Muzzammil Hassan and Islamic Primordial Violence

Yesterday's entry on the beheading of Asiya Hassan in Orchard Park, New York, brought out the representative trolls of the anti-American left. The meme at the comments, following Melissa McEwan at Shakesville, is that Muzzammil Hassan is a "moderate" Muslim and his wife's murder was a routine case of patriarchical domestic violence against women (can there be such a thing?). This refusal to see the genuine and unique brutality in Islamic culture is found in the inherent anti-Americanism on the radical left.

The truth is that Muzzammil Hassan is no "moderate" Muslim after all. Robert Spencer, at FrontPage Magazine, sets the record straight on this medieval killer (via Jihad Watch):

Last Thursday, a woman named Aasiya Z. Hassan, 37, was founded decapitated in Orchard Park, New York, a village near Buffalo. Her husband, Muzzammil Hassan, 44, was charged, rather oddly, with second-degree murder in the case. But the specter of someone who beheaded his wife being charged only with second-degree murder was the least of the oddities in this case: Aasiya Hassan’s body was found in the offices of the cable channel, Bridges TV. Aasiya Hassan was the inspiration for Bridges TV, and Muzzammil Hassan was its founder.

Muzzammil Hassan founded Bridges TV in 2004 to combat the negative perceptions of Muslims that he thought were dominating the mainstream media. According to a Reuters story at the time, Aasiya “came up with the idea in December 2001 while listening to the radio on a road trip.” Muzzammil Hassan explained: “Some derogatory comments were being made about Muslims that offended her. She was seven months pregnant, and she thought she didn’t want her kids growing up in this environment.”

Bridges TV originally declared that its intention was to “fuse American culture with the values of Islam in a healthy, family-oriented way.” However, there were indications at the outset that it might not have been as moderate as many assumed. Bridges TV from the beginning had ties to the Council on American-Islamic Relations, an unindicted co-conspirator in a Hamas terror funding case, and Islamicity.com, which retails rabid anti-Semitic literature. In 2006 Arab News reported that Hassan was trying to raise money for the network from Saudi investors.

And now comes the clearest, most harrowing indication of all that Bridges TV’s founder was not the moderate he appeared to be, but was rather a man who had imbibed deeply the traditional Islamic understanding that women are possessions of men, to be punished severely when they get out of line. Of course, this singular lesson of the beheading of Aasiya Hassan, who apparently had raised Muzzammil’s ire by filing for divorce, is the one that the mainstream media and the American Muslim community is doing its best to obscure. Immediately after the killing, Khalid J. Qazi of the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC) chapter of Western New York, declared: “There is no place for domestic violence in our religion — none. Islam would 100 percent condemn it.”

Unfortunately, all too few Muslim men seem to share Qazi’s view. The Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences has determined that over ninety percent of Pakistani wives have been struck, beaten, or abused sexually — for offenses on the order of cooking an unsatisfactory meal. Others were punished for failing to give birth to a male child. Dominating their women by violence is a prerogative Muslim men cling to tenaciously. In Spring 2005, when the East African nation of Chad tried to institute a new family law that would outlaw wife beating, Muslim clerics led resistance to the measure as un-Islamic.

Spencer's essay continues with an explanation of the intrinsic brutality among Muslim men, indicating that primordial violence against women is a central component to "Islamic tradition."

See also, "Beheading in New York Appears to Be Honor Killing, Experts Say."