The good news is that Rifqa Bary is alive. Police had been looking for Rifqa, a teenage girl from central Ohio who vanished three weeks ago. Rifqa, who turned 17 on Monday, converted to Christianity from Islam — bringing upon herself Islam’s death sentence for those who leave Islam.
Why did she flee? In the land of the free, she had to liberate herself.
“I was threatened by my dad,” Rifqa explained. “When my dad found out [about her conversion to Christianity], phone calls from the Muslim community started coming in with e-mails that confronted me. And I had a laptop, and he took that laptop and waved it in the air and he was about to beat me with it, and he said, ‘If you have this Jesus in your heart, you’re dead to me. You’re not my daughter.’ And I refused to speak but he said, ‘I will kill you. Tell me the truth.’ In these words, bad words, cuss words. So I knew that I had to get away.”
Rifqa Bary is alive. She ran to Florida and escaped the fate her father had in mind for her — unlike Amina and Sarah Said, two Muslim teens in Texas who ran away but returned home at the insistence of their mother, Tissie Said, only to be brutally murdered by their father, Yaser Said, on New Year’s Day 2008. Rifqa got away, unlike Aqsa Parvez, a Muslim teen in Canada who stayed with friends only to return home and get murdered by her father for refusing to wear the Islamic headscarf.
But now Rifqa Bary is in court, in a custody battle that could send her to her death. “They want me back home,” she says. “I can’t go back to Ohio, you guys don’t understand. That community, they’re like — I will die within a week. My life is at stake.”
“You guys don’t understand,” Rifqa said. “Islam is very different than you guys think. They have to kill me. My blood is now halal, which means that because I am now a Christian, I’m from a Muslim background, it’s an honor. If they love God more than me, they have to do this. And I’m fighting for my life, you guys don’t understand. You don’t understand.”
Americans don’t understand because the “experts” aren’t telling them. I pray that Rifqa’s defenders bring to the court experts who know about honor killings. Family members who have lost their relatives to honor killings (for less) should be giving testimony. Amina and Sarah Said’s aunt, Gail Gartrell, should speak; Ibn Warraq, Wafa Sultan (who is forced to live in hiding in the United States because of Islamic death threats), and Robert Spencer should speak; Phyllis Chesler and friends of Aqsa Parvez should speak.
This is the front line — right in Florida. While our finest young Americans engage in hard-fought battles on the front lines of the global jihad in Iraq and Afghanistan, and Israel is on the front lines of the global jihad in the Middle East, Muslim women all over the world are on the front lines in the war against Islamic jihad. The battlefield is their homes. They live their lives in abject terror in homemade concentration camps.
The control of women is central to the battle between free men and slaves. The horror of the Islamic subjugation, abuse, and murder of women has made its way to our shores. Our ignorance or worse, silence, is complicity in their deaths. Invariably, the terrible sociological result is a reduction in the status of women in Western society.
Are we in the free world going to stand by silently while Muslims in the West brutalize women and converts from Islam, and treat them as worthless trash? We failed Amina and Sarah Said, Aqsa Parvez, and thousands of other women held captive by the “devout.”
Rifqa Bary knows this: “Amina and Sarah,” she said, “they were forced to go back home. They were killed by their dad! This is not just some threat! This is reality! This is truth! This is reality! How many more cases do you want? There’s case after case. There’s hundreds of them. I am one. I am one of hundreds.”
How many more of these girls will we fail? Rifqa’s testimony is a plea to the free world to stand for its values and its principles. How far we have fallen when a young woman is pleading to be free in the land of the free, home of the brave.
Rifqa Bary’s life hangs in the balance. The West should do everything in its power to save her.
Pamela Geller is the editor and publisher of the Atlas Shrugs Web site and former associate publisher of the New York Observer. Her Op-Eds have appeared in the Washington Times, Newsmax, Human Events, WorldNetDaily, the American Thinker, Israel National News, and other publications.
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