Gray Lady Down (19 page)

Veiling is the least of the Muslim customs that seem to oppress women. On other misogynistic practices embedded in Islamic culture—such as forced domestic servitude, female circumcision and honor killings—the
Times
has shown an obtrusive nonjudgmentalism or inattention. For example, it did not report on a 2005 case that ended in the conviction of a married, 37-year-old graduate student from Saudi Arabia. According to prosecutors, Homaidan Ali al-Turki brought an Indonesian nanny to Colorado, paying her two dollars a day and making her sleep in the kitchen or the basement. Soon al-Turki made the woman his sex slave. During the trial, al-Turki’s attorney said the charges arose from the state’s failure to understand “cultural differences” and from “cynical Islamophobia.”
After his conviction on twelve felony counts, al-Turki received a sentence of twenty years to life. At the sentencing he shouted, “The state has criminalized these basic Muslim behaviors.”

Because al-Turki was connected to the Saudi royal family, his conviction caused the U.S. Department of State to urge Colorado’s attorney general to fly to Saudi Arabia and brief King Abdullah on the case. Meanwhile, al-Turki’s supporters began a campaign on his behalf, calling on Saudi students in America to arrange peaceful demonstrations, to leave the country as soon as possible, and to publicize the case any way they could.

That the
Times
didn’t report on a domestic servitude case in Colorado is not the issue. What
is
the issue, and the news peg, is that the perpetrator invoked Islam as justification, and that Saudi students in the United States saw injustice in the prosecution and conviction.

The subject of female genital mutilation (FGM) among Muslim immigrants is another that has caused the
Times
visible discomfort. The least invasive form of the procedure—mostly practiced by natives of African countries—involves cutting of the clitoral hood or clitoris; the most radical involves total excision of the genitalia, followed by the sewing up of the vagina with thread or twine. There is no Koranic justification for the practice, but it does mesh well with Islam’s notion of female submission to men. In the United States, the incidence of FGM has been rising along with Muslim immigration. Estimates are that 150,000 to 225,000 girls in the United States are at risk for the practice, and perhaps hundreds of daughters of African parents are circumcised in the United States every year. The
Times
has commendably reported on FGM in the developing world, and denounced it in editorials and op-ed columns (particularly Abe Rosenthal’s column), but has been timid and nonjudgmental when it comes to FGM among U.S. immigrants.

Strangely enough, one relativist voice on this issue has been that of John Tierney, who used to represent a conservative-libertarian view on the
Times
op-ed page. In November 2007, Tierney used his online column for a “New Debate on Female Circumcision,” as it was headlined. “Should African women be allowed to
engage in the practice sometimes called female circumcision?” he asked. “Are critics of this practice, who call it female genital mutilation, justified in trying to outlaw it, or are they guilty of ignorance and cultural imperialism?”

Tierney allotted space to two “circumcised African women scholars,” Wairimu Njambi, a Kenyan, and Fuambai Ahmadu, from Sierra Leone. Dr. Ahmadu, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Chicago, was raised in America and went back to Sierra Leone as an adult to undergo the procedure along with fellow members of the Kono ethnic group. She claimed that critics exaggerate the medical dangers, misunderstand the effect on sexual pleasure, and mistakenly view the removal of parts of the clitoris as being oppressive. She lamented that her Westernized “feminist sisters insist on denying us this critical aspect of becoming a woman in accordance with our unique and powerful cultural heritage.” She also argued that most of the Kono women she has met uphold the rituals because they relish the supernatural powers of their ritual leaders over men in society, and they embrace the legitimacy of female authority, particularly that of their mothers and grandmothers.

Tierney also gave space to Richard Shweder, a University of Chicago anthropologist who said that many Westerners trying to impose a “zero tolerance” policy don’t realize that these initiation rites are generally controlled by women, who regard it as a cosmetic procedure with aesthetic benefits. He criticized Americans and Europeans for outlawing it at the same time they endorse their own forms of genital modification, like the circumcision of boys or the cosmetic surgery for women called “vaginal rejuvenation.” In Dr. Shweder’s view, “feminist issues and political correctness and activism have triumphed over the critical assessment of evidence.” Although Tierney himself admitted that he wouldn’t choose circumcision for his own daughter, he cited the work of anthropologists in asking, “Should outsiders be telling African women what initiation practices are acceptable?”

The
Times
has brought a light-handed approach to the topic of polygamy in America, too. In March 2007, the immigration correspondent Nina Bernstein reported on the custom as practiced in New York, one of the American cities where immigration “has
soared from places where polygamy is lawful and widespread, especially from West African countries like Mali.” Bernstein found evidence of “a clandestine practice that probably involves thousands of New Yorkers.” She had been on the immigration beat for years before writing about this, and did so only in response to a tragic fire in the Bronx, when it was revealed that “the Mali-born American citizen who owned the house and was the father of five children who perished, had two wives in the home, on different floors.”

Bernstein emphasized that the custom was usually kept secret because it was grounds for exclusion from the United States, and could be punished with up to four years in prison. “No agency is known to collect data on polygamous unions, which typically take shape over time and under the radar, often with religious ceremonies overseas and a visitor’s visa for the wife, arranged by other relatives,” Bernstein wrote. She explained that “Don’t-ask-don’tknow policies prevail in many agencies that deal with immigrant families in New York, perhaps because there is no framework for addressing polygamy in a city that prides itself on tolerance of religious, cultural and sexual differences—and on support for human rights and equality.”

