Here is how it works: When a Muslim couple sets up television station specifically for the purpose of advancing understanding and tolerance of Muslims in America, the couple also creates a duty to further that goal by their own personal behavior. It would be more damaging for the proprietors of a station with such an important goal to be implicated in a terror plot, for example. Muslims doing so while claiming to be devoted to bridging the chasm of distrust between America and Islam would make the chasm deeper, perhaps deeper than the usual, garden variety Radical Islamic terrorist plot.
Another no-no for such a couple, I’d say: the husband stabbing the wife to death and cutting off her head.
Muzzammil and Aasiya Hassana founded a Buffalo TV station to promote tolerance and understanding of Muslims, and now Muzzammil has just been convicted of killing and beheading his wife in the studio in 2009. The TV executive served as his own attorney.
His defense? She had it coming.
This just isn’t going to help make people feel less anxious about Muslim culture at all. Muzzammil Hassana had a high standard of conduct to live up to because of his own high-profile project, and it was irresponsible and unfair to innocent American Muslims for him to commit such an act.
Awfully unfair to his late wife, too, of course. But horribly brutal, gory, cruel crimes have way of making us look past the important macro-ethical issues.
Fortunately, I’m on the job.
Ethics Alarms 
To make it worse, his defense was that she had it coming because she had humiliated him by filing for divorce. If your are going to form a TV station to combat negative stereotypes about Muslims, it helps if you aren’t yourself a negative Muslim stereotype.
“…negative Muslim stereotype…” I’m thinking of Bibi Aisha, the 19-yr-old Afghan girl whose in-laws cut off her nose and ears as punishment for fleeing from her abusive husband. The picture appeared on the cover of Time magazine. (As the father of a free, healthy grown daughter, I wept when I saw the photo). Bibi Aisha was flown to the USA for reconstructive surgery. I googled her name just now; she has a prosthetic nose and is lovely as ever.
Many protest, “…but that is not the real Islam, that is a local culture.” I agree. But try to convince a non-thinking world population.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali has written a couple of excellent books on Muslim culture: Infidel and Nomad, from an insider’s and woman’s perspective. I highly recommend reading these thoughtful and impassioned works.
I saw a movie called “Infidel”. Very entertaining.
Here are my disjointed and probably offensive thoughts.
This will certainly not promote tolerance, but in its own horrible way, it might promote understanding. On the one hand, all variety of men are capable of producing the sort of person who would sooner slay their significant other to avoid the shame of divorce. In a strange way, this just says that they’re just like anyone else.
On the other hand, the misogyny that is integral to some people’s practice of the religion is something that should be held to higher scrutiny. Obviously, the vast majority of modern enlightened Muslims aren’t misogynists, but in countries where they hold greater authority, institutionalized misogyny is the norm. An atheist polemicist I watch has said that he feels women’s rights are the line that Muslims should not be allowed to cross in the Western world, no matter what. That sounds fine to me. Nowadays, the only time misogyny is acceptable in the Western world is if we’re watching Mad Men.
The fact is that there are Islamic scholars who talk and teach about how precisely one should beat their wife, which sounds about as relevant to the modern world as a class on leech application to relieve the foul humors. I hope that I’m a calm enough person that, if a woman was ever gracious or stupid enough to be my bride, I would never put my hands on her in anything more aggressive than tickling. But a belief system that institutionalizes domestic violence is antithetical to the progress we’ve made in the equality of the sexes. Any man who strikes his wife and is unrepentant because she ‘deserved it’ should go up on domestic violence charges, and she should be free to drop him like a hot stone and seek out a less violent mate.
Recently, I learned someone with an online video series I’ve started watching identifies as a Christian. He responded to an anti-religious comment in a comic book (“Religion has killed more people than cancer… and they try to cure cancer.”) He responded by saying, generally, the problem with deaths being blamed on religion is only when the religious take their beliefs and harm someone else because of them. He’s perfectly content with his Christian beliefs, and they give him the personal strength to not be concerned about the people who disagree with them.
I have to believe that the majority of Muslims believe something close to this, even if not explicitly. They have their beliefs, and wouldn’t dream about harming anyone just for disagreeing. Those who do should be treated like anyone else who would and condemned.
I don’t see any other realistic response to something like this than saying, “We don’t rightly care what you might believe you’re allowed to do in some far away land that’s been spinning its wheels in the mud for longer than a millennium. Your faith is immaterial, your beliefs run contrariwise to those we deem most important. In this land, you deprived your wife of rights we guarantee all people who stand on this soil, and for this, you will be incarcerated for the rest of your days.”
Maybe I’m just fire-and-brimstone about this. I dunno.
I think that was well said.
And it’s the Comment of the Day!
I am curious if any here has personal contact with Muslims.
My step-mom is Lebanese. She spent the first, I believe, eighteen years of her life in Lebanon. She lost family to Muslims because her family was Christian.
There are two parts to Lebanon. The Christian side and the Muslim side. The Christians were moved bodily by Muslims into land the Muslims did not want. Then they started killing them.
My step-mom watched the bombs fall on Lebanon like they were fireworks at night during her youth. To this day, she has to wash her food carefully because she is afraid of being poisoned.
Are all Muslims bad people? No. I’ve met some who were extremely nice and would gladly have them as neighbors, friends, etc. My niece befriended one without so much as a protest from anyone.
Every culture has their radicals. I just personally believe that Muslims have more. Their culture is something you NEED to study to understand it and know exactly what it stands for.
There are two points of interest if you do this. A mosque in Spain and a war that was stopped in Sweden.
I’d just like to finish off with one thing I see in the culture that makes no sense to me. What God or Being or person would make someone believe that killing people will bring them 72 virgins if they die in the process? What culture would willingly convince a person that dying is okay as long as you kill others?
Jack, will you still not understand? Hassana had a high standard to live up to, yes, and he *did* live up to it, according to his own definition. He believes at least as much in his standard as you do in yours, and ultimately wants everyone to understand why his standard is better, and why killing his wife was the right thing to do. Unfortunately, he is by no means an aberration.
You are suggesting that his conduct will not promote tolerance, but may promote understanding. He, however, does not understand American culture.
In America, we put someone’s name in “The Mikado” before we behead them….