Tierney allotted space to two “circumcised African women scholars,” Wairimu Njambi, a Kenyan, and Fuambai Ahmadu, from Sierra Leone. Dr. Ahmadu, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Chicago, was raised in America and went back to Sierra Leone as an adult to undergo the procedure along with fellow members of the Kono ethnic group. She claimed that critics exaggerate the medical dangers, misunderstand the effect on sexual pleasure, and mistakenly view the removal of parts of the clitoris as being oppressive. She lamented that her Westernized “feminist sisters insist on denying us this critical aspect of becoming a woman in accordance with our unique and powerful cultural heritage.” She also argued that most of the Kono women she has met uphold the rituals because they relish the supernatural powers of their ritual leaders over men in society, and they embrace the legitimacy of female authority, particularly that of their mothers and grandmothers.
Tierney also gave space to Richard Shweder, a University of Chicago anthropologist who said that many Westerners trying to impose a “zero tolerance” policy don’t realize that these initiation rites are generally controlled by women, who regard it as a cosmetic procedure with aesthetic benefits. He criticized Americans and Europeans for outlawing it at the same time they endorse their own forms of genital modification, like the circumcision of boys or the cosmetic surgery for women called “vaginal rejuvenation.” In Dr. Shweder’s view, “feminist issues and political correctness and activism have triumphed over the critical assessment of evidence.” Although Tierney himself admitted that he wouldn’t choose circumcision for his own daughter, he cited the work of anthropologists in asking, “Should outsiders be telling African women what initiation practices are acceptable?”
The Times has brought a light-handed approach to the topic of polygamy in America, too. In March 2007, the immigration correspondent Nina Bernstein reported on the custom as practiced in New York, one of the American cities where immigration “has soared from places where polygamy is lawful and widespread, especially from West African countries like Mali.” Bernstein found evidence of “a clandestine practice that probably involves thousands of New Yorkers.” She had been on the immigration beat for years before writing about this, and did so only in response to a tragic fire in the Bronx, when it was revealed that “the Mali-born American citizen who owned the house and was the father of five children who perished, had two wives in the home, on different floors.”
Bernstein emphasized that the custom was usually kept secret because it was grounds for exclusion from the United States, and could be punished with up to four years in prison. “No agency is known to collect data on polygamous unions, which typically take shape over time and under the radar, often with religious ceremonies overseas and a visitor’s visa for the wife, arranged by other relatives,” Bernstein wrote. She explained that “Don’t-ask-don’tknow policies prevail in many agencies that deal with immigrant families in New York, perhaps because there is no framework for addressing polygamy in a city that prides itself on tolerance of religious, cultural and sexual differences—and on support for human rights and equality.”
These claims were all probably true. Still, one wonders how such an experienced reporter as Bernstein could not know about the prevalence of such a practice, especially when one woman likened it to being “in effect the slave of the man.” It was as if Bernstein had gone out of her way not to be curious about the practice. But she became a quick enough study to assure readers that while “Islam is often cited as the authority that allows polygamy” in Africa, “the practice is a cultural tradition that crosses religious lines, while some Muslim lands elsewhere sharply restrict it.”
By any measure, however, the Times’ reporting has been worst on the subject of Islamic honor killings. True, the Times has done a commendable job reporting on the practice in countries like Pakistan, Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Turkey, Iraq, Iran and the Palestinian Territories, and explaining the anthropological and cultural subtleties behind it. But when it comes to honor killings among immigrant Muslims on American soil, the Times has turned its head. Most American Muslim honor killings are not reported at all in the Times, or else they are reported as “domestic abuse.” The more specific cultural attributes—especially the psychotically violent overkill of beheadings, strangulations, immolations and electrocutions—are purged from the reports, as are other common “signatures” (in police terminology), such as participation by a number of family members, including mothers, fathers, brothers, cousins and uncles, and the lengths they often go to hunt the victim down. And reports on honor killings are accompanied by outraged, defensive statements from Muslim advocacy organizations denying that Islam has any role—although such killings are popularly defended in Koranic terms in the Middle East.
