Muzzammil Hassan is the founder and chief executive officer of Bridges TV, which he launched in 2004, amid hopes that it would help portray Muslims in a more positive light. "Orchard Park police are investigating a particularly gruesome killing, the beheading of a woman, after her husband — an influential member of the local Muslim community — reported her death to police Thursday.
muzzammil Hassan had a great idea: he established a television station to run programming that would counter stereotypes about Muslims. That sounds like a fine plan…but then his wife asked for a divorce, and his response was to murder and decapitate her, which rather confirms a particularly nasty stereotype. Unless, perhaps, it's not a stereotype, but simply a fact that Islam is a patriarchal religion of misogyny.
Muzzammil Hassan, 44, is accused of second degree murder of Aasiya Hassan, whose body was found last week at the TV station in New York state. Both Mr Hassan and his wife worked at Bridges TV, a station aimed at countering stereotypes of Muslims. Authorities said Mrs Hassan, 37, had recently filed for divorce. The couple had two children, aged four and six. Bridges TV, a satellite-distributed news and opinion channel, was founded by Mr Hassan in 2004 and was based in a suburb in Buffalo, in upstate New York.
Why are we looking at this in religious light, the American jails are filled with violent criminals. Infact the per-capita jail rate of Americans is highest in the world. This guy was just mentally ill. A close friend of the family tells that the Muzzammil had a nervous breakdown on his first divorce, his brother had to support him and his parents moved from Pakistan to US to live with him and to take care of him. He had several episodes later and never recovered from his trauma. Lets not look at this in the light of religious believes, doing so just makes one look Islamophobic and the confirms the belief that Westerners are just pointing fingers without looking at their own selves.
ReplyDelete(to the first commentator)
ReplyDeleteQuite true.
However, it is just that the way this crime was perpetrated fits with common prejudices (or at least with information floating around and) associated with Muslim culture.
No Western country (as far as I know) nowadays uses beheading as a way of executing a death sentence. While people do murder their spouses, a beheading would be considered a very exotic and especially bizarre killing.
Therefore, in a sordid way, this does draw attention, in somewhat the same way as a Pope who would talk about better understanding between Christians and atheists and then would confess to ordering to burn science books.