Pamela Geller, has been rallying her fellow conspiracy theorists and anti-Muslim shock troops to converge on the Franklin County Juvenile Court House, to in her usual shrill style, “Help Save Fathima Rifqa Bary!” Of course the Rifqa Bary case has long since ceased to be about the young girl her self, let alone about her safety but rather it has metamorphized into a vivid manifestation of the psychopathies of the Right-wing and its most ardent and zealous core. As journalist Michael Kruse put it in a back and forth with anti-Muslim Andrew Bostom, “he (Robert Spencer), and Pam Geller, too, are so much a part of this story, and certainly reasons it’s turned into what it’s turned into.”

The Rifqa Bary story is all but over, the courts have decided that she is safe in Ohio where she will have regular contact with her parents who they have also absolved from baseless allegations of violence and extremism. The lead cheerleaders in ripping this young girl from her family have been Spencer and Geller, who in the face of the verdict seem to be shell shocked.

Geller, the most vocal of the anti-Muslims over this case has chosen a quixotic strategy in response, attempting to pressurize the Courts to sweep aside the judicial process and their verdict in favor of her and her mobs fantasy of seeing Rifqa Bary living with a Christian family.

An interesting progressive website called Plunderbund reports that one its bloggers, Joseph will be attending the Geller rally to report on the ins-and-outs of the sure fire Islamophobia. Already we have a nice morsel of what is to come:

Spotted at Wingnut Islamophobe Rally: Islam is of the Devil

Just a hint of what is to come from a visit by PB blogger Joseph at a wingnut Islamaphobe rally in Columbus:

I also hear he has a video with Pam Geller of Atlas Shrugs (at least I think it’s her), claiming the White House is putting cookies on her computer! Not only is she a skeered of the Mooz-lums, but she’s a skeered of cookies too!

Boo!

More to come…

Stay tuned for more at Plunderbund, and we will also definitely be updating our findings.

UPDATE: More from Plunderbund

Pam Geller of Atlas Shrugs and a bunch of her wing nut friends held a rally today across from the Franklin County Juvenile Court House the stated purpose of which was to show support for Rifqa Bary.

It didn’t take but a few seconds to realize that the actual purpose was much more sinister. The people who showed up for this rally couldn’t give two shits about the Rifqa herself – they only care about using her as a tool to further their own hate-filled, intolerant, anti-Muslim agenda.

You could tell by the shirts and the signs that these people were full of hate. How very Christian of them.

The photos speak for themselves (but I added some captions anyway)…

---

Maybe a dozen people had on these ridiculous shirts.

---

Including these classy broads who brought along their babies. Want to talk about indoctrination?

---

This guy intentionally misspelled Muslim as ‘Moslem’ knowing that spelling is offensive.

---

More nutjobs with signs. The portly fellow on the phone is Robert Spencer, the wing nutty author well known for spreading misinformation and hatred of Islam. The guy to his left is one of the many serious-looking guys with sunglasses and suits who were pretending to be from the Secret Service.

---

Another nut with a sign. Note the stack of books? The top one is Robert Spencer’s “Stealth Jihad: How Radical Islam is Subverting America without Guns or Bombs”.

Lou Engle, a Joel's Army pastor

Fathima Rifqa Bary, has claimed that her parents are “radical Muslims,” yet the reality seems to be that it is actually she herself who has fallen into the ranks of radicals.  We’re already very familiar with the extremist church she is involved with, the Global Revolution Church, which preaches that there is today an Armageddon between good (the Christians) and evil (the Muslims).

Now, let’s look into a different group she has associated herself with, namely The Call, another End of Times Armageddon invoking group. Here she is on a conference call with Lou Engle, the fanatical leader of the cult:

Up until about four minutes into the video she sounds fairly sane,  but at about 4:20, suddenly she becomes possessed by what we can only assume is the Holy Spirit.  She enters a trance-like state that to us normal human beings seems bizarre, to say the least.  I’ve seen some preachers, Imams, and Rabbis have some crazy highs and lows in their speeches, but usually they build up to it.  On the other hand, Fathima Rifqa just turned on the crazy from the very start; one second she’s talking like a normal human being and the next she starts yelling in a crazed delirium, reaffirming the view that she’s been brainwashed by fundamentalists.

By 5:44, she does her best Glenn Beck impression, i.e. fake crying. When the initial story broke, I saw some YouTube users claim that Fathima Rifqa was fake crying.  I was skeptical, and gave her the benefit of doubt but when I saw the video of her talking to Lou Engle, I was really forced to reconsider my benevolence.  It does seem that she can turn on the fake crying at will.  It is therefore not so difficult to believe that she could also be faking this entire thing.

One other thing: in the Lou Engle conference call, pay close attention to the end of the video: they make it clear that Fathima Rifqa doesn’t care about her own safety; she will–as she says herself–go wherever God takes her.  The reason for all of this–according to these people–is not to protect Fathima Rifqa Bary (since she is ready to be martyred) but to advertise Christianity to 50 million Muslims who need salvation.  But wasn’t the entire court case about Fathima’s safety?  I think the video really shows that it’s not about that at all; it’s about publicity.

A writer for RightWingWatch.org wrote:

For the last few days, I’ve been covering the right-wing effort to mobilize it own Christian forces to counter the “dark spiritual content” of the upcoming Muslim prayer rally.  Tonight, activists gathered for a conference call/prayer rally hosted by the National Day of Prayer Task Force, headed by Shirely Dobson, wife of Focus on the Family’s James Dobson, Lou Engle of The Call, and featuring other activists like Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council and Cindy Jacobs.

Tonight, this effort revealed itself to be part of the much larger Religious Right battle against Islam in America when the Religious Right’s latest cause célèbre, Rifqa Bary, joined the conference call.

