Posted on 09/20/2009 4:54:44 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
A Florida judge declined today to decide whether a 17-year-old girl should be sent home to her Muslim parents in Ohio or allowed to stay in Florida with a couple of Christian pastors.
Circuit Judge Daniel Dawson instead urged the lawyers, the girl, her parents and the pastors to settle the custody issue in mediation.
In the meantime, Fathima Rifqa Bary was ordered to remain under the jurisdiction of Florida's Department of Children and Families.
The teenager, who goes by the name of Rifqa, has told Florida authorities that she fled her home in July because she had secretly converted to Christianity and that her father was bound by his Muslim faith kill her for leaving Islam.
"They have to kill me because I'm a Christian. It's an honor [killing]," she tearfully told ABC Orlando affiliate WFTV last month.
She was discovered living with Christian pastor, Blake Lorenz, and his wife, Beverly, who Rifqa said she met online.
Dawson sealed a report about the girl today, just hours before the hearing. The report on Rifqa Bary was carried out by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement.
Also before today's hearing, Rifqa's father spoke out for the first time on national television to "Good Morning America," saying his daughter's claims are completely "not true" and that she is being manipulated by people in the Christian community.
"I don't believe my daughter would say this," Rifqa's father, Mohamed Bary, told "GMA." "She's completely being coached -- I mean trained, influenced by these people. It's so sad."
The Barys blame the girl's actions on the Lorenzes and believe the Lorenzes coaxed her into claiming the honor killing, though they admit they would prefer if their daughter was Muslim.
(Excerpt) Read more at abcnews.go.com ...
"We love her. It's our daughter. She being a Christian doesn't mean she's not my daughter," he said.
So folks, do we believe the father ?
More here :
Christian attorney: Why I think Rifqa Bary’s mother is in the right
By Craig McCarthy, Special to the St. Petersburg Times
Editor’s note: Craig McCarthy, a private attorney in Orlando specializing in juvenile courts, was the court-appointed attorney for Rifqa Bary’s mother from Aug. 10 until Sept. 3. Rifqa Bary, a 17-year-old Christian convert who fled Ohio for Orlando, has claimed she’ll be killed if sent back to her Muslim parents. Last week, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement found no credible reason to believe that. At a Monday hearing, her parents’ attorneys plan to argue that the case should be dismissed in Florida and sent back to Ohio.
The objective facts of the Rifqa Bary case, viewed with a minimum of passion and maximum wisdom and discernment, should matter, to Christians in particular.
I am writing now because a report by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement has been released addressing the claims of Rifqa Bary that her parents would allegedly kill her because she has converted from Islam to Christianity. The report provides additional documentation of things I have known for some weeks but have not until now been at liberty to say.
It will astonish many fellow conservatives as well as many on the left to learn that I, an evangelical Christian, have vigorously defended Rifqa Bary’s mother in court. And I believe that my former client’s cause is just.
From the beginning of this case until earlier this month, I was the attorney for Aysha Risana Bary, Rifqa’s mother. I hope it comes across as nothing but a simple fact when I say this to you: I know more about what is really going on in this case than you do — and those of us who are Christians and conservatives ought to be interested in the facts behind controversial stories.
I found the Lord and became born again at the age of 5 and was raised in an evangelical tradition and environment. With the exception of my live appearance on Fox News Channel’s Fox and Friends last month, I have made my faith as a Christian clear to every journalist who has interviewed me about this case.
I am an attorney who has been involved with probably close to a thousand cases involving child abuse and neglect, both on the side of the state and on the side of parents who have had the state dismantle their families. (A little aside: I almost lost my job way back for trying to save Terri Schiavo while I was a Department of Children and Families attorney — I was critical of Attorney General Charlie Crist in that case then and am critical of Gov. Charlie Crist in this case now.)
Bottom line, I am a Christian attorney who believes in working to advance the cause of Christ while I’m here in this fallen world.
And I also believe that many Christian conservatives have allowed themselves to adopt a narrative and thus reach conclusions about the Rifqa Bary case prematurely, just as we accuse the mainstream media of sticking to their preferred narratives instead of squaring their passions with reality.
Early on, I all but pleaded with Christians to hit the pause button and wait for more investigation and facts. The implications of getting this wrong have pained me greatly. Now to the facts.
