Posted on 10/14/2009 3:14:46 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
ORLANDO, Fla. -- First there was Elian Gonzalez, the Cuban boy torn between two nations. Then there was Terri Schiavo, the brain-damaged woman torn between two families. Now comes Rifqa Bary, the teenage runaway torn between two faiths.
If you're involved in a high-stakes custody fight, Florida, it seems, is the place to be.
Could Rifqa's father in Ohio really kill her for leaving Islam to embrace Christianity? Has the 17-year-old read too many fundamentalist Christian Web sites? Or is it all just teen dramatics?
Those are all questions swirling around the 17-year-old Ohio girl who became a Christian several years ago and sought shelter with an Orlando pastor after she feared for her life because, as she says, her father is bound by his Islamic faith to kill her.
Her parents deny the charges, and are now fighting in the courts in both states to bring Rifqa back home. The case has become a cause celebre among conservative Christian groups, Muslim activists and, of course, politicians.
Gov. Charlie Crist said "the first and only priority of my administration is the safety and well-being of this child." Marco Rubio, Crist's opponent in a GOP primary for a U.S. Senate seat, also urged state leaders "to use every legal tool at their disposal to properly evaluate Rifqa's best interests."
"The case in Florida began as a television event," said Craig McCarthy, a former attorney for Rifqa's mother in Orlando. "It could have been dismissed on day one."
As courts in Orlando and Columbus, Ohio, wrestle over which state has jurisdiction, Rifqa remains in Orlando in foster care. On Tuesday, an Orlando judge ruled Rifqa should return to Ohio, although no timeline was set, and when she does return, she will remain in foster care.
The girl arrived in Orlando after connecting with the wife of an Orlando pastor on Facebook. The pastor and his wife took Rifqa in after "they realized that she was someone who really believed her life was in danger," said Mathew Staver, the founder and chairman of the Liberty Counsel, an Orlando firm specializing in religious litigation. Staver represents the pastor and his wife, Blake and Beverly Lorenz. The teen was placed with a different foster family after the couple contacted authorities.
A Florida Department of Law Enforcement report found no evidence of any threat or abuse against Rifqa and said her allegations are "based on her belief or understanding of the Islamic faith and/or Islamic law and custom. (Rifqa) stated that she believes Islamic law dictates she must be put to death for her abandonment of the Islamic faith."
Her father, Mohamed Bary, denied making any such threat, according to the report, but he told investigators when he confronted Rifqa about her conversion last June he lifted a laptop to throw it but reconsidered, thinking about how much money he had invested in it.
The case has put Muslim groups on the defensive. Islam condones no such killings, said Babak Darvish, executive director of the Columbus chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations. Darvish said the girl's parents are distraught about her behavior. They brought the family to the United States from Sri Lanka when Rifqa was a child so that she could receive better treatment for an eye injury that eventually left her blind in one eye, he said.
Darvish accused some conservative Christians and politicians of using the story to stoke anti-Muslim sentiment. "They're trying to use this case to further this extremist political, religious agenda," he said.
Lou Engle, an outspoken Kansas City, Mo., evangelist who has taken up Rifqa's case, said, "If Florida authorities release her to her parents, who she alleges threatened her for converting, we don't know what will happen to her and we should not risk it. While we hate to see any child leave the care of their parents, these conditions are unacceptable."
For some, Rifqa personifies lingering Christian-Muslim tensions more than eight years after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. In late September, as more than 3,500 Muslims prepared to gather for Friday prayers at the U.S. Capitol, Rifqa was featured as part of a national call-in prayer-a-thon.
Engle, who helped organize the call, referred to Rifqa as "our little sister," and during the call, Rifqa grew emotional when she was asked to pray for Muslims to embrace Christianity.
In her few public appearances, Rifqa is at times emotional, impassioned, giddy and sometimes a little incoherent. In a YouTube video during which she shares her testimony, Rifqa calls her parents "radical, radical Muslims" and says, "they can't know of my faith because if they do know the consequences are really harsh. Just the culture and the background that they come from is so hostile toward Christianity."
She explained that a classmate introduced her to Christianity, and then grows emotional as she describes the moment she became a Christian, during an altar call at church.
"The Lord completely wraps me in his arms of love, and I break down on the floor and weep," she said. "I felt nothing but love, nothing but this great radical love."
An attorney for Rifqa did not return calls seeking comment; his staff cited a court-imposed gag order. Staver said the threat against Rifqa is real and that Muslims, not Christians, have turned the story into another televised courtroom circus.