At the beginning of the clip, Lou Engle is told by one of the other participants that “their little sister” is on the line, at which point Engle introduces Rifqa Bary to the conference call participants and asks her to share her story.  Bary, sounding like a somewhat nervous but otherwise perfectly average teenager, recounts her conversion to Christianity and her decision to flee from the home of her Muslim parents in Ohio.  Following that, Engle declared Bary to be “an Esther for such a time as this” and asks her to lead the call in prayer, which she agrees to do, at which point she becomes seemingly hysterical and rather incoherent while sobbing and praying, making it nearly impossible to understand what she is saying outside of her repeated cries to Jesus.

And then, just like that, she stops, seemingly catching the other participants off guard until Engle then chimes in with his own fervent prayers to God to “use Rifqa to be an Esther.” Soon Engle is joined by various others, all of whom pray for this modern day Esther who will lead Muslims out of Islam and into Christianity while asking God to spread Rifqa’s “so that the testimony of Jesus will go out to CNN, will go out to talk shows and use this little story so that all across America the Gospel will be preached” and to “expose the hidden darkness that is rolling into the nation through these ideologies.”

Eventually, Engle unmutes the conference call’s participants and asks them all to pray for Rifqa, at which point the call the descends into little more than chaos and static.

So this is all a publicity stunt to advertise Jesus.  Here’s what I think happened: Fathima Rifqa was attracted to some fringe Christian groups due to their rhetoric.  These Bible thumpers saw Fathima Rifqa as a tool they could use to boost their own publicity–a way to call the Muslim heathens to Jesus.  They convinced a young and impressionable Fathima Rifqa that she wasn’t just some ordinary high school student but a prophet sent to the heathen nations.

Let’s investigate Lou Engle and The Call to see what kind of company Fathima Rifqa keeps.  Engle is quite the loon.  At first, I thought he had what psychiatrists would call akathisia, or the inability to sit still–a common side-effect of anti-psychotic medications.  On closer examination though it seems that it’s malingering–part of his ploy to dupe impressionable young people that he speaks through the Holy Ghost.  One mainstream Christian critic of his wrote:

As he spoke, Lou Engle constantly rocked back and forth, as apparently he almost always does now when preaching, under what he would claim to be the anointing of the Holy Spirit. His spiritual manifestations are supposed to be a sign that he speaks under the unction of the Holy Spirit and when the jerks, grunts, twiches and miscellaneous experiences and feelings get stronger, they supposedly bear witness to him and the audience that what he says is true and prophetic and the ‘glory’ and ‘anointing’ of the Lord is there testifying to it.

To see this conman bobbing and rocking, watch this here (it’s long so just watch a bit of it to see what I mean):

And here he is doing the same even when nobody is in the room except for the camera:

The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), a non-profit civil rights organization that tracks hate groups, cites Lou Engle as a prominent Joel’s Army pastor.  Proponents of this theology (considered heretical by mainstream Christians) believe that the Christian youth will become a part of Joel’s Army that will physically “conquer the earth” and forcibly convert “the nations” to Christianity.  Democracy will be overthrown and a literalistic Biblical law will reign supreme.  Keep in mind that the Islamophobes like Robert Spencer and Pam Geller try to convince us that Muslims secretly want to conquer the entire world for Islam, overthrow democracy for a harsh understanding of Sharia, and convert the world to their religion.

Yet, here we have a girl (Fathima Rifqa Bary) associating with a man (Lou Engle) who is linked to a warlike theology that endorses the idea that Christian youth armies will conquer the entire world for Jesus, overthrow democracy, and forcibly convert non-believers to Christianity–and look at what side Spencer and Geller are on!  On pp.226 of his book The Pathetically Incorrect Guide to Islam, Spencer demands that Muslims must “renounce sharia’s expansionist imperative,” yet I don’t see him demanding that radical Christian dominionists must renounce their desire to conquer by force the entire world for Christ.   Well, it’s not surprising, since in his book, Spencer himself calls for a Crusade against Islam (Ibid., p.231), not unlike these Joel’s Army lunatics.  So we’re coming full circle here.  The nutters defending each other.

I urge you to read the article by SPLC, as well as this expose by another hate watch site known as the Box Turtle Bulletin.  Here is an excerpt:

Lou Engle also echoes Brown’s embrace of martyrdom. Engle, whose own ministry is known as “The Call,” is closely aligned with a militant Christian Dominionist movement known as Joel’s Army.

Going back to the earlier article, Casey Sanchez (of the Southern Poverty Law Center) describes Engles as follows:

Joel’s Army is prophesied to become an Armageddon-ready military force of young people with a divine mandate to physically impose Christian “dominion” on non-believers…

Joel’s Army followers, many of them teenagers and young adults who believe they’re members of the final generation to come of age before the end of the world, are breaking away in droves from mainline Pentecostal churches. Numbering in the tens of thousands, they base their beliefs on an esoteric reading of the second chapter of the Old Testament Book of Joel, in which an avenging swarm of locusts attacks Israel. In their view, the locusts are a metaphor for Joel’s Army…

“The pitch and intensity of the military rhetoric of this branch of the global Dominionist movement has substantially increased since the beginning of 2008,” writes The Discernment Research Group, a Christian watchdog group that tracks what they call heresies or cults within Christianity. “One can only wonder how long before this transforms into real warfare with actual warriors.”

‘Snorting Religion’

Joel’s Army believers are hard-core Christian dominionists, meaning they believe that America, along with the rest of the world, should be governed by conservative Christians and a conservative Christian interpretation of biblical law. There is no room in their doctrine for democracy or pluralism…Joel’s Army followers believe that once democratic institutions are overthrown, their hierarchy of apostles and prophets will rule over the earth, with one church per city…

The atmosphere is less charged with violence at “The Call,” a 12-hour revival of up to 20,000 youths led by Joel’s Army pastor Lou Engle and held every summer in a major American city (this year’s event was scheduled for Washington, D.C. in August)…

As even his critics note, Engle is a sweet, humble and gentle man whose persona is difficult to reconcile with his belief in an end-time armyof invincible young Christian warriors. Yet while Engle is careful to avoid deploying explicit Joel’s Army rhetoric at high-profile events like The Call, when he’s speaking in smaller hyper-charismatic circles to avowed Joel’s Army followers, he can venture into bloodlust.