In July 2008, a Pakistani immigrant allegedly strangled his 25-year-old daughter with a bungee cord in the Atlanta suburb of Jonesboro because she was determined to end her arranged marriage and had gotten involved with a new man. According to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Sandeela Kanwal’s father, Chaudhry Rashid, “told police he is Muslim and that extramarital affairs and divorce are against his religion [and] that’s why he killed her.” In one court session, the paper reported, a detective testified that Rashid had said: “God will protect me. God is watching me. I strangled my daughter.” The New York Times was missing in action.
A few weeks before that, Waheed Allah Mohammad, an immigrant from Afghanistan who lived in upstate New York, was charged with attempted murder after repeatedly stabbing his 19-year-old sister. The Rochester Democrat reported that Mohammad was “infuriated because his younger sister was going to clubs, wearing immodest clothing, and planning to leave her family for a new life in New York City.” His sister was a “bad Muslim girl,” he told sheriff’s investigators. The Times ignored this story too.
On New Year’s Day 2008 in Irving, Texas, the bullet-riddled bodies of the Said sisters—Sarah, 17, and Amina, 18—were found in an abandoned taxi in an empty parking lot. Police issued an arrest warrant for their father, an Egyptian immigrant named Yaser Abdel Said, who had reportedly threatened to kill them upon learning that they had boyfriends. According to authorities, one of the girls died instantly, but the other one lived long enough to make a cell phone call to police, pleading for help and saying that she was dying. Yaser Said fled and was put on the FBI’s Most Wanted list. The girls’ brother, who authorities believe knew of the father’s plans, took flight too. He eventually wound up in Egypt, from where he wrote taunting notes to reporters covering the case, as well as to extended family members in America who spoke out critically about the murders. Despite the horrific details of the case, and the extensive coverage it got from other news organizations, the Times remained silent.
One Muslim wife-killing that the Times did report involved the television network executive who killed his wife after she had filed for divorce and received an order of protection against him in February 2009. Muzzammil Hassan attacked his wife in the network studios, stabbed her with hunting knives, then decapitated her. Afterward he went to the local police station, announced that his wife was dead, and then led the police to the scene and gave them the weapons he had used. He was charged with second-degree murder.
The Times took a week to report the story, and then refused to use the words “beheading” or “decapitation,” instead delicately noting that police found the woman’s head “separated” from her body. Although the case, in tandem with the honor killings of the previous year, cried out for a follow-up or a trend story, there was none. Instead, the Times showed its ideological aversion to saying what really occurred by echoing Islamic advocacy groups who insisted that such violence had no place in their religion and that the murder had to be understood merely as a form of “domestic abuse,” as Liz Robbins’ account put it.
Readers commenting on the Times Web edition didn’t buy it. One noted that what seemed particularly Islamic (and therefore germane) was the beheading: “Why would you kill someone in that particular wa
y?” Another wrote: “Many Muslim-American organizations insist that honor killing is ‘Un-Islamic.’ Yet, many scholars of Islam equally assert that the Qur’an as well as custom permits grave punishment for disobedient women. The argument that Islam is a ‘religion of peace’ has grown so tiresome in the face of so much evidence to the contrary.”
The killing triggered a major denunciation from Marcia Pappas, president of the New York State chapter of the National Organization of Women. “This is apparently a terroristic version of an honor killing, a murder rooted in cultural notions about women’s subordination to men,” Pappas said. “Why is this horrendous story not all over the news? Is a Muslim woman’s life not worth a five-minute report?” Pappas’ statement itself was newsworthy in that it represented a major breach with the national organization, which refused comment on the matter. The Times gave it no coverage.
Since the days right after 9/11, when it predicted an open season on American Muslims, the Times has doggedly followed a script built around the claim of Muslim victimization and Islamophobia. This wave of oppression never crested, yet the Times has continued to treat Muslims as an endangered species, always on the brink of being caught up in an American pogrom. Every year, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) puts out a report claiming increases in bias crimes, and every year, the Times laps it up. Not surprisingly, the paper has refused to admit that many “hate crimes” have been hoaxes.
