Josh Ellis sums it up: “Guy founds a TV network to show Muslims in a more positive light then beheads his wife when she files for divorce.” (I add: allegedly)
The founder of a U.S. Muslim television network has been arrested and charged with murdering his wife by beheading her, the network’s Web site and local media reported.
Muzzammil Hassan, founder and CEO of Buffalo, N.Y.-based Bridges TV which launched in 2004 with a mission to show Muslims in a more positive light, was charged after reporting the death of his wife, Aasiya Hassan, 37, on Thursday night.
After Hassan, 44, told police his wife was at the Bridges TV offices, in the village of Orchard Park, they found her body there, beheaded, The Buffalo News reported.
Authorities said Aasiya Hassan, with whom Hassan had two children, had recently filed for divorce and had an order of protection mandating that he leave their home as of February 6.
(Thanks Josh)
February 17, 2009 at 4:21 pm
Whatever, this is no different than when any given Christian televangelist is caught with his hand down some trannie hooker’s pants.
February 17, 2009 at 4:28 pm
Except that the televangelist doesn’t usually behead the trannie hooker afterwords.
February 17, 2009 at 7:14 pm
Paying for consensual sex is “no different than” murdering your wife?
I missed a couple year’s worth of meetings, clearly….I’ll make the wiser assumption that Jon had his [sarcasm] code going for that comment.
February 18, 2009 at 1:07 am
You know, it must be pretty awesome to be a Christian. People look the other way on your totally legitimized violence, wholesale slaughter, and genocide consistent over millenia and pretend like the occasional beheading someone overshadows all of it.
No, not sarcasm. Just a fucking dose of reality. Almost a million people were killed by a Christian fundamentalist maniac in Iraq. His “progressive” successor is racking up a pretty good score of Pakistanis rather quickly. Funny how that violence is legitimized and person-to-person violence from a Christian to say, a homosexual man, is considered aberrant while anything a Muslim does wrong is further “proof” that there’s something inherently reactionary about Islam.
Islam, FWIW, is the first religion to give women property rights, and lacks the other Abrahamic religions neuroses about women enjoying sex. While lurid tales of Muslim “oppressors” make good copy, it doesn’t seem like anything more than supermarket tabloid bullshit to me.
Call me when they start carpet bombing countries with depleted uranium and magnesium flare shells.
in b4 9/11.
February 18, 2009 at 1:39 am
Yeah because NOWHERE on this site do I ever criticize Christianity or the war in Iraq. I’m a total shill for Christianity. You got me.
Islam used to be a relatively enlightened religion. That has not been the case for quite sometime.
“lacks the other Abrahamic religions neuroses about women enjoying sex”
Completely untrue now. May have been true at sometime. Google “female circumcision.”
Islam may have been the first religion to give women property rights. Now it’s the only major religion to endorse beheading your wife and strangling your daughters.
I don’t know why Islam has changed, but it has. Adam Curtis and others have suggested that US intervention in the Middle East has radalized Islam (Curtis specifically looks at the case of Egypt in The Power of Nightmares). Others blame Israel’s aggressive expansion. I think both were probably contributors, but wouldn’t rule out other influences as well.
Places where I don’t criticize Christianity, Israel, and US foreign policy:
http://www.technoccult.com/archives/2006/11/03/what-we-face/
http://www.technoccult.com/archives/2008/04/09/power-of-nightmares-on-google-video/
http://www.technoccult.com/archives/2009/01/02/condoleezza-rice-re-writing-recent-hamas-history/
February 18, 2009 at 2:46 am
You frequently criticize American foreign policy and Christianity. I am more making a statement about the American media in general.
Female circumcision is a tribal custom practiced by Muslims, Christians, and animists alike. It is found nowhere in the Qu’ran or the Hadiths.
Where does “Islam” endorse beheading your wife and strangling your daughters? Keep in mind that when talking about anything not in the Qu’ran or Hadiths you’re talking about one individual mullah or line of mullahs rulings. The rulings of mullah are highly suspect to me, as they are likely more reflections of the political desires of a local warlord than anything in the Qu’ran.
February 18, 2009 at 4:36 am
You frequently criticize American foreign policy and Christianity. I am more making a statement about the American media in general.
In the name of unpacking what’s a sort of half-formed thought above, I offer this: Why is the first time I heard about the TV station because of this? Where was the media attention over an Islamic cable station? Maybe it was there. I don’t remember it, and I don’t exactly live in a media cave.
February 18, 2009 at 5:41 am
“I am more making a statement about the American media in general.”
Yeah, I think Fox News is especially bad about this. On the other hand, right wing media are some of the only source of real criticism of Islam – the left tends to soft peddle it.
I am no Quranic scholar and do not pretend to be. I only know that what is common practice for people calling themselves Muslims to practice and justify with their religion. If you want to be theological you can argue that those who do violence in the name of Christianity are not “real” Christians and therefore Christianity is not to blame.
That’s actually a big part of my beef with religion: you can use these old texts to justify basically anything and no one can agree which contradictory things to follow.
That said, here is a page about the tradition of honor killing as justified in the Quran, with passages cited:
http://www.islam-watch.org/SyedKamranMirza/honor_killing.htm
Here is one on female circumcision:
http://www.soundvision.com/info/gender/femalecircumcision.asp
Which confirms that there is no mention of female circumcision in the Quran, but that it is a common and acceptable practice for Muslims. So I’m still calling bullshit on the claim that Islam “lacks the other Abrahamic religions neuroses about women enjoying sex” again re-iterating that while – like communism and capitalism – it may sound good on paper, it’s a nightmare in practice
February 18, 2009 at 5:46 am
Previous discussion on honor killing at Technoccult:
http://www.technoccult.com/archives/2008/01/30/honor-killings-and-crimes-of-passion/
My position remains or or less the same: killing ones wife is a “man thing” rather than a “Muslim thing.” It doesn’t matter if it’s justified as “a crime of passion” or as “an honor killing.”