This March, at a “Passion for Jesus” conference…Engle called on his audience for vengeance.

“I believe we’re headed to an Elijah/Jezebel showdown on the Earth, not just in America but all over the globe, and the main warriors will be the prophets of Baal versus the prophets of God, and there will be no middle ground,” said Engle. He was referring to the Baal of the Old Testament, a pagan idol whose followers were slaughtered under orders from the prophet Elijah.

“There’s an Elijah generation that’s going to be the forerunners for the coming of Jesus, a generation marked not by their niceness but by the intensity of their passion,” Engle continued. “The kingdom of heaven suffers violence and the violent take it by force. Such force demands an equal response, and Jesus is going to make war on everything that hinders love, with his eyes blazing fire.”

Although Joel’s Army theology is mainly directed at people in their teens and early 20s via events like The Call and ministries like IHOP, sometimes the target audience is even younger. In some of the most arresting images in “Jesus Camp,” a 2006 documentary about the Kids on Fire bible camp in North Dakota, grade school-aged kids dressed in army fatigues wield swords and conduct military field maneuvers. “A lot of people die for God and they’re not afraid,” one camper told ABC News reporters in a follow-up segment.

“We’re kinda being trained to be warriors,” added another, “only in a funner way.”

Engle has a bunch of other views considered heretical by mainstream Christianity, such as the belief in “God men” and blood atonement.  It is strange that so many Christians would want to place their trust in Fathima Rifqa Bary who has made her bed with such shady groups and people.

Her fascination with Lou Engle began long before.  As Davi Baker of the SF Examiner notes, it was discovered that Lou Engle’s book entitled Digging the Wells of Revival was part of Fathima Rifqa’s reading material. Additionally, the group she found refuge in, the Global Revolution Church, has similar metanarratives. Baker writes:

On the pen drive found in her room was a reading list, and on that reading list was a book titled “Digging the Wells of Revival” by Lou Engle.  The final chapter of that book is titled “The Hinge of History: Raising up the Nazirites.” …Some have teased that Rifqa’s writings indicate that she wants to be a prophet, but this is exactly what Lou Engle has in mind. Lou writes that God said to him, “America is receiving Her apostles, prophets, and evangelists, but She has not yet seen Her Nazirites!” Lou Engle has a long history of claiming direct communication with God, as well as prophetic dreams…

They seem to imagine some kind of army of super Christians who will appear in a moment of National crisis and win the day. What’s the crisis? Consider these statements from Lou’s homepage, TheCall.com. “There is a great spiritual conflict with a rising tide of Islamic boldness being manifested… we must have spiritual discernment as to the spiritual dark powers that are being invoked into our nation.” Compare that with similar statements from Blake Lorenz, the pastor of Global Revolution Church who housed Rifqa, “These are the last days, these are the end times, and this conflict between Islam and Christianity is going to grow greater. This conflict between good and evil is going to grow greater.”

The radical cult members and Fathima Rifqa are feeding off of each others’ delusions.  As one astute blogger wrote:

These Evangelical Fundamentalists see signs and wonders everywhere while they look for the new prophets among this last generation the Elijahs and the Esthers who will lead others into the battle against the Devil. So as we have noted Lou Engle,Bill Johnson & other Evangelicals who adhere to these beliefs read into certain situations what may be more than what’s actually there.

So enter Rifqa Bary a convert from a Muslim American family who refers to herself as an Esther chosen to play a special role in the last days by God.She says she has had visions of angels and demons of God and Satan and hears God speaking to her directly . So to some she is a prophet to others possibly just a rather enthusiastic convert to Christianity and to others they wonder if she is either just delusional or whether the Evangelicals with whom she was in contact encouraged and fed her delusions. For instance like any true prophet she too must suffer and be ridiculed and harassed and victimized by non-believers so she may exaggerate all out of proportion certain events and encounters and the speech of others. In her case with the help of these anti-Islamic Evangelical Christians she has come to believe her parents want to kill her or that other Muslims are looking for her so they can kill her.

These “True Believers” latch onto her narrative and so believe that Rifqa is being persecuted by her family by Islam and by those who are in authority in part because they recognize who Rifqa is though they may not know this on a conscious level. So all facts surrounding her case are seen through this prism of signs and wonders and the persecution of the “Real Church” or “body of Christ” so they are not going to be easily convinced that they are wrong about Rifqa that she may just be another confused impressionable anxiety ridden teenager with a touch of meglomania.

I think Fathima Rifqa Bary, the Global Revolution Church, and The Call have used the psychological defense mechanism known as projection: they themselves are the radicals and extremists, but they project that onto Fathima Rifqa’s parents and the Mooslims in general.  From what we can tell, Fathima Rifqa’s parents don’t seem too passionate, zealous, or dogmatic about their religion, not nearly as much as Fathima Rifqa and those she has joined.  So the real question is: who is the real extremist here?  Who is espousing the whole ‘holy war between Christianity and Islam’ ideology?  Ironically, the group that Fathima Rifqa has associated herself with is linked to a theology that dictates that non-believers should be forced into the faith of Christianity.

We can draw some broader conclusions from this: those Islamophobes who have taken up the Fathima Rifqa case as their casus belli–including Robert Spencer and Pam Geller–are the real extremists, not the vast majority of Muslims whom they always point the finger at.  It is after all Spencer, Geller, et al. who believe in a modern day Crusade, one they justify by fear mongering about the other.  What peace loving people should ask–when confronted by their rantings–is: who are the real extremists here?

The Family of Fathima Rifqa Bary

This is another great article from Michael Kruse. He combines thoughtful and exhaustive research with insightful  research. It sheds more light on the Fathima Rifqa Bary case which will hopefully be resolved soon. Will the daft anti-Muslim bloggers who were pushing all sorts of wild conspiracy theories and slander about this family finally apologize? Don’t hold your breath!

