Posted on 07/14/2010 4:08:40 AM PDT by SJackson
Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Pamela Geller, founder, editor and publisher of the popular and award-winning weblog AtlasShrugs.com. She has won acclaim for her interviews with internationally renowned figures, including John Bolton, Geert Wilders, Bat Ye’or, Natan Sharansky, and many others, and has broken numerous important stories — notably the questionable sources of some of the financing of the Obama campaign. Her op-eds have been published in The Washington Times, The American Thinker, Israel National News, Frontpage Magazine, World Net Daily, and New Media Journal, among other publications. She is the co-author (with Robert Spencer) of the soon to be released, The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration’s War on America (forward by Ambassador John Bolton).
FP: Hi Pamela Geller, welcome back to Frontpage Interview.
Tell us about your new honor killing awareness campaign.
Geller: Thanks Jamie.
The honor killing awareness campaign is Stop Islamization of America’s (SIOA) next campaign to reach and educate the American people. Taxicab ads have hit the streets of Chicago, the first in a nationwide campaign.
The ads aim to educate the American people about the horrors of honor killing. They feature photos of honor killing victims with the question, “Is your family threatening you?” and the URL of the SIOA website LeaveIslamSafely.com.
This is phase II of SIOA’s pro-freedom ad campaign; its goals are twofold. Primarily it is to help girls in trouble, but it is also meant to raise awareness of the rise of honor killings in the West. Young Muslim girls must know that there is an escape from their homemade concentrations camps. This is a sub-campaign and logical follow-up to the “Leaving Islam?” bus campaign, which is soon to break in another major US city.
FP: And there is an urgency here isn’t there?
It is important to note that “both [Azad’s] parents were born and educated in the U.K.” They were not unassimilated immigrants, which the media and the apologists always associate with honor killings in the West.
Police say that 17,000 women are victims of honor killing in Great Britain every year. And it is happening in the U.S. as well: our campaign features three American honor killing victims. The ads feature photos of these girls:
Amina and Sarah Said: They ran away from their brutal home life and their devout Muslim father, Yaser Said, only to be lured back to their Texas home by their mother on Christmas Day 2007 and then tortured and murdered not 24 hours later, in an honor killing on New Years Day 2008. They were killed for dating non-Muslims. Yaser Said is still at large.
Noor Almalaki was run over by a car driven by her father in an honor killing in November 2009 in Arizona. He killed her for being “too Americanized” and not Muslim enough.
Gülsüm Semin was repeatedly and severely beaten by her family in Germany. Ultimately she was brutally beaten beyond recognition and “honor” murdered because she refused forced Islamic marriage in Turkey.
Banaz Mahmod was killed in her apartment in London by her father and his brother and four others because they didn’t approve of her boyfriend.
The triangle that flanks the ads in the front and in the back reads, “They wanted liberty, they got death.”
FP: What are the Islamic foundations to honor killing?
Geller: Jamie, Muslims are not the sole perpetrators of honor killings, but a recent survey showed that 91 percent of honor killings worldwide are committed by Muslims, and 84 percent of honor killings in the United States were done by Muslims.
This is no surprise. A manual of Islamic law approved by Al-Azhar University, the most respected authority in Sunni Islam, stipulates that “retaliation is obligatory…against anyone who kills a human being purely intentionally and without right.” However, “not subject to retaliation” is “a father or mother (or their fathers or mothers) for killing their offspring, or offspring’s offspring.” In other words, Islamic law sets no penalty for a parent who kills his child.
Also, the legal codes of Jordan, Syria, and other Muslim countries have substantially reduced penalties for honor murders as compared to other murders, and Islamic clerics have resisted efforts to stiffen penalties for honor killings.
FP: And, without doubt, the fear and hatred of female sexuality that serves as a foundation to Islam engenders the fertile soil for Islamic honor killings.
So why this particular tactic of your new campaign?
Geller: This is a growing problem that is being hidden and obfuscated by the big liberal press. It needs the spotlight of truth to expose the ugly terrible reality behind the wretched existence of these girls living under siege. The West is reluctant to speak of it, media whitewashes it, but knowing what we know about Aqsa Parvez’s homelife (read the whole horrible account here) and Amina and Sarah’s wretched home life (read here), it is time we stood up for these girls. This cannot stand in America.
I thought the taxicab advertising was a perfect medium to get our message to the people who are hungry, tired of the lies and starving for information that the media is too afraid to provide. The taxis are a powerful medium to pull the curtain back on the obfuscation and deception on honor killings. Kudos to Jeff at the Verifone Company for understanding this new use of an old medium to spread the truth.
FP: What do you hope this campaign can help achieve?
Geller: What we hope to achieve is that these girls will not have died in vain. These girls are not invisible. Their terrible, miserable existences will be known, and their stories will save the lives of other girls and boys in trouble. Such misogyny was unheard of this country 30 thirty years ago — the appeasement to Islam and the Sharia will only serve to advance this grotesque ideology.
FP: What are the Islamic foundations to honor killing?
Geller: Jamie, Muslims are not the sole perpetrators of honor killings, but a recent survey showed that 91 percent of honor killings worldwide are committed by Muslims, and 84 percent of honor killings in the United States were done by Muslims.
This is no surprise. A manual of Islamic law approved by Al-Azhar University, the most respected authority in Sunni Islam, stipulates that “retaliation is obligatory…against anyone who kills a human being purely intentionally and without right.” However, “not subject to retaliation” is “a father or mother (or their fathers or mothers) for killing their offspring, or offspring’s offspring.” In other words, Islamic law sets no penalty for a parent who kills his child.
Also, the legal codes of Jordan, Syria, and other Muslim countries have substantially reduced penalties for honor murders as compared to other murders, and Islamic clerics have resisted efforts to stiffen penalties for honor killings.
FP: And, without doubt, the fear and hatred of female sexuality that serves as a foundation to Islam engenders the fertile soil for Islamic honor killings.
So why this particular tactic of your new campaign?
Geller: This is a growing problem that is being hidden and obfuscated by the big liberal press. It needs the spotlight of truth to expose the ugly terrible reality behind the wretched existence of these girls living under siege. The West is reluctant to speak of it, media whitewashes it, but knowing what we know about Aqsa Parvez’s homelife (read the whole horrible account here) and Amina and Sarah’s wretched home life (read here), it is time we stood up for these girls. This cannot stand in America.
I thought the taxicab advertising was a perfect medium to get our message to the people who are hungry, tired of the lies and starving for information that the media is too afraid to provide. The taxis are a powerful medium to pull the curtain back on the obfuscation and deception on honor killings. Kudos to Jeff at the Verifone Company for understanding this new use of an old medium to spread the truth.
FP: What do you hope this campaign can help achieve?
Geller: What we hope to achieve is that these girls will not have died in vain. These girls are not invisible. Their terrible, miserable existences will be known, and their stories will save the lives of other girls and boys in trouble. Such misogyny was unheard of this country 30 thirty years ago — the appeasement to Islam and the Sharia will only serve to advance this grotesque ideology.
BTW there are a too many non-muslims who are too handy with their fists on their women. It usually isn’t in the name of religion but the influence of alcohol.
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