Frank Gaffney on Fox News discusses Rifqa Bary– a 17 year-old apostate from Islam. She fled her home in Ohio last month, claiming that her father threatened to kill her for converting from Islam to Christianity. Under Shariah law, the punnishment is death for apostatacy. Rifqa fled to Florida to seek refuge with a pastor she’d met through Facebook. A Florida judge has temporarily placed her with a foster family until the court determines whether she should be turned over to Ohio, who have already stated their intention to send Rifqa back to her parents.

Florida Governor Crist has it within his power to prevent Rifqa Bary from being added to the list of victims of the barbaric practice of honor killings. He can advise the court that the distinct prospect of death at the hands of her family constitutes “mitigating circumstances” that would justify refusing to return the minor to Ohio and the relatives’ not-so-tender mercies. Neither can she safely be remanded to the community that is home to one of America’s most virulent promoters of Shariah, the Noor Islamic Cultural Center near Hilliard Ohio, and whose schools and community services so dismally failed Rifqa when she and/or her friends sought help in the wake of previous acts of violence against her.

Sadly, Crist has, to date, evinced no interest in this matter. He seeks higher office, however, having announced his candidacy for the United States Senate. Even if the governor could, somehow, live with the knowledge that — by failing to act to allow Rifqa Bary to stay in Florida, he may be condemning her to death at her family’s hands — it is hard to believe that the voters of his state will think they want such a man to represent them in Washington.

Voters and others around America who understand the implications of ignoring Shariah and manifestations of its encroachment in the United States like Rifqa Bary’s case are encouraged to contact Crist today via phone (850) 488-7146, fax (850) 487-0801 or e-mail at [email protected]

Dead Girl Walking

Frank J. Gaffney, Jr.
Thursday, August 20, 2009
Newsmax

“Dead girl walking.” That’s how Florida anti-Shariah activist Tom Trento of the Florida Security Council described Rifqa Bary. Bary is a 17-year-old girl who fled to Florida to escape an abusive Muslim family in Ohio out of fear that she would be killed by her father or brother. Unless Florida’s governor, Charlie Crist, intervenes, a state judge in Orlando is expected on Friday afternoon to force Rifqa to return to Ohio — and almost certain death.

Rifqa has ample reason to fear such a fate. She has been repeatedly and savagely beaten by family members in the past. Reportedly, this petite young high school cheerleader lost vision in an eye following one such attack by her brother.

Worse yet, Rifqa had converted to Christianity. “Apostasy” is a capital offense under the theo-political-legal program authoritative Islam calls Shariah. Pamela Geller, who has extensively documented this case at her marvelous Atlas Shrugs blog (www.AtlasShrugs2000.com), quotes the girl as saying:

[My father] took [a] 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.

As Shariah expert and best-selling author Robert Spencer has pointed out, there is a passage in Chapter 18 of the Quran that is held to authorize Muslims to murder wayward children, a practice that has come to be called “honor killing.” Incredibly, such murders are now increasingly occurring not just in Muslim communities in the Middle East but in the West, as well.

In fact, as the founder of ACT! For America, Brigitte Gabriel, has noted, a conference of police officers from many European countries was recently convened in The Hague to discuss the burgeoning problem of Muslim honor killings. She reports that Britain has reopened 110 cases in which murders occurred last year that are now all suspected of being honor killings.

Closer to home, the bodies of four women were found a few weeks ago floating in a river in Toronto. All had been murdered by relatives in the name of redeeming the family’s honor. And there have been at least three instances of honor killings in America in recent months in Texas, Atlanta, and New York.

Some of the victims of honor killings have been executed for such “offenses” as dating or simply talking by phone to non-Muslim boys, wearing make-up, refusing to wear the hijab, other head coverings or “modest” clothing, or filing for divorce. Others had the temerity to leave the faith.

Nonie Darwish, herself an apostate and author of the outstanding “Cruel and Usual Punishment: The Terrifying Global Implications of Islamic Law”, notes that one of the sayings of Mohammed, the Sahih hadith 9:50, states unequivocally: “No Umma [a member of the Muslim community] should be killed for killing a Kaffir [an infidel]. . . . Whoever changes his Islamic religion, kill him.”

Crist has it within his power to prevent Rifqa Bary from being added to the list of victims of the barbaric practice of honor killings. He can advise the court that the distinct prospect of death at the hands of her family constitutes “mitigating circumstances” that would justify refusing to return the minor to Ohio and the relatives’ not-so-tender mercies. Neither can she safely be remanded to the community that is home to one of America’s most virulent promoters of Shariah, the Noor Islamic Cultural Center near Hilliard Ohio, and whose schools and community services so dismally failed Rifqa when she and/or her friends sought help in the wake of previous acts of violence against her.

Sadly, Crist has, to date, evinced no interest in this matter. He seeks higher office, however, having announced his candidacy for the United States Senate. Even if the governor could, somehow, live with the knowledge that — by failing to act to allow Rifqa Bary to stay in Florida, he may be condemning her to death at her family’s hands — it is hard to believe that the voters of his state will think they want such a man to represent them in Washington.

Those voters and others around America who understand the implications of ignoring Shariah and manifestations of its encroachment in the United States like Rifqa Bary’s case are encouraged to contact Crist today via phone (850) 488-7146, fax (850) 487-0801 or e-mail at [email protected].

© 2009 Newsmax