On the morning of Aug. 10, I was working at the juvenile courthouse in Orange County. I observed people loudly making threats to bring in the media and the governor about some matter to be heard that day. Something immediately seemed “off” about some of the personalities in this case (and by that I do not mean the child herself).
Later that day, I was appointed to the case to defend Rifqa’s mom. This was not purely by chance. As the person in my county who is routinely appointed to serve as an attorney ad litem to speak for children in foster care, I had been asked to stick around. It was anticipated that I might very well become Rifqa’s attorney.
When the attorney who had at first entered an appearance on behalf of Pastor Blake Lorenz later changed her position and declared that she in fact represented the child Rifqa, however, I was given the task of representing one of the parents in the case. It’s inside baseball for most readers, but I was immediately struck by the strangeness of Lorenz’s attorney spontaneously declaring an attorney-client relationship with the child in open court that hadn’t existed the moment before.
That sense of strangeness remains relevant given a recent motion to clarify the roles of Rifqa’s four attorneys filed by DCF. In any event, I took the case on behalf of Rifqa’s mom and started digging, knowing from the beginning that the case had implications for people of my Christian faith and being determined to get it right.
By Aug. 12, I already had solid documentation that at least one thing circulating in the media and on blogs was flat wrong: that the parents had not reported the child missing for 10 days. Not long after, I was able to nail down another misreported “fact,” that the child’s note left to her parents had not been given to police. Neither of those things are true.
Why are those relatively mundane facts important? They are important because the person reporting them couldn’t possibly know those things, yet so-called adults surrounding Rifqa eagerly passed those things on to media without analysis, one imagines, because they served to paint the child’s parents in a bad light.
Knowing that the key facts first presented in Orlando were just plain wrong, and almost inexplicably wrong given that neither claim could possibly be known to anyone in Florida, I continued with my sense that something was “off” here, and kept digging.
I was annoyed as a Christian, as an officer of the court and as a litigator (in that order) that many with whom I agree on many issues were so willing to disregard the notion that a parent has the right in this country to raise and influence a child without governmental interference, unless there is evidence of abuse or neglect that is credible and not based on stereotypes or based on the beliefs or actions of what people who are not the parents might think, feel or do.
Consider this: A minor goes missing; an Amber Alert is issued; law enforcement officials develop information; that information brings police to a lead; that lead actually has knowledge of where the child is; despite the fact that the lead initially denies his knowledge of where the child is, police are able to put that together with a call to the National Center for Missing and Endangered Children, and then they find the missing child. … Yet the response of certain people involved with this case is to be outraged that the police did their jobs. Something is “off.”
Then came the FDLE report executive summary. It’s out there now. It confirms things I already knew. When Mohamed Bary personally showed me photographs of his daughter in a cheerleader outfit when we met for the second time on Aug. 21 (he had driven from Ohio to Florida twice to attend court hearings), I knew that claims that he had no idea that his child was a Westernized and normal high school student were nonsense.
Reading the FDLE report, I now have confirmation of several things I’d developed information about. I am no longer involved with this case as an attorney. It would be improper by my writing to interfere with the Barys’ new attorneys and how they want to proceed. Suffice it to say that a growing list of otherwise uninterested people would have to be lying in order for what you think is true about this case to be true.
To my Christian readers I say that most of you likely had a heartfelt desire to protect a new convert to our faith. I can’t fault you there. Quite frankly I am happy that the child knows Jesus, but that is a personal feeling and not relevant to my previous job of defending these parents from the power of the state to take their family apart.
Please recognize that the Lord is not so powerless as to need people to hide information, to embellish facts, or to give false witness in order to advance Christ’s kingdom. You homeschoolers in particular ought to pause and weigh the power of the state to take your child into foster care against your feelings on this case and whether or not you would wish to be afforded a competent defense should religious biases be used against you some day.
To any readers who may be of the People for the American Way variety who blog about the hypocrisy of Christians, I simply present myself, an evangelical Christian who believes in facts and law and has extended himself far out on a limb before his peers on behalf of Rifqa’s mother.
To any readers who may be Muslim, do not allow your reading of certain blogs to taint your feelings toward your Christian neighbors.