McCarthy, the Orlando attorney who formerly represented Rifqa's mother, was ambivalent about those who have taken up Rifqa's cause.
"It is not a unanimously held belief that these people are orthodox Christians," he said. "Which to me is a double tragedy for Rifqa, because if she wants to be a Christian, that's fantastic. I don't think she's necessarily being taught the faith in a healthy way."
How many times have we heard from the Islamists, the media and the apologists that Rifqa Bary’s parents could not have been that devout, since she was a cheerleader? The famous cheerleader picture is then posted as proof. How much danger could she really be in if her parents allowed her to wear the cheerleading uniform?
According to a very close friend of Rifqa’s in Ohio, Rifqa’s parents never saw her in the uniform that she was pictured in. The cheerleaders had a warm-up suit that they would wear, and when she left her home to go to games, she had the warm-up suit on, never the cheerleading skirt.
Her parents did not go to any games to see her cheer. From what I have ascertained, her parents were not involved in her school life at all...
Further, Rifqa Bary is an honor student (GPs 3.5) - a good girl. Like what her friends, Amina and Sarah Said, she lived two lives: she was a happy productive successful student in school and a tortured, oppressed and brutalized victim at home. Many in her school were shocked to hear that Rifqa, the quintessential good girl, had run away from home; those close to her were not surprised at all. She was terrified of her father and lived in fear for years.
The “unruly delinquent” claim is inaccurate. It does not gibe. Unruly delinquents are not honor students with over 3.5 GPAs.
Secondly, even assuming that her parents are moderate Muslims, let us not forget that Sharia does not simply involve her parents. She is in probable danger from OTHER Muslims from the Mosque that her parents go to (not a moderate mosque by all reports I’ve read ).
But your point about Ohio having jurisdiction on this case is well taken — PROVIDED — ADEQUATE PROTECTION FOR RIFQA IS PROVIDED.
The point of course is this — Rifqa isn’t inventing something out of thin air. There are WORRYING PRECEDENTS HERE IN THIS COUNTRY AND AROUND THE WORLD!!
Read this for instance :
http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=24329
Amina Said, 18, and her sister Sarah, 17, smile happily in one widely circulating photo, and Amina is wearing what looks like a sweatshirt bearing the name “AMERICAN.” But their fate may have been the herald of a new, disquieting feature of the American landscape: honor killing. Amina and Sarah were shot dead in Irving, Texas, on New Year’s Day. Police are searching for their father, Yaser Abdel Said, on a warrant for capital murder.
The girls’ great aunt, Gail Gartrell, told reporters, “This was an honor killing.” She explained that Yaser Said had long abused the girls, and after discovering that they had boyfriends, had threatened to kill them — whereupon their mother fled with them. “She ran with them,” said Gartrell, “because she knew he would carry out the threat.” But Said found them, and apparently did carry it out.
Honor killing, the practice of murdering a female family member who is believed to have sullied the family honor, enjoys widespread acceptance in some areas of the Islamic world. However, Islam Said, the brother of Amina and Sarah, has denied that the murders had anything to do with Islam at all. “It’s not religion,” he insisted. “It’s something else. Religion has nothing to do with it.”
Knowing that the mosque that Rifqa’s parents go to isn’t exactly a “moderate” mosque ( they have invited radical islamists to preach ), it isn’t bigotry for any judge to be on the side of caution.
OK, there is so much in this article I don’t get. For instance:
Around this time a friend of Mohammad logged on to Facebook as a teenager and chatted with Rifqa. She told him she was a Christian. The Barys wanted some answers.
“I told Rifqa we had to sit down and talk. But she avoided any such thing. I took away her laptop and disconnected her cell phone for a short time. Her mother confronted her and told her to tell the truth, saying, ’We have to talk about it; otherwise all of us may have to go back to Sri Lanka,’” Mohammad said.
She told a friend of her father that she was a Christian, so they take away her cell phone and laptop and tell her they may have to go back to Sri Lanka?
You see, they sound so reasonable (she can convert if she wants) but when they start talking about actual facts, things don’t seem to add up.
I never said she was an “unruly delinquent”. She was participating fully in normal American teen culture, including being on the cheerleading squad, and spending endless hours on Facebook. The notion that her parents had no idea what US cheerleaders do and wear is preposterous, as is the notion that extremist Muslims who would resort to honor killings would allow their daughter to run around unsupervised to after school activities and a part-time restaurant job.
