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."
Spare the knife, spoil the child.
NO ONE knows just how many Muslim girls and women are murdered each year in the name of family "honor," since their deaths frequently go unreported and unpunished. The cases that do come to light are ghastly. "Women and young girls are set ablaze, strangled, shot at, clubbed, stabbed, tortured, axed, or stoned to death," a United Nations report noted in 2004. "Their bodies are found mutilated with their throat slit, or they are chopped into pieces and thrown in a ditch."The report singled out as especially horrifying the honor killing in Pakistan of "a 16-year-old girl who was reportedly electrocuted to death after being drugged with sleeping pills and being tied to a wooden bed with iron chains." Her offense: marrying a boy from the wrong community. Countless others have lost their lives for refusing an arranged marriage, wearing Western-style clothing, having a boyfriend, or even being raped.
Recently, the Saudi human rights activist Wajeha al-Huwaidar wrote a scathing essay characterizing honor killings as a scourge peculiar to the "Greater Middle East," with its entrenched culture of misogyny and male supremacy. Her article was prompted by the lynching of 17-year-old Du'a al-Aswad, a Kurdish girl stoned to death by a mob of Iraqi men. (The essay has been translated by the Middle East Media Research Institute, which also provides a link to a gruesome cellphone video of the lynching.) "From Pakistan and Afghanistan through Iran, the Middle East, and all the way to Morocco," Huwaidar wrote, "this entire part of the world [is full of] defeated and dejected men, whose only way to gain some sort of victory is by beating their women to death."
Yeah I know. I covered the Amina and Sarah story, when it broke, preaching to the choir here.
Muslim law requires that (allows) a Muslim lie to further his religion.
May God have mercy on her soul. (But notice the ACLU and all liberals - including the writer of the article - so hate Christianity that they refuse to discuss the case, or even ALLOW that the father “might” be lying.)
Zealotry is zealotry. It involves irrational behavior that is destructive to oneself and/or others, and while it can certainly vary by degree, the full range of degrees are displayed by zealots of all religious brands. Rusty and Andrea Yates were Christian-branded zealots, but it certainly made no difference to their children whether they were Christian-branded or Muslim-branded or some other brand. Andrea was certifiably insane in addition to be a zealot, but Rusty was just a garden variety zealot — insisted on following the rather extreme rules of the sect he’d hooked up with, which meant leaving his certifiably insane wife alone all day every day to “homeschool” several young children, and have an additional baby, despite doctors warnings that this was very dangerous, given her precarious psychiatric history and pattern of worsening post-partum depression>psychosis following each baby.
This girl is mentally unstable (read some of the martyr complex stuff she was posting just before she ran away), and she ran away from home instead of finishing high school. Unemployment is high these days, with many wonderful and mentally stable people needing jobs, including many devout Christians who have families to support. Her new friend Pastor Lorenz is up to his ears in expensive legal problems as a result of his involvement with her, so he’s not likely to be hiring her (and thankfully, the courts aren’t going to let him pimp her out to the media, at least until after she’s turned 18).
Rifqa’s 15 minutes of fame will be over soon, and more likely than not she’ll blow any chance she’s given to take a job a support and support herself. Just like she blew her chance to keep relatively quiet about her religion for just one more year, finish high school, and then leave home with her parents having no recourse, since police wouldn’t waste time hunting down an 18 year old who appears to have relocated of her own free will, nor would police have a legal right to tell her parents of her whereabouts even if they located her.
She’s 17. A bit of legal wrangling, and she turns 18.
Problem solved.
I can’t understand the Muslims. I grew up in a Catholic family. I converted to Asatrú at age 14. Told my parents at age 16.
Yeah, they were pissed. They eventually let me be: I was not converting back, and forcing me to go through the motions without actually believing would be pointless in both our faiths.
Why can’t muslims show the same reason?
Um...I'm not completely up on what journalism schools teach today, but in news stories isn't every example of the reporter's opinion supposed to be qualified with an actual fact? What is "giddy" or "incoherent" about the above quotes?
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