These claims were all probably true. Still, one wonders how such an experienced reporter as Bernstein could not know about the prevalence of such a practice, especially when one woman likened it to being “in effect the slave of the man.” It was as if Bernstein had gone out of her way not to be curious about the practice. But she became a quick enough study to assure readers that while “Islam is often cited as the authority that allows polygamy” in Africa, “the practice is a cultural tradition that crosses religious lines, while some Muslim lands elsewhere sharply restrict it.”

By any measure, however, the
Times’
reporting has been worst on the subject of Islamic honor killings. True, the
Times
has done a commendable job reporting on the practice in countries like Pakistan, Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Turkey, Iraq, Iran and the Palestinian Territories, and explaining the anthropological and cultural subtleties behind it. But when it comes to honor killings among immigrant Muslims on American soil, the
Times
has turned its
head. Most American Muslim honor killings are not reported at all in the
Times,
or else they are reported as “domestic abuse.” The more specific cultural attributes—especially the psychotically violent overkill of beheadings, strangulations, immolations and electrocutions—are purged from the reports, as are other common “signatures” (in police terminology), such as participation by a number of family members, including mothers, fathers, brothers, cousins and uncles, and the lengths they often go to hunt the victim down. And reports on honor killings are accompanied by outraged, defensive statements from Muslim advocacy organizations denying that Islam has any role—although such killings are
popularly
defended in Koranic terms in the Middle East.

In July 2008, a Pakistani immigrant allegedly strangled his 25-year-old daughter with a bungee cord in the Atlanta suburb of Jonesboro because she was determined to end her arranged marriage and had gotten involved with a new man. According to the
Atlanta Journal-Constitution,
Sandeela Kanwal’s father, Chaudhry Rashid, “told police he is Muslim and that extramarital affairs and divorce are against his religion [and] that’s why he killed her.” In one court session, the paper reported, a detective testified that Rashid had said: “God will protect me. God is watching me. I strangled my daughter.” The
New York Times
was missing in action.

A few weeks before that, Waheed Allah Mohammad, an immigrant from Afghanistan who lived in upstate New York, was charged with attempted murder after repeatedly stabbing his 19-year-old sister. The
Rochester Democrat
reported that Mohammad was “infuriated because his younger sister was going to clubs, wearing immodest clothing, and planning to leave her family for a new life in New York City.” His sister was a “bad Muslim girl,” he told sheriff’s investigators. The
Times
ignored this story too.

On New Year’s Day 2008 in Irving, Texas, the bullet-riddled bodies of the Said sisters—Sarah, 17, and Amina, 18—were found in an abandoned taxi in an empty parking lot. Police issued an arrest warrant for their father, an Egyptian immigrant named Yaser Abdel Said, who had reportedly threatened to kill them
upon learning that they had boyfriends. According to authorities, one of the girls died instantly, but the other one lived long enough to make a cell phone call to police, pleading for help and saying that she was dying. Yaser Said fled and was put on the FBI’s Most Wanted list. The girls’ brother, who authorities believe knew of the father’s plans, took flight too. He eventually wound up in Egypt, from where he wrote taunting notes to reporters covering the case, as well as to extended family members in America who spoke out critically about the murders. Despite the horrific details of the case, and the extensive coverage it got from other news organizations, the
Times
remained silent.

One Muslim wife-killing that the
Times
did report involved the television network executive who killed his wife after she had filed for divorce and received an order of protection against him in February 2009. Muzzammil Hassan attacked his wife in the network studios, stabbed her with hunting knives, then decapitated her. Afterward he went to the local police station, announced that his wife was dead, and then led the police to the scene and gave them the weapons he had used. He was charged with second-degree murder.

The
Times
took a week to report the story, and then refused to use the words “beheading” or “decapitation,” instead delicately noting that police found the woman’s head “separated” from her body. Although the case, in tandem with the honor killings of the previous year, cried out for a follow-up or a trend story, there was none. Instead, the
Times
showed its ideological aversion to saying what really occurred by echoing Islamic advocacy groups who insisted that such violence had no place in their religion and that the murder had to be understood merely as a form of “domestic abuse,” as Liz Robbins’ account put it.

Readers commenting on the
Times
Web edition didn’t buy it. One noted that what seemed particularly Islamic (and therefore germane) was the beheading: “Why would you kill someone in
that
particular way?” Another wrote: “Many Muslim-American organizations insist that honor killing is ‘Un-Islamic.’ Yet, many scholars of Islam equally assert that the Qur’an as well as custom permits grave punishment for disobedient women. The argument
that Islam is a ‘religion of peace’ has grown so tiresome in the face of so much evidence to the contrary.”

The killing triggered a major denunciation from Marcia Pappas, president of the New York State chapter of the National Organization of Women. “This is apparently a terroristic version of an honor killing, a murder rooted in cultural notions about women’s subordination to men,” Pappas said. “Why is this horrendous story not all over the news? Is a Muslim woman’s life not worth a five-minute report?” Pappas’ statement itself was newsworthy in that it represented a major breach with the national organization, which refused comment on the matter. The
Times
gave it no coverage.

Since the days right after 9/11, when it predicted an open season on American Muslims, the
Times
has doggedly followed a script built around the claim of Muslim victimization and Islamophobia. This wave of oppression never crested, yet the
Times
has continued to treat Muslims as an endangered species, always on the brink of being caught up in an American pogrom. Every year, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) puts out a report claiming increases in bias crimes, and every year, the
Times
laps it up. Not surprisingly, the paper has refused to admit that many “hate crimes” have been hoaxes.