She has gotten involved with not one, but two seriously sketchy pastors. The Florida pastor who was harboring her has sinced announced (but declined to explain) that his church (the grandiosely named “Global Revolution Church”) that only started up about a year ago is “reorganizing” — he says “The lawyers are trying to figure out which way it’s going to go”. http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/local/breakingnews/orl-bk-rifqa-bary-lorenz-church-090909,0,6381208.story I also did a little digging on this church back when this story first broke. When I spotted an out-of-place looking photo on the website, I quickly tracked down its origin and contacted the copyright owner (a professional photographer and web PR consultant) who confirmed that she had no connection with the church and that it was not authorized to be using the photo. I presume that’s the least of the church’s legal problems these days.
The self-styled pastor in Ohio, 21/23 year old (age varies by source) Brian Williams, declined to cooperate with Ohio police until they threatened to arrest him. Though Williams had apparently still been living in Ohio when he drove Rifqa to the Greyhound station to run away, by the time police caught up with him, he had already moved to Missouri for unclear reasons, and Kansas City police acting on behalf of the Ohio police, searched his home and were prepared to arrest him. Then Williams contacted the various people he knew she’d been in touch with via Facebook when she was looking for a place to run away to, and the Florida pastor, Lorenz, only notified Florida police that he had her after he learned from Williams that police were now hot on her trail (and his). In a typical Florida DCF screw-up, they took her into legal custody of the state but then let her stay with Lorenz for another 3 days, during which time Lorenz had a local TV news crew come in and interview her. Yep, that’ll help keep her safe from homicidal Muslim maniacs who want to kill her for converting — just put her on TV and let the whole world know exactly where they can find her. < /s> That was too much even for Florida DCF, where somebody finally noticed they’d put her in an unlicensed foster home, and got her out of there.
Lots of crazies in this story, and it could be that Rifqa’s parents are among them. But at first glance, they sure don’t stand out as the most worrisome adults involved in Rifqa’s life.
Another interesting little tidbit I bumped into:
http://www.columbusdispatch.com/live/content/local_news/stories/2009/09/15/rifqa_report.ART_ART_09-15-09_B1_O5F31CN.html?sid=101
“Rifqa also said a high-school teacher had offered her a place to stay to escape the consequences of her religious beliefs at home. The teacher told investigators she offered the place because there were parties with alcohol thrown at the residence when the parents were out of town. She told investigators she was not aware of any danger to Rifqa because of her faith.” (I’m assuming the booze parties were the work of her 18 year old brother, so I guess he’s not a wildly devout fundamentalist Muslim who’d be willing to help out with killing his sister.)
Supposedly the main reason they came here from Sri Lanka was to get medical treatment for her eye injury (and independent sources have confirmed that she did indeed receive treatment for the eye here, saving the eye itself, but not the sight in that eye). So they may not have originally intended to settle here permanently. And they wouldn’t be the first parents to immigrate to the US and decide to return to their native country when their kids starting adopting American culture, and being very rebellious towards their parents and parents’ culture. That’s a long way from threatening to kill her. I have some friends — an American born woman, and her Indian born husband, both lifelong Catholics — who met and married here in the US, and seemed settled here for a while, but then elected to move overseas, first to Switzerland and then to India, in part because they felt the cultural environment would be better for their children.
It appears that the Barys’ concerns went beyond just Rifqa’s conversion, to her sneaking around with people they didn’t know. Who knows which one really bothered them the most, but normal parents object to their teenagers spending most of their time, online and in person, with people the parents don’t know anything about.
Sri Lanka is predominantly Buddhist, and honor killings are rare there (basically nonexistent, except presumably among the Muslim Tamil Tigers guerrilla group which hangs out in remote jungles, training suicide bombers) and certainly not tolerated by the government. Mr. Bary would have a better chance of getting away with it here, and even if caught would face much less unpleasant consequences.
Let’s look at the other side of the story :
* She’s 17. Can’t she be emancipated? She’s just a few months away from being 18, which means she can leave home if she wishes. If 16-year-olds can be tried as adults in criminal cases, the same standard should be applied in this case, with someone old enough and intelligent enough to know what she is doing. The fact still stands -— she is within the AGE OF REASON and her opinions has to be given weight.
* Let’s assume that no one can know what is in the hearts of this young woman’s parents. What we DO know, is that Islam DOES allow honor killings, and especially for those who reject islam for Christ ( I just cited one example ij Texas above ). The court must do all that is in it’s power to protect this child from the worst. All of us pray that her parents love her too much to murder her, but reality is often cruel, and for the court to err, and cost Rifqa her life would be a far worse tragedy than to keep her safely away from her parents until she turns 18.