And to Rifqa, one year younger than my older child, I say that as a father and as a Christian, and as your mother’s former attorney, I care about you and have since Aug. 10. God bless you, and I believe that all things will work together for good.
— Craig McCarthy, a graduate of West Point and Florida State Law School, was the court-appointed attorney for Rifqa Bary’s mother for the first several weeks of this case.
thousands of other young kids run away and are ignored.
How long until she turns 18?
I'd say if that scenario comes to pass the judge goes up on accessory to murder charges. That ought to give the judge pause...
I believe him. She is still his daughter. But she is an apostate from Islam. He will try to convert her back to Islam and if that fails the religiously-mandated penalty is death. He neatly sidesteps the question.
This story has been in the local news of late, and I can tell you that there has been no evidence presented of any threat to the girl. Her parents seem pretty forthcoming and her other allegations about the Noor Islamic Center don’t seem to have any merit either. It all depends on whether you trust the word of a runaway teenage girl who has a disagreement with her parents.
There’s nothing that would stick in court, or in public opinion, unless people choose who to believe based on whether they are Muslim or Christian.
Who do we believe?
The girl; this pseudo religion has doctrine against her! Read “Prophet of Doom!” http://www.prophetofdoom.net/
What would constitute "credible evidence"?
The fact that it commonly happens isn't good enough? The fact that the parents had sold their business and were apparently planning to travel?
It really doesn't matter what Florida believes. It matters that she believes that they were getting ready to travel, and at the end of the journey she was going to be dead or married to a 60 year old imam.
She's old enough to be an emancipated minor. Emancipate her.
In a couple of months she'll be eighteen and its all moot.
When your life and your liberty are at stake, I'd hate to trust to the good judgement of lawyers and judges, even a Christian like Craig McCarthy. They don't have any skin in the game; if they're wrong they get to go home that evening to a good meal and the latest American Idol. If I were her, I'd go off the radar for a couple of months and stay there until after her eighteenth.
Saying that Muslims are required to kill apostates is a bit like saying Christians are supposed to stone adulterers. It’s based on a misunderstanding of doctrine. As a Christian I am not “pro-Islam,” and I believe that Islam is a false hope, as it does not bring about salvation through faith in Christ, so I’m not really defending Islam, so much as I am defending the truth, and the truth isn’t partisan.
Don’t confuse tradition in Islamic countries with actual Islamic doctrine. I personally don’t believe the girl, and I think she handled her situation badly.
My advice to her, if she truly fears for her life, is to try to stretch out the court case as long as possible, and if that doesn’t work, run.
Sorry, you are wrong!
I will say this again; there are only a few types of people who tolerate or promote the filth of Islam- the ignorant, sneaks, cheats and liars!
Islam fronts as a religion for public consumption and control; all components are about conquest and dominance. Would you call Marxism, Fascism or Supremacist movements a religion, having all the same components, the first has used economics and environmentalism the second uses Statism and Nationalism, the third uses identity politics to manipulate their public while adhering to power at the end of a gun-barrel. This philosophy has honor killings.
Please read or listen to “Prophet of Doom”; also review writings by Robert Spencer and Victor David Hanson or go to www.jihadwatch.org or http://www.prophetofdoom.net/
When a florida judge doesn't decide something, it's probably a good thing.
On the other hand, if father was seeking to withhold nutrition and hydration, it would have been rubberstamped. Precedent, you know.
Even if you believe her dad, and I don’t, he does not exist in a vacuum. Returning her to her parents would just make her a convenient target for some other Muslim who would willingly kill her for a free chance at (what he thinks) would be Paradise.
That girl is going to be a target for the rest of her natural life.
If they do, who is likely to know better than the girl?
And its not just a matter of honor-killing; she apparently believed she would be removed to her parents' homeland, and then married off against her will. Again, a good reason to run.
What kind of evidence would constitute credible evidence? The fact that it happens isn't sufficient? Does anyone think the parents would tell the State of Indiana that, yes, we're taking her home to get her away from bad influences, and we'll be marrying her to a good muslim man...? Did anyone expect they would say that?
She's almost eighteen. She's made her decision. If this drags out for any time at all it will be moot.
I do believe that's the wedge.
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