honor killing.

Stop the Islamization of America, which Geller and Spencer founded, has been listed as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, a non-profit civil rights watchdog.

“Pamela Geller is the anti-Muslim movement’s most visible and flamboyant figurehead,” according to a profile published by SPLC on its web site. “She’s relentlessly shrill and coarse in her broad-brush denunciations of Islam and makes preposterous claims.”

The SPLC claims to track the activities of “hate groups,” and Pamela Geller allegedly heads one of which I am associate director. Yet there is nothing we have ever advocated beyond defense of Constitutional principles of equality of rights of all before the law, against those who are trying to force special privileges and accommodations for certain groups. The SPLC claims to track hate groups, but includes absolutely no Islamic jihad terror groups on its list. So apparently advocating Islamic antisemitism and hatred of Jews and Christians and the necessity to subjugate them is not “hate” as far as the SPLC is concerned, but standing up against those things IS “hate.” The hypocrisy is stunning.

The Arab American Institute, a decades-old community organization in the Detroit area, discouraged Muslims and their supporters from protesting at the site of Geller’s conference. But they organized a competing event, said AAI president Jim Zogby, because Geller and Spencer have become too prominent to ignore.

“Geller and Spencer have thousands of followers, and are given airtime to spew their hate on major American news networks, as if they are respected analysts with just another viewpoint,” Zogby said on the AAI announcement for the “Rejecting Islamophobia” town hall in Detroit.

I appreciate Zogby’s testimony to our effectiveness, but note what he is saying: we must not be heard. So afraid is he of the possibility that the truths we tell might be heard by large numbers of Americans that he defames us — as if standing for freedom and equality of rights for all people disqualifies us from the ranks of “respected analysts.”

Although many Americans have never encountered a Muslim in person, about 43 percent questioned in a recent Gallup Poll said they felt at least “a little” prejudice against Muslims.

Note the spin. Not a word about jihad attacks and plots in the U.S., which have sharply increased since 2009, and which have been perpetrated in the name of Islam and in accord with Islamic teaching. No, for Huus, it’s all about prejudice among yahoos who have never even met a Muslim.

“This group, we cannot ignore. This is the time for our community to take a stand, along with all those who value America’s commitment to diversity and freedom of religion, against the politics of division and bigotry promoted by the Islamophobes.”

A variety of community, interfaith and religious leaders and Michigan public on their agenda, for a “community conversation about how to respond to these continued attacks,” said Zogby.

One participant who was just on his way to the town hall was Dawud Walid, who heads the Michigan office of the Council on American Islamic Relations, a civil rights advocacy group for Muslims.

“A civil rights advocacy group”! Huus does not consider it important to tell her hapless readers that Hamas-linked CAIR is an unindicted co-conspirator in a Hamas terror funding case — so named by the Justice Department. CAIR operatives have repeatedly refused to denounce Hamas and Hizballah as terrorist groups. Several former CAIR officials have been convicted of various crimes related to jihad terror. CAIR’s cofounder and longtime Board chairman (Omar Ahmad), as well as its chief spokesman (Ibrahim Hooper), have made Islamic supremacist statements. Its California chapter distributed posters telling Muslims not to talk to the FBI.

“I think firstly we have to better expose who these anti-Muslim bigots are as well as their funders,” said Walid. “We believe that the Islamophobia that permeates our country is being pushed by a well-organized, highly-funded network.”

In reality, “Islamophobia” as a concept was invented by the Muslim Brotherhood in order to intimidate non-Muslims into thinking there was something wrong with resisting the jihad and Islamic supremacism.

He says that while Dearborn and Detroit have become a focus for the activities of Geller and others of like mind, the problem is bigger.

“Islamophobia is a national illness,” he said.

So is Islamic supremacist propaganda purveyed as news by Useful Idiot reporters.

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Filed Under: "Islamophobia", claiming victim status, journalistic bias


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