c. 2005 Religion News Service
(UNDATED) It was a particularly gruesome discovery: An entire family of Coptic Christians from Egypt was found murdered in a home in Jersey City, N.J., in January. Rumors began to spread that it had been an “Islamic killing.”
All the victims had been tied up and gagged. According to some reports, Sylvia Armanious, 15, had her throat slit “in line with Quran 47:4,” and a cross tattooed on her wrist was mutilated. Prior to the murders, Hossam Armanious, the father, was apparently warned by Muslim members of an Internet chat room, “You’d better stop this bull _ or we are going to track you down like a chicken and kill you.”
Later on, autopsy reports revealed that the family’s throats had not been slit, and Sylvia’s cross tattoo was not mutilated, although being stabbed in the neck is not any better. As suspicion of Muslim fingerprints on the terribly gruesome murder continued to swirl, authorities announced the arrest of Edward McDonald and Hamilton Sanchez _ both non-Muslim and non-Egyptian _ for the murder of the Armanious family.
After murdering the family, authorities allege, the two men withdrew close to $3,000 from the Armaniouses’ bank accounts using their ATM card, and ATM surveillance camera footage helped authorities catch the suspects. McDonald, in fact, lived directly above the Armanious family, in their second-floor apartment.
It was the hardly the first time the court of public opinion prematurely convicted Muslims of a crime.
On July 4, 2002, there was a shooting at the Los Angeles airport. An Egyptian man, Hesham Mohamed Hedayet, shot and killed two people at an El Al ticket counter. Many immediately called the shooting a “terrorist incident.” After authorities investigated the crime, they learned that the shooting was related to Hedayet’s personal financial woes _ and not terrorism.
And we all remember what happened in Oklahoma City in 1995. In the immediate aftermath of the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, many pointed to Middle Easterners as the culprits.
On CNN, former Rep. David McCurdy stated back then, “My first reaction when I heard of the explosion was that there could be a very real connection to some of the Islamic fundamentalist groups that have been operating out of Oklahoma City.”
The New York Times reported that “some Middle Eastern groups have held meetings there (in Oklahoma), and the city is home to at least three mosques.” Even after authorities released sketches of two Caucasian men, CNN’s Wolf Blitzer said, “There is still a possibility that there could have been some sort of connection to Middle East terrorism.”
When Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols _ again two non-Muslim, non-Arab men _ were arrested for the bombing, all these voices of suspicion were immediately silenced. Both McVeigh and Nichols were convicted of killing 168 people, including 19 children, and McVeigh was later executed for the crime.
All of these cases highlight two very important points: first, that terrorists come in all flavors, and second, we must wait for the facts before jumping to conclusions. A premature jump to conclusions is liable to hurt innocent people. As the Quran states, “If a wicked person comes to you with news, ascertain the truth, lest you harm people unwittingly and afterwards become full of regret for what you did” (49:6).
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The premature blame of Muslims for the Armanious family murder contributed to increased tension between the Egyptian Muslim and Christian communities in New Jersey. According to Tarek Youssof Saleh, a Muslim cleric who went to the Armanious family funeral to offer condolences, “(Copts in the crowd) called me killer and animal and terrorist.”
In the immediate aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing, more than 200 incidents of anti-Muslim and anti-Arab threats, harassment, intimidation, vandalism and physical assaults were reported. A mosque in Stillwater, Okla., had its windows shattered by two separate drive-by shootings in the days after the attack. A Muslim woman in Chicago wearing a traditional Islamic head scarf was fired upon while walking in her neighborhood. One of the most serious incidents occurred on April 20, 1995, the day after the bombing. An Iraqi refugee suffered a miscarriage of her near-term baby after an attack on her home in Oklahoma City by unknown assailants who broke windows in her house and pounded on her door while screaming anti-Muslim epithets. The baby died.
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We must always wait for the facts before jumping to a premature and completely erroneous conclusion, and that goes for the recent murder of a Muslim cab driver in Chicago. The cab driver, Haroon Piryani, was allegedly run over and crushed by his passenger, city employee Michael Jackson, on the night of Feb. 4. There were some in the Muslim community who wanted to call this terrible incident a “hate crime.” This temptation must be resisted. We must wait for the facts to be borne out of the case, otherwise we are no better than those who prematurely called the Armanious family murder a case of “Jersey Jihad.”
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