On May 12, 2005, Andrea Elliott filed a story headlined “Muslims Report 50% Increase in Bias Crimes.” She wrote: “The report outlined more than 1,500 cases of harassment and anti-Muslim violence around the country in 2004, including 141 hate crimes, compared with 1,019 harassment cases and 93 hate crimes in 2003.” But a random sampling of these “hate crimes” by Daniel Pipes of the Middle East Forum discovered “a pattern of sloppiness, exaggeration and distortion.” For instance, CAIR had cited the July 9, 2004, case of apparent arson at a Muslim-owned grocery store in Everett, Washington. But according to Pipes, investigators quickly determined that the store’s operator, Mirza Akram, staged the fire to avoid meeting his scheduled payments and to collect on an insurance policy. CAIR also stated that “a Muslim-owned market was burned down in Texas” on August 6, 2004. But by the time CAIR released its report, the owner had already been arrested for having set fire to his own business. These were small-fry “cry wolf” cases, but they should have been reported in some kind of omnibus package by the Times, especially since the paper has acted as a mouthpiece for so many of CAIR’s charges in the first place.
On the flip side of the coin, the Times also refuses to acknowledge the jihadi subtext to hate crimes committed by Muslims. A case in point is the Muslim who ran his SUV into a crowd of students in March 2006. According to TimesWatch, “The man charged with nine counts of attempted murder for driving a Jeep through a crowd at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill last Friday told the police that he deliberately rented a four-wheel-drive vehicle so he could ‘run over things and keep going,’ according to court papers released yesterday by investigators.” Times Watch further quoted statements made to the police in which Mohammed Reza Taheri-azar, an Iranian-born graduate of the university, said he felt the United States government had been “‘killing his people across the sea’ and that his actions reflected ‘an eye for an eye.’” According to Chapel Hill news organizations, the suspect told the police that the attack was to “avenge the deaths of Muslims around the world.” Nevertheless, the Times did not even use the word “Muslim” at any point in its story, which was buried on page 18.
The features of domestic Islamic extremism are further softened with favorable profiles that accent philosophical and social moderation. While an analysis of the relationship between free speech and hate speech by Adam Liptak in January 2004 mentions that “militant Wahhabism and other religious doctrines advocating violence are freely preached in the United States,” the Times rarely goes into the mosques and tells us what these radical imams are actually preaching. Nor has the paper looked at the phenomenon of “mosque coups,” where militants take over the executive committees, sometimes by intimidation or threats, and change the tone of the mosque. In May 2004, a Muslim feminist, Asra Nomani, wrote in the Wall Street Journal about the transformation of her hometown mosque in Morgantown, West Virginia, from mild to militant.
The Times highlights the gentler face of Islam through positive profiles of clerics who, it says, stand for moderation. An October 2001 piece by Laurie Goodstein mentioned the fact that before 9/11, “incendiary anti-American messages” were long a “staple” at some Muslim events, but said the attack had prompted influential American Muslim clerics to “temper their tone.” One cleric quoted in the piece is Anwar al-Awlaki, thirty years old, the spiritual leader of a mega-mosque in northern Virginia. According to Goodstein, al-Awlaki was being “held up as a new generation of Muslim leader capable of merging East and West: born in New Mexico to parents from Yemen, who studied Islam in Yemen and civil engineering at Colorado State University.” Al-Awlaki told Goodstein that in the past, there had been “some statements that were inflammatory, and were considered just talk, but now we realize that talk can be taken seriously and acted upon in a violent radical way.” He assured her, “What we might have tolerated in the past, we won’t tolerate any more.”
Goodstein does not mention that two of the 9/11 hijackers worshipped at al-Awlaki’s mosque or that law enforcement officials strongly suspected he was involved in the 9/11 plot, though they could not prove it. And by the end of the decade, al-Awlaki had established himself as an Internet jihadist superstar from a base in Yemen, and played a central role in radicalizing Nidal Hasan, the Fort Hood killer, and recruiting Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a.k.a. the “Christmas Bomber” of 2009.