The Life Rifqa Bary Ran Away From

WESTERVILLE, Ohio — Rifqa Bary saw a girl. She kept seeing her. She saw her in the bathroom and the lunch room and the locker room.

“And for some reason,” Rifqa said later in a video posted on YouTube, “I told her I was a Christian.”

Which she wasn’t. Not yet.

“Wanted to fit in, maybe,” she said.

Eventually she would run away from her home here and flee to Florida, believing her Muslim family had to kill her because of her conversion to Christianity. Eventually she would become for some a crucial character in a culture war. Eventually her story would fill TV airtime, stoke partisan blogs and spark dueling custody cases in courts in two states.

But this is where it started: Rifqa saw a girl. The girl asked her to go to church. So she went.

The Korean United Methodist Church is a brick building with a low roof on a busy road in Columbus. The sign outside says “Welcome.” Inside, on Nov. 18, 2005, people stood and sang, “with fire in their eyes,” Rifqa said, and so she did, too. The pastor talked about salvation and invited newcomers up to the altar.

“I felt nothing but love,” Rifqa said in the video.

She was 13 then. She is 17 now. The story of her life in between is the journey of a teenage girl, the only daughter in an immigrant family, a brown-skinned, lower-middle-class high school student in a mostly well-to-do, white suburb, looking for a place to belong.

What started as adolescent identity issues and predictable tensions with her parents ultimately became a plan to escape. In her mind, it was her role in an epic battle between God and the Devil, in which she was both a prize and a prophet.

• • •

Home for the Bary family is a second-floor apartment with a tan carpet and two bedrooms. The table in the dining room sits on unsteady legs. The living room couches are draped in blankets to cover the worn upholstery.

This is where Rifqa lived, with her father, Mohamed, her mother, Aysha, her 19-year-old brother, Rilvan and her 6-year-old brother, Rajaa. Her father sells jewelry at weekend trade shows around the South and Midwest. Rifqa shared a bedroom with Rilvan. Rent for the apartment: $850 a month.

They’re here because of her.

The Barys are from Galle on the southern coast of Sri Lanka in the Indian Ocean. When Rifqa was 5 she fell on a toy airplane that pierced the cornea of her right eye. Scar tissue built up over the next couple of years. Doctors told the Barys they might have to remove the eye. So they went to New York in 2000 for medical treatment.

Four years later they moved here in large part because of the schools. The school district of suburban New Albany is considered one of Ohio’s best. It’s 80 percent white, 9 percent Asian, 6 percent black. The campus with its red-brick buildings and tall white columns feels almost collegiate. Average income in the district: $185,000 a year.

At New Albany High, where last year she was a sophomore, Rifqa was on the honor roll and the junior varsity cheerleading team. She was known as a diligent student in the classrooms, and as a friendly, even gregarious presence in the hallways.

At home, her mother cooked traditional dishes, curries and rice with dahl, but Rifqa preferred chili from Wendy’s and soup from Panera.

On weekends, she shopped for clothes at stores like Hollister and Abercrombie & Fitch, spending money she made babysitting and waitressing at the Chinese restaurant in a nearby strip mall.

At home during dinner, over the past few years, she stopped speaking Tamil, her family’s native language. Her family spoke Tamil to her, and she spoke English to them. When her grandparents called from Sri Lanka, her mother says, she spoke only “small, small words.”

The Bary parents prayed five times a day. Rilvan did not. Neither did Rifqa.

In 2006, she made a baby­sitting flyer that said she was Christian; in 2007, her father found in her room Rick Warren’s Christian bestseller, The Purpose Driven Life.

This sometimes made her parents sad, but not mad, they say — their children were growing up in America, not Sri Lanka, so they understood.

Her father says he told her: “You know, Rifqa, you have a brain of your own, you do whatever is good for you, but you were born Muslim — it’s your responsibility to learn that, too.”

Rifqa was always well-behaved — she didn’t even have a curfew, her parents say, because there was no need. In the months before she ran, though, her behavior changed. She turned sullen and stopped spending as much time with her little brother. She started locking the door to her room.

Tensions crested in the spring.

Rifqa says her parents confronted her about her Christianity — her father angrily, her mother tearfully. They threatened to kill her, she says, or take her back to Sri Lanka.

Her parents say that’s not true. They both say the confrontations had to do with her overall behavior — late-night Facebooking with guys in their 20s and what seemed to be a new set of friends whom they didn’t know.

One night, they say, she stormed out of the apartment.

“It’s my life!” she said.

Her friends noticed a change, too: On Facebook, Rifqa Bary became Anna Michelle Matthew.

• • •

Rifqa was forced to live a secret life of sorts, she has said — to friends, in court files, to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement — praying and reading her Bible in the middle of the night in her room or the bathroom or the porch on the back of her family’s apartment.

Her parents say they knew.

At school, meanwhile, she did nothing to hide her faith.

“She’d read her Bible in class,” said Tony Hou, a junior at New Albany. “She brought her Bible with her just about everywhere.”

It became, he said, one of the things she was known for — her blue Bible, her name written on the front, in shiny silver letters.

Last fall, she listened to an online sermon given by Jamal Jivanjee, a local evangelical pastor who also was a Muslim who became a Christian. She e-mailed him. They met at Starbucks.

And at some point she started reading the Facebook writings of an Ohio State University student and an aspiring pastor named Brian Michael Williams.

In Williams’ writings, evolution is bunk, abortion is murder, Armageddon is near. He said he needed “an army of prayer warriors” for the end of days.

Rifqa grew to consider Williams a friend and a mentor. She started last spring proselytizing students at school. Her father scolded her for it, he said, because it was against school rules.

At home, when Rilvan had friends over, she started coming out of her room and telling them about the Bible, saying they were listening to “demonic” music.

“She was really aggressive about it,” said David Sharpe, who last year graduated with Rilvan.