February 18, 2009 at 5:54 am
There are many mullah who say that female genital mutilation is haraam. The fact that other religious groups practice it seems proof that it’s not a “Muslim thing.”
February 18, 2009 at 8:07 am
The Qu’ranic citations in the above article seem like a bit of a stretch to me.
February 18, 2009 at 4:56 pm
Ulysses Lazarus – your argument seems to be 1. Shari’a Law isn’t “true” Islam, therefore Muslims are exempt from criticism. 2. Muslims should also be exempt from criticism because they aren’t as bad as the US military. I reject both ideas out of hand.
It doesn’t matter if a practice originated in Islam or if scholars can prove or disprove its validity in the Quran. What matters is what people do. The fact that you don’t interpret Islam the same way Muzzammil Hassan (self-appointed ambassador to the Western world) does won’t bring his wife back.
February 18, 2009 at 8:20 pm
To clarify, my arguments are:
1) Tribal customs that have been adopted by Muslims and are practiced by other religious groups are not Islamic- they are tribal customs that Muslims happen to practice. Just like how most Christians in Texas eat a lot of steak but steak eating is not a “Christian practice.”
2) Muslims are not exempt from criticism. However, whenever someone talks about the Western bogeyman of violent Islam I find it necessary to point out that Christians perpetuate most of the world’s violence, and that their violence is largely legitimized. There are all kinds of lurid, tabloid examples of violence in the Islamic world, and they’re all fucking tragic. However, as I’ve said repeatedly, and stand by, the death of one woman, no matter how gruesome, is a lot less important to me than the wholesale rape of Iraq, Palestine, and now Pakistan.
3) The sociopathic behavior of a Muslim doesn’t seem to me to be “Islamic.” Nor does the sociopathic behavior of a Christian seem “Christian” to me. It seems like the behavior of a sociopath. No good shits of any religious background will have no trouble finding excuses for their anti-social behavior in religion. Why do we take the bait and assign religious significance to it? Why not just say they’re no good shits?
That’s about all I have to say about the matter for now. I’ll be writing about this in BSG, which has been a long time coming.
February 19, 2009 at 12:29 am
1. Muslims claim these tribal traditions are justified (or sometimes mandated) by their religion. Regardless of their origin, they use religion to justify their practices.
2. Fair enough. For my part, I’m more interested lately in the question of why Islam has taken this violent turn in its history instead of becoming more secular like Christianity.
The US and the UK perpetuate the large scale violence you refer to, with most of the rest of the west in opposition (though doing little to stop it, and reaping the rewards of US military dominance).
The next largest violent conflict going at the moment is the Darfur conflict – Muslim on Muslim violence if I’m not mistaken.
I think Christians are more violent by proxy (allowing violence to be done by cops and soldiers) and Muslims are more violent individually since in countries that follow Shari’a Law allow them to literally get away with murder. I think if secular law weren’t in place in the west, Christians would be just as violent (see the case of domestic violence by non-Muslims).
3) Too much here to argue here. Trevor Blake, Richard Dawkins, et al. have argued this extensively. To summarize my position: I think that Christians who aren’t out killing homosexuals and non-violent Muslims, etc. are the ones who are NOT religious – they are making their own moral decisions instead of following their faith.
February 19, 2009 at 2:45 am
Also, just targeting the “no good shits” in a society only works when the no good shits are a minority. Muslims in the middle east and Christians in America are the majority. Their support of their local mullahs and the Republicans, respectively, are a problem arising from a systemic faith in ancient superstitions.
February 19, 2009 at 4:23 am
Humans are the killers, often dressed in religion. Saying Christians kill more than Muslims is a bit of a gloss. Just like saying Americans kill more than Europeans or Africans or Russians or Ottomans or Spaniards etc etc. All cultures are guilty of genocide. Some have just been more successful than others. A casual read through history proves this (not to mention a survey of animal behavior and ape politics). American imperialism is not that different from Russian or Chinese or otherwise. And they all dress themselves in cloaks of honor, deity, righteousness.
Those who buy into polarizations are always manipulated by those in power who wish to retain & expand that power. And those who drive revolutionary insurgencies reap the romanticized support of white liberal college kids while they put their own children in the front lines to garner sympathy when the opposition’s rockets fly in.
Dogma, zealotry, and fanaticism are the real dangers. Fear Sharia & the Brotherhood but be open to Muslims you meet. Same goes for Fundamentalists v average Christians. And never assume a revolutionary force is good just because they are the underdog, or communist, or whatever ism of the day popular with the kids. Most revolutions in history have replaced one set of power-hungry, self-interested rulers with another set.
Generational evolution is the key, and universal access to actually experiencing each other as humans instead of as The Other. This is my hope of the web, that it overcome fear and stereotype and replaces it with humanity.
My two bits – been reading a lot of history & geopolitics lately and it’s really opened my eyes to the reality of these historical cycles of tribal conflicts.
March 20, 2009 at 7:05 pm
F’in terrorist a$$hat.
March 20, 2009 at 7:12 pm
Let’s face it. Both Christendom and Islam today are false religions. As for governments of any nation, consider Daniel 2:44. Remember, Jesus Christ is the only true ruler mankind needs to cure its problems.
Christ Jesus would not condone any of the practices of today’s religions except for Jehovah’s Witnesses. The JW’s are persecuted worldwide. Jesus said his true followers would be persecuted. Think about it.
March 23, 2009 at 3:50 pm
What more can one say….actions speak louder than words.There is no way he can spin this into a “positive light”.