Longtime Jihad Watch readers are familiar with the horrifying case of Amina and Sarah Said, whom their father Yaser Said murdered in an honor killing in Texas on New Year’s Day in 2008.
“Trotter added that Amina and Sarah had nowhere to turn in Texas. No one understood that a teenager saying ‘My Dad is going to kill me’ is a serious cry for help, not adolescent drama.”
No one understood it because no one knows much of anything about honor killing. If they have heard of it at all, they think of it as something that is a weird cultural practice done by people in far-off countries. If authorities in Texas had been aware of how many Muslim countries tolerate it, and how it is justified in Islamic law, they might have taken the Said girls’ claims more seriously.
Muslims commit 91 percent of honor killings worldwide. A manual of Islamic law certified as a reliable guide to Sunni orthodoxy by Al-Azhar, the most respected authority in Sunni Islam, says that “retaliation is obligatory against anyone who kills a human being purely intentionally and without right.” However, “not subject to retaliation” is “a father or mother (or their fathers or mothers) for killing their offspring, or offspring’s offspring.” (‘Umdat al-Salik o1.1-2). In other words, someone who kills his child incurs no legal penalty under Islamic law. In this case the victim was the murderer’s daughter, a victim to the culture of violence and intimidation that such laws help create.
The Palestinian Authority gives pardons or suspended sentences for honor murders. Iraqi women have asked for tougher sentences for Islamic honor murderers, who get off lightly now. Syria in 2009 scrapped a law limiting the length of sentences for honor killings, but “the new law says a man can still benefit from extenuating circumstances in crimes of passion or honour ‘provided he serves a prison term of no less than two years in the case of killing.’” And in 2003 the Jordanian Parliament voted down on Islamic grounds a provision designed to stiffen penalties for honor killings. Al-Jazeera reported that “Islamists and conservatives said the laws violated religious traditions and would destroy families and values.”
Until the encouragement Islamic law gives to honor killing is acknowledged and confronted, more women will suffer.
“‘Nice legs. Mmm very nice’: Disturbing home video reveals creepy relationship slain Texas teenage sisters had with their Egyptian father who fled nine years ago after their ‘honor killings,'” by Kaileen Gaul, Dailymail.com, February 3, 2017:
Newly released home movies show the creepy relationship Yaser Abdel Said had with his two daughters he is accused of murdering in a motel parking lot.
Home video shows Said lurking in the bedrooms of daughters Sarah, 17, and Amina, 18, making leering comments at his children.
In a clip, the father says: ‘Nice legs. Mmm very nice.’ He tells this to his teenage daughters as he pans over their legs with the camera as they lie in bed.
‘Sarah sleeps with her pants? Mmm, very nice. Wow, look at those eyes. I got my eye on you,’ Said says. The girls seem harassed by their father and yell at him to get out of their room.
In another disturbing part of the Crime Watch Daily footage, Amina is seen playing with a gun.
Said is accused of shooting Sarah and Amina Said 11 times in a taxi on New Year’s Day in 2008. Some of his relatives speculate these may have been ‘honor killings.’
Said fled from Irving, Texas after his daughters were murdered and made an appearance on the FBI’s most wanted list in 2014.
The girls accused their father of sexual abuse in 1998 when they were eight and nine years old according to Dallas Morning News.
They later took back the accusation saying they lied so they could live with their grandmother and not in rural Texas. But their mother swore in an affidavit that they were telling the truth.
Family members say the Egyptian-born father was obsessive about his daughters’ virginity and believed western society was corrupting the girls.
He allegedly threatened to kill them when he found out they had boyfriends at their high school.
The teens’ mother Patricia Owens rejects the notion that the girls were murdered to protect their chastity.
Under the guise of taking to get the girls something to eat, Said allegedly took them in a taxi and shot them dead to defend their honor.
Sarah Said’s called 911 while inside the cab. Her final words were ‘Oh my God, I’m dying’. Then the emergency operator heard a barrage of gunshots.
The Saids’ case was featured in the documentary The Price of Honor.
The film tells how the American teenagers were unable to slip free of their Egyptian father’s suffocating control, ultimately victims of what filmmakers say is a trend of honor killings that goes unrecognized in the US.
In the documentary Ruth Trotter says: ‘Amina always knew that Yaser was going to murder her, it was just a question of when and where.’
Amina was dating Trotter’s son, Joseph, when she died, and Sarah also had a boyfriend, though both had tried to keep this from their father.
‘She made Joseph promise that he would not harm himself, that when she dies he would live,’ Trotter added.
The documentary reveals that when Amina was 15 Yaser took his daughters to Egypt to find husbands.
Trotter said he picked one man who was almost 50 for Amina to marry but she begged and pleaded with her mother to come back home.
Trotter added that Amina and Sarah had nowhere to turn in Texas. No one understood that a teenager saying ‘My Dad is going to kill me’ is a serious cry for help, not adolescent drama….