Last spring was when Rifqa also started exchanging Facebook messages with Beverly Lorenz. She and her husband, Blake Lorenz, are the pastors at Orlando’s Global Revolution Church, an evangelical, end-times group that says it’s “about changing our culture.”

Brian Williams baptized Rifqa in June, in Big Walnut Creek at Hoover Dam park, not far from her parents’ apartment. She cried and laughed and kept falling over so Williams had to hold her up.

“After she was submerged in the water,” said Hou, her New Albany classmate, “she pretty much fainted, she pretty much passed out, literally, from joy.”

Rifqa wrote in her journal.

“I am called to the nations,” she said. “Send me to the deepest darkest places into the pagan land.”

“Lord is preparing me.”

“Enemy is after me.”

• • •

Some of her friends got a Facebook message from her in the middle of July.

“She basically said: ‘My bags are being packed,’ ” said Jivanjee, the pastor. “She said: ‘The day that I have dreaded is now upon me. Pray for me that I would not deny my faith.’ ”

Sunday, July 19, 2:30 a.m.: Her mother woke up and saw her out on the porch. Her mother begged her to come inside. Her father was out of town for work.

Rifqa came into the living room.

Pictures of her in her cheerleading uniform were on the top of the TV next to the trophy she won in 2003 in an oratorical contest. On the wall in a frame held together by tape was a poster with some verses from the Koran.

“In the name of Allah, Most Gracious, Most Merciful. Say: O you that reject faith! I do not worship that which you worship, nor do you worship that which I worship. … To you be your way and to me mine.”

Rifqa shut her door.

Sometime between then and 8 a.m., she took her toothbrush and her travel pack, wrote a note to her parents, and left.

She took a right on Longrifle Road and a left on Mardela Drive and went to a small brown house a third of a mile away. The Hopsons live there. Their daughter is one of her friends. They knew she was coming. They knew where she was going.

Later that day Williams picked her up and drove her downtown to the Greyhound station. He knew where she was going.

So did people in Orlando. Global Revolution director of operations John Law bought her ticket, she later told FDLE, and the Lorenzes had decorated a room just for her in their home.

Her mother walked into her room Sunday morning. No Rifqa. She called her husband. He came home early from his trip. He called Rifqa’s cell phone. Straight to voice mail. He called some of her friends. Nobody knew where she was. He called the police.

In her room they found some books she had been reading. Did God Forsake Jesus? The Prayer of Jabez for Teens. Page 55: “Are you ready to ask God for something huge, something outrageous?”

They found the note she left.

“Jesus is my saviour, I cannot deny Him, nor will I ever. I pray that you find His mercy and forgiveness just as I have. Love you both dearly.”

No sign of her Monday. No sign of her Tuesday. On Wednesday, her father went to the Golden Valley Chinese restaurant, where she was scheduled to start work at 5. Maybe she would show. He sat at a table by the window. He looked out at a bank, at a gas station, at traffic on Sunbury Road.

It was 4:45.

It was 5.

It was 5:15.

Rifqa had been in Florida for almost two days.

Michael Kruse can be reached at mkruse@sptimes.com or (727) 893-8751.

What’s next?

The next hearing in the case is Tuesday in Orlando. A Florida judge is expected to talk in court with an Ohio judge to discuss the possibility of sending her back to her home state.

About the story

This story is based on court records, police reports, Brian Williams’ diary, reporting in Orlando and Ohio, interviews with Rifqa Bary’s friends and family, and her words — written on her laptop, said to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement and spoken into video cameras and then disseminated on YouTube.

Michael Kruse

This is another excellent article by Michael Kruse on the Fathima Rifqa Bary case. It explores the charges made by anti-Islam bloggers as well as Rifqa herself. He also gets the opinions of various Islamic scholars on the issues that have been raised by the case, separating truth from fiction.

How Real Are Runaway’s Fears of Being Killed for Becoming Christian?

Will religious runaway Rifqa Bary be killed if she’s sent home to Ohio?

Bary is the 17-year-old girl who fled to Florida in July because she’s terrified that her Muslim family has to murder her due to her conversion to Christianity.

Authorities in both states say there’s no “credible” threat against her. Investigators from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement say her fear is “subjective and speculative.” Her parents say they don’t want to hurt her and just want her back.

She’s living with a foster family as a court in Orlando tries to decide what to do with her. The next hearing is Monday afternoon. Attorneys for her parents are expected to argue that the case should be shifted to Ohio.

This is a good time to pause for a bit and take another look at her Aug. 10 interview with local TV. It remains this ongoing story’s primary source.

“I’m fighting for my life!” she said in her nearly seven-minute interview with Orlando’s WFTV. “You guys don’t understand!”

Let’s understand then.

• • •

“Imagine the honor in killing me,” she said. “It’s in the Koran.”

It’s not. Here’s what is.

One verse: “If any of you turn back from their faith and die in unbelief, their works will bear no fruit in this life and in the Hereafter; they will be companions of the Fire and will abide therein.”

Another verse: “If they turn renegades, seize them and slay them wherever ye find them.”

Those are parts of the two verses Robert Spencer cites to support his belief that Bary will be killed because Islam says she must be killed.

Spencer blogs at JihadWatch.org. He’s written nine books, with titles like Stealth Jihad, The Truth About Muhammad and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades). Two of them have been New York Times bestsellers. In Stealth Jihad, published last year, he writes of the coming “Islamic conquest of North America” and urges this country’s schools to stop “the empty rhetoric of inclusion and multiculturalism.”

Here are some other things the Koran says.

One verse: “Let there be no compulsion in religion.”

Another verse: “Show kindness to parents, and to family.”

The Koran, like many other holy texts, is long, complicated and at times contradictory, and over centuries different people have had and continue to have different interpretations.

Bary has committed apostasy. That means she was a Muslim and now she’s not.

“The Koran condemns apostasy,” said Jonathan Berkey, a professor of Islamic studies at Davidson College in North Carolina, “but the verses about seizing and slaying ‘renegades’ concerned enemies of the prophet Muhammad’s state, people who posed a political or even military threat.

