Mark Steyn Asks an Indelicate Question

by Little Miss Attila on February 15, 2009

at the National Review blog:

[A]re beheadings common in western New York? I used to spend a lot of time in that neck of the woods and I don’t remember decapitation as a routine form of murder. Yet the killing of Aasiya Hassan seems to have elicited a very muted response.

When poor Mrs Hassan’s husband launched his TV network to counter negative stereotypes of Muslims, he had no difficulty generating column inches, as far afield as The Columbus Dispatch, The Detroit Free Press, The San Jose Mercury News, Variety, NBC News, the Voice of America and the Canadian Press. The Rochester Democrat & Chronicle put the couple on the front page under the headline “Infant TV Network Unveils The Face Of Muslim News”.

But, when Muzzammil Hassan kills his wife and “the face of Muslim news” is unveiled rather more literally, detached from her corpse at his TV studios, it’s all he can do to make the local press – page 26 of Newsday, plus The Buffalo News, and a very oddly angled piece in the usually gung-ho New York Post, “Buffalo Beheading: Money Woe Spurred Slay”.

Oh, really? He beheaded her for some goofy clause in the insurance policy? Not exactly:

An upstate TV exec who set up a channel promoting Muslims as peace-loving people was stressed about his failing business in the days before he allegedly chopped off his estranged wife’s head, a friend of the couple said today.

Ah.

. . . . . . . . .

“Murders are being committed in the US every day by people of all faiths.”

Well, maybe. But for sheer news value you’d think this one might stand out. Look at this picture. That’s the very definition of “moderate Muslim”. Look at the late Aasiya Hassan, beautifully coiffed, glossy-lipped. On countless occasions since 9/11, I’ve found myself at lunch or dinner in New York, London, Washington, Paris or some other western city, sitting next to a modern Muslim woman like Mrs Hassan telling me how horrified she is at how hijabs and burqas, honor killings and genital mutilation, forced cousin marriages and the disproportionate number of Muslim wives in European battered women’s shelters, how all these have come to define Muslim womanhood in the 21st century. Yet Aasiya Hassan ended up no differently – all because her husband’s TV network had a cashflow problem?

The media’s lack of curiosity is in marked contrast to their willingness to propagandize for the launch of Mr Hassan’s station. It also helps explain why the US newspaper business is dying.

I am actually that rare creature among center-right bloggers: a person who sees and respects moderate Islam. But to refuse to cover this crime because it is committed by a Muslim is soft bigotry; we cannot combat what we do not see, and to deny the sexism within many strains of Islam—and, for that matter, within many subcultures in the Arabic world and within Iran—is to refuse to engage reality.

The last wife-murderer who really got any ink was O.J. Simpson—and he almost achieved decapitation of his erstwhile spouse.

This is a gruesome, gruesome crime, and we aren’t really hearing about it outside the blogging world. My local radio stations show tremendous alacrity in telling me every time there is a family tragedy in a trailer park in Kansas City, however. “If it bleeds, it leads.” Unless it doesn’t.

h/t: Insty.

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