* Rifqa Bary says she ran to Florida to save her life: “I was threatened by my dad.” She says that her father told her, “If you have this Jesus in your heart, you’re dead to me. You’re not my daughter. I will kill you.” But now her father is trying to regain custody of Rifqa, and he and the Islamic Society of Central Florida say she has been “kidnapped” and “brainwashed” by a “cult,” and that she’s a “rebel,” a “troubled teen.”
Well, which is it? She hitchhiked to the bus station and took a Greyhound from Ohio to Florida. How is that a kidnapping?
* Rifqa Bary’s father is also claiming that she was “brainwashed” by the pastor of the Global Revolution church in Orlando. Pastor Blake Lorenz denies that, saying, “she has been a Christian for four years, long before we ever met her.”
You said she has a page on MySpace. Well what does that tell us ? Rifqa’s MySpace page, to which she last logged in two years ago, shows that she had already converted by then. Her MySpace page is evidence that she was a Christian at least by 2007.
There is more evidence on that same MySpace page. Rifqa chose a “Christian layout” and says that her favorite movie was “A Walk to Remember” — a good Christian flick. The movie is about a pastor’s daughter, a good Christian girl who changes the life of a popular but rebellious teenage boy through her indomitable spirit, purity, and goodness. Reviewer Jeffrey Overstreet said in Christianity Today: “The main character is portrayed as a Christian without being psychopathic or holier-than-thou.”
Further, under Rifqa’s favorite book, there is a small icon of a page from the Bible. The passage highlighted? Love is patient. Notice how it’s all done cryptically, as if she is hiding. “My Savior is JC,” she writes — JC, of course, is Jesus Christ. The movie is a Christian movie. The book is the Bible. And Rifqa wrote all this in 2007. THAT WAS BEFORE SHE EVEN MET THIS PASTOR.
* In contrast, Islamic Society of Central Florida President Imam Muhammad Musri charges that Rifqa is “nothing more than a troubled teen” and a “rebel teenager running away from home.”
The Pakistan Daily carries even worse charges: “The family maintains that the girl was into drugs, promiscuous behaviour and raunchy messages on Facebook. She was discussing sex with multiple older married men. When the parents tried to control her behaviour she refused to do so. On her return to the home she conjured up a story of conversion to Christianity.”
* The fact is -— No one who knows Rifqa has come forth with any stories of drug abuse or promiscuity.
* That makes it likely that all of this “troubled teen” propaganda is a yarn spun (taqiya) to con the authorities into sending this girl back to a dangerous and deadly situation. Let’s say that Rifqa is not in jeopardy from her father and other family members, if so, Let’s not forget the danger from all devout Muslims, for she committed the worst of all sins, apostasy. And she broke the code of silence.
* Let’s say you don’t trust this pastor because of the strange, cultic name of his church — THE LEAST WE SHOULD ALLOW IS LEGAL PROTECTION BY THE LAW UNTIL SHE REACHES 18.
This website seems to show a little nuance :
http://atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com/
EXCERPT :
Check out Mohamed Bary’s missing immigration documents. Mr. Bary lost his application for amnesty. He lost his appeal for reconsideration of the administrative law judge’s denial of that amnesty application, (or, application for change of status to temporary resident legal alien, to be more precise.)
He and his family are subject to immediate deportation and further exclusion. He claimed he came to America to tend to Rifqa’s eye, when in fact he came illegally through Mexico (according to the document) and the “doting” father never got Rifqa medical treatment.
For the several months the attorneys for Rifqa Bary’s parents have been promising to produce their immigration documents. And yet they still have failed to produce them. First, Craig McCarthy (since discharged) and then the new, improved, CAIR-approved Shayan “Shaytan” Elahi repeatedly promised to produce them here and here and here and here. The Barys have ten days before they are in contempt of court. My money says they are going to say the documents are lost.
Here’s the bottom line :
If she has NOT been telling the truth, then she needs to face the consequences of making unfounded claims such as these.
But if what she has been saying is true then we have to ask ourselves if we going to continue to allow people freedom of religious expression or if that is something that parents can decide for their grown children.
Your father wasn’t a nutcase who believed in killing his child over a religious conversion. That makes all the difference.
She needs to ‘disappear’ again, maybe to another Christian home in another state. oops...
Abused women do it all the time. There are networks that help them escape.