“For others,” he said, “the Koran implies that apostasy is something that God will punish.”

Not people. Not in this life.

• • •

“They have to kill me,” she said.

Let’s acknowledge this right here: There’s no way to know for sure if her parents, or anyone else for that matter, will kill her.

But this can be said with certainty: They don’t have to.

This idea, though, comes from sharia, or Islamic law. There is one Koran but there is no single sharia. It comes from many sources, including the Koran, and is “more like a discussion by Muslim scholars concerning the duties a Muslim should perform,” said Valerie Hoffman, a professor of Islamic studies at the University of Illinois.

Most Muslim jurists say apostasy is punishable by death — but not all of them. It is “the heart of a burning debate among modern Muslims,” said Sherman Jackson, a professor of Islamic studies at the University of Michigan.

“There are lots of liberal Muslims today who feel that there should never be any execution of people who convert from Islam to another religion,” Hoffman said. “You can’t say Islam says this or Islam says that.”

Also important is the fact that sharia is law only to the extent that specific governments choose to enforce it as such. Some governments in the Muslim world do. Most don’t. Indonesia is the largest Muslim-majority country in the world. Its government does not.

“Sharia is just not applied very often, particularly in the modern world,” Berkey said. “There are few places in the Muslim world where much at all of sharia is applied with the force of law.”

Apostasy executions are rare.

An official at the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom told the New York Times in 2006 that he knew of four: one in Sudan, in 1985; two in Iran, in 1989 and 1998; and one in Saudi Arabia, in 1992.

In the case of Bary, which government would order her execution for apostasy — Ohio, Florida, the United States?

“The allegation that Muslim parents would be required to kill an apostate daughter is absurd,” said Carl Ernst, a professor of Islamic studies at the University of North Carolina, “particularly if there is no evidence to back this up besides the daughter’s statement.”

• • •

“I don’t know if you know about honor killings,” she said.

Honor killings are real. The United Nations Population Fund says there could be as many as 5,000 a year worldwide.

Honor killings are usually when a man in a family kills a woman in that family because of some shame the man believes she brought on the family. It typically involves some sort of perceived sexual impropriety, anything from promiscuity to adultery to dating the wrong guy or dressing too “Western.” Sometimes, women are killed after they’re raped.

Honor killings happen mostly in the Muslim world. In the last couple of years, though, there was a double murder some called an honor killing in Texas, there was one in Georgia, there was another in upstate New York.

But honor killings and apostasy executions are not the same thing.

“This is a basic mistake of conflating two things,” said Brett Wilson, a professor of Islamic studies at Macalester College in Minnesota.

Ernst, the professor from UNC, called honor killings “a local or tribal custom,” having far more to do with culture than religion — “more or less equivalent,” he wrote in an e-mail, “to the so-called ‘unwritten law,’ honored by judges in Texas at least through the 1950s, which considered it legitimate for a husband to kill his wife and her lover if he discovered them in a compromising situation.”

• • •

To believe absolutely that the girl from Ohio will be killed if she’s sent home, you have to believe that there’s no variation in the interpretation of Islam — no Sunni, no Shia, no Sufism — among the approximately billion and a half Muslims worldwide, stretching from Southeast Asia to Africa to the Middle East to Europe to Florida and Ohio. Saying all Muslims have exactly the same rigid and literal beliefs and act on those beliefs in exactly the same ways is like saying the same thing about Christians.

Times news researchers Shirl Kennedy and Will Short Gorham contributed to this report. Michael Kruse can be reached at mkruse@sptimes.com or (727) 893-8751.

Andrew Bostom and Robert Spencer

Andrew Bostom (well over due for a LoonWatch piece), a close friend of Robert Spencer’s, and another self-proclaimed “Islamic scholar” is lauded on JihadWatch as having “taken on and crushed” Mchael Kruse, the St.Petersburg Times reporter who has been covering the Fathima Rifqa Bary case.

It’s a popular tactic amongst Islamophobes, especially Robert Spencer to try and twist what is clearly a negative outcome for themselves into a self-declared victory with a peppering of congratulatory self-adulation. This was the case with Spencer in his confrontation with Professor M. Cherif Bassiouni, when his alter-ego Hugh Fitzgerald proclaimed “victory” for Spencer and “defeat” for Bassiouni.

The truth is Spencer and company are ever more becoming isolated on the fringes of an increasingly radicalized segment of the Right-Wing, the company he keeps consists of neo-fascists, birthers, conspiracy theorists, Glenn Beck types, etc.

Michael Kruse

In this recent episode Bostom says that Kruse was wrong for stating that Spencer believes that “Muslims are in America to take over,” which from the body of Spencer’s work and the company he keeps is more than likely an accurate presumption, in context it is also the impression that he was trying to give at the press conference outside the courtroom of the Fathima Rifqa Bary case.

A case which is proving to be very embarrassing for Spencer, as evidence after evidence keeps coming out that the charges made by bloggers such as him and Pamela Geller that Rifqa’s life was/had to be in danger and that she was abused by her parents turn out to be bogus. Spencer’s reputation has taken a big hit and he is doing everything in his power to try to salvage some face.

Let’s look at an interesting part of the exchange between Bostom and Kruse:

Kruse to Bostom:

It’s my job to listen to everybody. It’s not my job to assign everybody equal credibility. When it comes to Robert Spencer scholars of Islamic studies outright dismiss him and his body of work. They call him an unreliable ideologue at best and a divisive bigot at worst. I can’t do that, though, can’t just ignore him like that, because he, and Pam Geller, too, are so much a part of this story, and certainly reasons it’s turned into what it’s turned into. Judging from his e-mails and how he talks in person, Rob strikes me as a pretty smart guy, but he’s a pretty smart guy with a very specific worldview. Everything he writes or says gets filtered through that static narrowness. Here is a relatively new dynamic: The other day in Orlando, Rob and Pam were speakers at a news conference, advocates for one “side” of this whole thing, and THEN they covered it as members of the press. They’re covering a story they’ve helped create, or at the very least stoke. The front row of the courtroom was for media, and there was the AP, some newspaper reporters, some TV reporters, some radio reporters, and there was Pam, a woman who last fall wrote a story on her blog saying Barack Obama was the illegitimate son of Malcom X. All of it is an interesting piece of the sprawling Rifqa Bary story, worth watching and considering now, and during the next story like it, and the next one after that.

