February 27, 2010

Prosecuted for Saving a Girl's Life

By Pamela Geller

A girl flees from her home in fear for her life -- and law enforcement goes after the people who helped her. That's the situation in the Rifqa Bary case. The Columbus Dispatch reported this about Rifqa's friend Brian Williams: "An Ohio minister accused of driving a teenage runaway to a bus station last year has retained a lawyer as police say they're investigating whether anyone broke the law in helping the Christian convert leave home for Florida." And why did she flee to Florida? Because, she says, when her devout Muslim father found out she had become a Christian, he said to her, "I will kill you." And with Islam's death penalty for apostates, she had to take that seriously. But Rifqa's father is not in danger of being prosecuted. Brian Williams is.

Law enforcement, in a perverse twist of reality, continues persecuting the Christians in Ohio who helped a teenage apostate escape the death threat (in line with sharia law) made by her family. They are investigating any "criminal wrongdoing with anyone involved in getting her from one location to another." How many other runaway cases are pursued in this way? How many other teenage girls in America have this attention paid to them by law enforcement? How many teenage girls who sell their bodies for sex and drugs for an adult pimp are pursued this way? And their pimps?

Back on January 19, Rifqa Bary was tricked into pleading guilty to the charge of being "unruly" in exchange for a dependency deal that the Bary parents and Omar Tarazi, their attorney chosen by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), later reneged on. And now we understand why Tarazi demanded a guilty plea from Rifqa in exchange for this meaningless deal. The Franklin County, Ohio, prosecutor, under pressure from Tarazi, is seeking to indict Brian Williams on two charges: contributing to the "unruliness" of a minor and "interference with custody," which carries a sentence of six months to a year.

Brian Williams was helping a girl who was afraid she would be murdered. Yet Rifqa's legal team seems unable to do anything to head off his, or to compel the court to punish the Tarazi's duplicity in reneging on the deal. If the Islamic death penalty for apostasy were explained in court in light of Rifqa's situation, the Franklin County prosecutor would not pursue Brian Williams. Instead, Rifqa's legal team urged him to plead guilty to these outrageous charges at enormous personal expense. Whom are they working for? CAIR?

They are wrong. Williams should not plead it down. Why should Brian Williams have a record for helping Rifqa? Yet the dhimmi media is right there reinforcing this outrage, like the cheering crowds at the gallows. The sharia-compliant Columbus Dispatch ran an AP story about Williams retaining counsel. The incompetent AP reporter Andrew Welsh-Huggins wrote: "The girl claimed she could be harmed or killed for converting to Christianity, a charge her parents, immigrants from Sri Lanka, have denied." The girl "claimed" -- got that? Everything from the unindicted co-conspirators at CAIR and the lawyer they chose for Rifqa's parents is reported as gospel. But a young girl terrified for her life whose words are supported by the sharia mandate of death for apostasy only makes "claims."

What kind of nation, what kind of society are we living in, when someone who helps a girl whose life is in danger is prosecuted for it? An Islamic one. Not so fast, buster.

I am proud to say that Robert Spencer and I were able to connect Brian Williams with the Thomas More Law Center. The Thomas More Law Center will be representing Brian Williams pro bono. The Islamic supremacists pursuing Rifqa Bary and the Christians who helped her will be met with a vigorous freedom of religion defense.

What wonderful news -- that as he is prosecuted, Brian Williams will be defended by legal counsel who understand that this is enforcement of sharia and are unafraid to fight the oppression and intimidation of the Islamic machine. This is in contrast to Rifqa's lawyers, who naïvely made numerous backdoor deals with her parents' CAIR-appointed attorney. Every underhanded, dirty deal that Rifqa's lawyers made with the attorney for her parents was broken.

Why should CAIR be able to use our judicial system to send a message to non-Muslims that they will be punished for helping a Christian? Brian Williams and Rifqa Bary must prevail. If the Islamic machine succeeds in making an example of them, then we are all in trouble.

Pamela Geller is the editor and publisher of the Atlas Shrugs website and is former associate publisher of the New York Observer. She is the author (with Robert Spencer) of the forthcoming book The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration's War on America (Threshold Editions/Simon & Schuster).