Another radical Islamic cleric given a moderate face by the Times was Ali al-Timimi, leader of a mosque in Northern Virginia. In 2005 he was convicted of inciting his followers to go to Afghanistan to wage war against the United States right after the 9/11 attacks, and was sentenced to life. At the sentencing, according to Timesman Eric Lichtblau, “Mr. Timimi delivered to the court an impassioned and often eloquent speech that lasted nearly 10 minutes touching on Greek and Roman philosophy, religious history and the United States Constitution. Quoting Aaron Burr, Mr. Timimi said the idea that a cancer researcher like himself would incite his followers to violence was the stuff of ‘crudities and absurdities.’” Absent from Lichtblau’s account, but included in the Washington Post story, was al-Timimi’s assertion that his religious beliefs do not recognize “secular law.”
Fawaz Damra is another imam who got kid-glove treatment in the Times, at least for a while. On September 22, 2001, the religion columnist Gustav Niebuhr described how the Cleveland mosque where Damra preached was the target of a hate crime when a man rammed his car into the building, shattering the front doors and damaging a marble fountain inside. Instead of displaying anger, the congregation prayed for the man, Damra told Niebuhr, who obviously was struck by the imam’s compassion. What he was angry about, Damra said, were the 9/11 terror attacks, “because I’m an American.”
A month later, Damra was forced to apologize to the city of Cleveland after local television stations broadcast a ten-year-old tape in which he called for the death of Jews as the enemies of the Islamic nation. The tape had been released by federal immigration authorities who used it in a Florida deportation case, and Damra said it no longer reflected his views. Then in 2004, Damra was charged with lying about his ties to terrorist organizations, tax evasion, money laundering, mail and wire fraud, and with providing false information in applying for U.S. citizenship. He was finally convicted of concealing his ties to Palestinian Islamic Jihad and deported to his native West Bank in 2007. Even in the news brief in which it relayed this information, the Times found space to say that “His lawyer, Michael Birach, called him a healer who made a real contribution to religious understanding in the Cleveland area and said Damra was a victim of fe
deral officials who wanted to look tough after the Sept. 11 attacks.”
Then there was a three-part series in April 2007 by Andrea Elliott, exploring the world of Reda Shata, an Egyptian-born imam in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, as he negotiated the moral contours of a post-9/11 world for his flock. Headlined “An Imam in America,” the series was clearly an effort on Elliott’s part to overcome the prejudices instilled in American readers by “a vilifying media”:Sheik Reda, as he is called, arrived in Brooklyn one year after Sept. 11. Virtually overnight, he became an Islamic judge and nursery school principal, a matchmaker and marriage counselor, a 24-hour hot line on all things Islamic.
Day after day, he must find ways to reconcile Muslim tradition with American life. Little in his rural Egyptian upbringing or years of Islamic scholarship prepared him for the challenge of leading a mosque in America.
The job has worn him down and opened his mind. It has landed him, exhausted, in the hospital and earned him a following far beyond Brooklyn.
“America transformed me from a person of rigidity to flexibility,” said Mr. Shata, speaking through an Arabic translator. “I went from a country where a sheik would speak and the people listened to one where the sheik talks and the people talk back.”
As well written and incisive as it was, the series raised a storm in some quarters. While many read the piece as a calculated bid to make Sheik Reda out to be a moderate, there were many discordant notes belying this impression. “Like Arabs around the world,” Elliott reported, “Mr. Shata disagrees profoundly with the United States’ steadfast support of Israel, and views the militant group Hamas as a powerful symbol of resistance.” Elliott noted that “When Sheik Ahmed Yassin, the founder and spiritual leader of the terror group Hamas, was killed by Israelis in March 2004, Mr. Shata told hundreds who gathered at a memorial service in Brooklyn that the ‘lion of Palestine has been martyred.’”
Gray Lady Down Page 14