Here Kruse devastates Bostom and Spencer by pretty much objectively telling it like it is, or as Dave Chapelle used to say Keepin’ it real. This is incomprehensible to polemicists and subjective ideologues such as Bostom and Spencer. It is incontrovertibly true that Spencer (and Bostom for that matter) is completely and thoroughly rejected by academics, we have noted that before here.

Yet, Kruse makes the point that he as a reporter cannot reject Spencer and Pamela Geller out of hand because THEY ARE PART OF THIS STORY. In fact, he points out they have in many ways CREATED this story or at the very least stoked it.

That is absolutely true, ever since the story broke Spencer and Pam have been on a crusade, whipping up their supporters in the blog world to “save Fathima Bary” from a sure “honor killing.” They knew nothing about the family or the context, they cared nothing for this little girl or her future, but eager to make Muslims and Islam look barbarous they attempted to castigate this family in front of the public thereby destroying any chance in those early days of reconciliation.

When fact after fact came out confirming the family’s story, supported by the Ohio police and Children Services, Pamela Geller resorted to making accusations which she claimed she heard from “anonymous sources” that Rifqa Bary was abused throughout her whole life, and that she was even sexually abused by her uncle.

Spencer applauded her in all this, extolling that the mainstream media was ignoring this “mountain of evidence” secured by Pamela Geller that showed that Rifqa Bary’s family was fundamentalist crazy and had abused her. For some reason the police were unable to unearth any evidence of these libelous accusations? Probably because they are made up whole-cloth.

Kruse, highlights how incongruous it is for a woman such as Pamela Geller,  who claims Obama is a Mooslim, anti-Semite, Socialist son of Malcolm X to be in the press area covering a story that she is actively creating. Bostom responds with more polemic,

Bostom to Kruse:

I deal with your non-sequiturs about Robert and Pamela, below. But first, you deliberately and grossly misrepresented what Robert said and the very specific context in which he made his statement–despite standing right next to him, as one can see in the videotape. That reflects very poorly on your own credibility and your ability to judge anyone else’s for that matter.

Do you not see that? Do you not see your own transparent–certainly to me– “static narrowness?”

As for scholarship, who are you to judge? What do you know about Islamic doctrine and history??

I asked you to contact Ibn Warraq via e-mail–He says he never heard from you, and judging from your responses to my repeated questioning you never obtained his definitive scholarly assessment of apostasy, “Leaving Islam”–so clearly real scholarship on the subject matter at hand—apostasy from Islam–does not even appeal to you.

Have you attempted to contact another high profile apostate from Islam, Nonie Darwish, who recently published “Cruel and Usual Punishment,” and wrote about a high profile apostasy case ongoing NOW in her native Egypt, in early August??

I have compiled, edited, and introduced two critically acclaimed scholarly compendia–one on the jihad, the other on Islamic Antisemitism. I have also read and on several occasions reviewed Robert’s books, and they easily exceed most of what passes for “scholarship” on Islam in today’s academy–despite targeting, deliberately, the larger lay audience. Regardless, they are solid works in their own right that are meticulously documented. Have you read them and found identifiable flaws in any of them??

As for Pamela, excuse me, but from my where I sit, she is doing the basic shoe leather investigative reporting those like yourself have thus far refused to do.

How many of Rifqa’s friends have you interviewed, starting for example with the now publicly identified Jamal Jivangee? What sort of of financial investigation of Mr. and Mrs. Bary’s businesses have you conducted??

I think you are being very disingenuous, and your pretense of “objectivity” is simply ludicrous.

As we mentioned Kruse did not misrepresent Spencer, Spencer just spoke very badly and it is not a stretch for Kruse to say that Spencer believes “Muslims are in America to take over” because that is exactly what he was insinuating at that right-wing blogger “press conference.” Then Bostom attempts to accuse Kruse of being ill-informed and not knowing anything about Islam (ironic) and then lists himself (in a bit of shameless self-promotion) and another Islamophobic writer, Ibn Warraq as “experts” that Kruse should have contacted.

This is a highly rich and whiny statement at the same time, what part of discredited do Bostom and Spencer not get? People don’t choose you guys as experts in the field of Islam because you are a pair of polemicists with deep hatred for Islam and Muslims. You can’t blame people for not considering you suitable candidates. He also trots out Nonie Darwish who believes there is no such thing as a moderate Muslim, she dumps all Muslims in the radical camp, she also compares Islam to Nazism amongst other interesting Islamophobic anecdotes.

By this time Kruse is almost done, knowing by now where Andrew Bostom comes from, i.e. the far right lunatic camp and says,

Kruse to Bostom:

I should stop, I know this, but I just have to ask: We’ve talked on the phone, we’ve e-mailed, and you seem like an intelligent person, so how can you possibly take Pam Geller seriously?

Bostom to Kruse:

Excuse me, but just as you have calumniated Spencer–with a live video record to debunk you and prove your deliberate misrepresentation—you’ve now done the same with Geller.

From here:
http://atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com/atlas_shrugs/2008/10/how-could-stanl.html

“The ‘Atlas says that Barack Obama is Malcolm X’s love child’ charge has gone viral among leftards and lizards. The only problem with it is that it is false. I am not the author of this post, and I posted it because the writer did a spectacular job documenting Obama’s many connections with the Far Left. The Malcolm X claim is one minor part of this story, and was of interest to me principally as part of the writer’s documentation that Stanley Ann Dunham could not have been where the Obama camp says she was at various times. I do not believe that Barack Obama is Malcolm X’s love child, and never did — but there remain many, many unanswered questions about his early life and upbringing.”