My personal view is this -— given the fact that she is 17 years old, given the fact that 17 is NEAR ADULTHOOD, given the fact that honor killings are a REALITY in Islam, given the fact that the mosque her father attends is not a moderate one but actually invites hateful radicals who support terrorists to teach and preach, given the fact that her parents came here illegally ( AKA breaking American immigration law) -— WE SHOULD NOT GIVE HER PARENTS THE BENEFIT OF THE DOUBT.
Rifqa is not a mere child who does not know what she’s talking about and her background and personal life does not tell us that she is a rebellious, promiscous teen.
THEREFORE, EVEN IF SHE WERE TO BE RETURNED TO OHIO, SHE SHOULD BE GIVEN PROTECTION BY THE LAW AND NOT FORCIBLY RETURNED TO HER PARENTS AGAINST HER WILL.
Amen. I heartily agree with your fine analysis.
Definitely warrants investigation. Though my guess would be that some of the more zealous members of the mosque would be a much bigger threat to Rifqa than her parents, and that makes the case much less about Rifqa than about the mosque. If that mosque is really encouraging its members to go out and kill apostates, then a whole lot of people are at risk. For the time being, her exact location needs to be kept under wraps — no more stunts like Pastor Lorenz putting her on TV. Even if there never was any real threat to her to begin with, the fact that these pastors have encouraged her to make all these grandiose statements about what a huge deal it is that she’s converted to Christianity and what a big honor it would be for some Muslim to kill her over it, and have aided and abetted her in getting these statements on TV, YouTube, and all over the print media, it’s safe to say that there are now at least a few zealous jihadist maniacs who are feeling inspired to track her down and kill her. I know there are plenty of those types lurking around our country, whether her parents are among them or not.
As for their mosque affiliation, I don’t really know how many choices of mosques they have in Columbus. They may have just affiliated with “the” mosque, rather than having an array to choose from and choosing one with some serious radical ties because it most closely matched their own beliefs. It really doesn’t sound to me like they were terribly active Muslims of any sort, between the cheerleader daughter who seemed to be unsupervised most of the time, and the booze-partying teenage son, and the father out of town on business much of the time. Though I certainly hope authorities are digging into the nature of his business, which is some sort of gem dealing — could very well be perfectly legitimate, but it’s also the sort of business that could be convenient for international money laundering.
“Pastor” Williams has since admitted to police that he drove her to the bus station, knowing she was running away from home without her parents’ knowledge. Lorenz knew she was on her way to come and stay at his house, and didn’t notify police until 2 weeks later, when he learned from Williams that police had gotten info on her whereabouts.
Legally, under Ohio law, Florida law, and federal law (since it was across state lines, and both pastors who were helping her knew that the plan was for her to cross state lines), this was a kidnapping.
I’ve never heard of the “Pakistan Daily”, but it sounds like some junky tabloid that invents a lot of embellishing details. Most of the information you cited there has not appeared anywhere else, and her parents have done a number of major media interviews.
As for the 2007 MySpace page, the bulk of the information I’ve seen indicates that she was managing to practice her Christianity just fine while living with her parents, until she got mixed up with this “pastor” Brian Williams, who’s barely an adult himself. As for the eye treatment issue, I’ve seen at least a couple of articles (e.g. the big Newsweek article on the case) that made it sound like it was confirmed that she did have treatment here, and that they were able to save her eye (which doctors in Sri Lanka had been planning to remove completely), but were not able to restore any vision to it. Presumably both the Ohio court and immigration officials will be demanding some firm evidence that she received treatment here.
I think in all likelihood, the Ohio courts will never return her to her family’s custody, given her age, and how vehemently she doesn’t want to go back to them. I doubt they’ll even need to find that there’s any threat to her safety to reach that decision — it can be supported just on the basis that she needs psychological treatment, and that it would be in the “best interests of the child” not to forcibly return her to her family.
Though if the family’s immigration status is what your sources are saying, the whole lot of them may be deported to Sri Lanka, and I personally wouldn’t be sorry to see all of them go. I think the girl is nuts and has gotten mixed up with some adult nuts who are exploiting her for their own purposes. And if the parents are knowingly here illegally, they can be sent home by slingshot for all I care. Emancipate her? She’ll be on our welfare rolls 5 minutes later. No thanks.
I tend to view the cheerleading as solid evidence that the parents *were not* intolerant/extremist Muslims, but it doesn’t really tell us what they *are* now. Rifqa may not be the only member of the family with a newfound religious zealotry.
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