“Buffalo man” (just kidding! he’s a Muslim man) found guilty of beheading wife

Bruce B. writes:

This is just too ridiculous not to mention. A headline from Middle American News, Feb 8, reads:

“Muslim “American” TV Exec in Charge of Erasing “Stereotypes” Guilty of Honor Beheading of Wife”

Doesn’t this sound like a headline from The Onion?

(Granted it’s MAN’s headline/summary for a linked article—but it’s accurate, and, without the quotes around “American,” would be a reasonable headline for the actual story).

LA replies:

In fact, that’s the way the story was described in mainstream media, though not so plainly, and not in headlines, as MAN has done) when he was arrested a couple of years ago. I wrote in February 2009:

Here is a story by Editor and Publisher on the Orchard Park, New York wife-beheader, Muzzammil Hassan. Hassan is the creator and CEO of BridgesTV, a cable network dedicated to “connecting people through understanding.” Yeah. Understanding. We understand—“we” meaning the approximately one percent of Americans who understand sufficiently what Islam is. But the other 99 percent of us don’t understand. Will this quintessential “moderate” Muslim’s Islamic-style slaughter of his wife help us understand? More bridges are needed! And cover those bridges with the scores of millions of corpses of the people killed and the tens of millions of people enslaved and the lights of civilization extinguished by 1,400 years of Islam, then maybe we’ll understand.

See also this entry, “A non-Islam theory of the Buffalo beheading,” from the same week. In that entry, David B. wrote:

This Vdare blog article by Brenda Walker has this quote from the press, “While he and his wife were happy to be in the United States, they were upset by the negative perceptions of Muslims, and particularly how this perception might affect their children.”

The translation is that despite being financially very successful, the Pakistani banker resented the culture of the country he was getting rich in. When his wife wanted a divorce, he cuts her head off. Today I suppose the banker is complaining of how he is being portrayed.

To which I replied:

Or it might be played like this. I can see this editorial in the New York Times:

Cultural assumptions that kill

In a further indication of the costs of our society’s mean-spirited refusal to welcome immigrants with open arms, a Pakistani Muslim immigrant became so distraught over Americans’ negative stereotypes of Muslims that he cut his wife’s head off.

Other VFR entries on that story are here and here.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at February 10, 2011 04:06 PM | Send