As a scrupulously honest, painstakingly objective journalist you must know that Pamela has written “I do not believe that Barack Obama is Malcolm X’s love child, and never did”? Would you even care if you did know?

We know the answer to that, as your calumny against Spencer makes plain.

As we demonstrated Kruse didn’t calumny against Spencer or Geller but Bostom does by trying to defend Pamela. Pamela is thoroughly discredited for more then her posting of the Malcolm-X-is-the-father-of-Barack-Obama-conspiracy, which she attempts to half-heartedly disavow now, but also for her other conspiracies that Barack Obama is a Muslim, that he was indoctrinated into Jihad in Pakistan, that he hates Jews and is an anti-Semite, that he is not an American citizen and was not born in America; all that doesn’t even touch a bit of what she says about Palestinians, Arabs, and real Muslims.

On her post about Barack Obama being the illegitimate son of Malcolm X, which she now claims she doesn’t support, there are some troubling questions that it seems Bostom doesn’t want to raise or answer. Like the obvious as day and night, why did she post that crazy article in the first place? Is that any way to prove that there was “no way that Obama’s mother could have been in America when Obama was born?” The fact is that Pam posted the piece with out any qualifiers, she posted it in her name without attributing it to anyone else. That brings her story of never having supported it into high doubt, the attempt to cover it up now and sweep it under the rug is not going to work especially when her track record has been loonier than the loons.

Fathima Rifqa Bary

We have been keeping track of the Fathima Rifqa Bary case which the anti-Muslim blogsphere has invested a lot in;  attempting to further their agenda of demonizing Islam and Muslims. The fact that they don’t care much about this young girl or her family is obvious, they just want to score points in their tireless crusade against Muslims.

It seems slowly but surely the case is being resolved and more and more facts are coming out. The anti-Muslim blogsphere lead by the wacky Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer have been casting the family as fanatical, abusive, wanting to kill their daughter. They have cast unsubstantiated allegations on the local Mosque in Columbus, Ohio saying it is a haven for terrorists, even when it has been proved a bastion of moderation.

Now Mike Kruse of the St. Petersburg Times reports that the Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE) have reported that there is “no evidence whatsoever of alleged abuse or threats of death made by the girl’s parents.”

ORLANDO — The attorney for the mother of Ohio religious runaway Rifqa Bary said in court here Thursday that results of a critical investigation by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement had come back “very favorable” and “with no evidence whatsoever” of alleged abuse or threats of death made by the girl’s parents.

Attorney Roger Weeden’s statement was the most contentious part of a hearing that was tense throughout. It came before the judge imposed gag orders in an attempt to restore some order to this controversial custody case turned culture war.

In addition to the gag order for the attorneys, Judge Daniel P. Dawson gave them 10 days to read the FDLE report — no more talking about that, either — and gave them 30 days to schedule the start of mediation for the Bary family.

“Let’s concentrate on getting this case resolved,” Dawson said. He set a pretrial hearing for Sept. 29.

Bary, 17, ran away last month from her family’s home near Columbus because she believes her Muslim parents have to kill her because of her conversion to Christianity. She traveled to Orlando by bus and stayed in the home of evangelical pastors Blake and Beverly Lorenz of the Global Revolution Church for more than two weeks before authorities knew where she was.

She’s been living with a Christian foster family since Aug. 10. At a hearing Aug. 21, Dawson, the judge, decided to keep her in Florida as custody issues get settled.

She was in court Thursday, wearing a brown sweater, a white dress and dark red nail polish. She said nothing, but did blow an occasional kiss to people she knew in the courtroom when she wasn’t reading her Bible.

The FDLE report was finished late Thursday morning. It includes a two-hour, 45-minute interview with Bary. The results of the report, based on what Weeden said in court, mirror the results of a recently completed abuse investigation done by Franklin County Children Services in Ohio. The conclusion up there: “unsubstantiated.”

Thursday, the state Department of Children Families asked that Bary no longer be allowed to visit with Blake and Beverly Lorenz. The judge agreed, although he let her continue to visit with the Lorenzes’ three children, who are in their 20s, and whom Bary considers “dear friends and spiritual advisers,” according to John Stemberger, her attorney.

In court, Krista Bartholomew, Bary’s guardian ad litem, said this case was “not a holy war,” but that’s what this has become over the last month.

Before the hearing on Thursday, outside in front of the courthouse, Tom Trento held a news conference, as he did before the first hearing. He’s from the Florida Security Council, an organization with the slogan of “Securing Florida Against Terror.” This time, though, he brought a pastor from Ohio and a pair of anti-Islam bloggers.

Jamal Jivanjee, the Ohio pastor, compared Rifqa Bary to Anne Frank, the Jewish girl who was killed by Nazis in World War II and whose diary became what many consider one of the most important books of the 20th century.

Robert Spencer, who writes on a blog called Jihad Watch, told reporters Islam was here to take over America. Pam Geller of the Atlas Shrugs blog dismissed the results of the Franklin County investigation by saying things were “corrupt in Ohio.”

“Forget your political correctness!” she said.

Muslim businessman Mohammad Lutfi of Orlando yelled that Trento, Spencer and Geller were “conservative, right-wing militants” and “crusaders.”

Later, after the hearing, the attorneys made hasty exists, citing the new gag order. They hurried past the TV trucks, the reporters, the cameras, the shouting, red-faced, finger-pointing scrum.

Out in the busy, rain-slicked street in front of the courthouse, an appropriate metaphor for the day: a silver sedan screeched, skidded and slammed into the back of a navy blue Jeep.

Michael Kruse can be reached at mkruse@sptimes.com or (727) 893-8751.

http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/local/breakingnews/orl-fathima-rifqa-bary-update-090309,0,4434694.story

One should thank Michael Kruse for his excellent reporting as well as accurately describing just who Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer are; true agenda driven fanatics with an immeasurable amount of hate for Islam and Muslims.