Killer Dads (33 page)

In 2007, Hirsi Ali and supporters launched the AHA Foundation headquartered in New York to “protect and defend the rights of women and girls in the West from oppression justified by religion and culture,” according to the organization's website.
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The group tracks and members speak out about honor killings and assaults, forced marriages, and genital mutilation. Though the issues are far more significant in some other Western nations, American “honor killings” have occurred. Though the killings in North
America—all victims have been female—are rare, the loss of a single life is unacceptable, AHA spokeswoman Amanda Parker told me in a phone interview. And while the public is aware of only a handful of cases, AHA is convinced that there have, in fact, been “dozens,” said Parker. The killings also point to an underlying world of behaviors such as forced marriage and nonfatal child abuse linked to expectations about daughters and concepts of honor and punishment.

For every honor killing in the United States “there are hundreds of other cases of honor abuse, from the mild to the extreme, that are often brought on by things like dating, drinking, dressing ‘immodestly' or rejecting Islam,” cardiologist Zuhdi Jasser, president of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy, and a commissioner on the US Commission on International Religious Freedom, wrote in a 2012 opinion piece in
USA Today
.
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Jasser, like the AHA, is attempting to walk a political tightrope between the shrill Pamela Geller, who used Jessica Mokdad's killing to Islam-bash, and officials of some Arab activist organizations who are reluctant to admit that any honor killings have occurred in America.

Girls at home in America who may feel threatened because of perceived issues of honor are often faced with more difficulty in obtaining help from civil authorities because so few officials have any experience dealing with their situations or recognizing legitimate danger signs. A girl may tell a social worker or a teacher or a cop, “‘My dad's going to kill me because I'm wearing too much makeup,' and the cop thinks, ‘Yeah, I just told my daughter that last week,'” Parker explained to me. But in a rare instance, it “can actually be a life-or-death situation,” she said. AHA last year helped a 17-year-old girl who first learned she was pregnant sitting in her pediatrician's examining room with her mother. “Dad's going to kill me,” she said. Again, the comment wasn't the kind of typical hyperbolic response many American teens might give in such a situation. “She really and truly believed her father was going to take her life,” said Parker. “Her mother told her, ‘I can't protect you from your father. I'm disowning you,' and stood up and walked out.” The pediatrician attempted to hospitalize the girl to protect her until some arrangements could be made, but the hospital refused because the girl wasn't ill. AHA, contacted by the pediatrician, reached
out for help to a local child-protection agency, which couldn't take action, officials explained, because there was no history of abuse and no physical harm. Finally, a detective who had investigated an Arizona honor killing of two teenage daughters in his precinct contacted local police to explain the danger the girl might be in and urged them to check on her at home. When police arrived, they found the teen covered with bruises, and she was removed to a shelter, said Parker. She lives apart from her family now and is raising her baby daughter. To help officials spot danger zones, AHA offers training to police and social workers who may encounter honor threats in a home or receive pleas of help from a frightened child.

Honor killings are an intriguing inverse of the William Parente brand of family annihilation. In a familicide, the father presumably doesn't want to leave his family alive to suffer his shame after his death. In an honor killing, the perceived shame reflection is reversed: The father regards his daughter as casting dishonor on him and the rest of the family. In both cases, it's the child who suffers the worst consequences. Honor killings don't occur only among Muslim families, and some may argue that other kinds of male killings of an intimate partner represent a kind of “honor killing” to a man because he may feel his masculinity or honor is tarnished when a wife leaves or cheats on him. Honor killings, in other words, may be one more iteration of the sometimes-murderous evolutionary-based relationship between the sexes and a male's drive to control a female. The killing may be far less about “honor” than essentially about zealously guarding a female's sexual fidelity so an intimate partner isn't duped into expending resources on a child not his own. But in the case of many honor killings, chastity is guarded not by the intimate partner but by a father (and sometimes by a young woman's brothers), almost as if he's a proxy husband until a daughter (or sister) marries.

In Hirsi Ali's characterization of honor killings, acts of honor “are rewarded and those acts perceived as shameful are severely punished,” she noted at a videotaped symposium on honor killing and forced marriage June 6, 2011, at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in Manhattan. These “shameful” acts are “unique to women in certain cultures. It has to do with their sexuality—virginity, chastity, fidelity, and purity are emblems of honor.
Sex before marriage is considered infidelity. These are sources of shame for the family or tribe. The women in these cultures don't own their bodies. Their sexuality is a commodity and it's of high value, which is owned by their families. These sexual commodities are seen to lose value once they're believed to be tainted.” She complained at the conference about pressure groups that insist that “there is no violence” and that any attribution of violence to these cultures “they claim is racism or anti-Islam.”

Domestic violence and child abuse beyond the scope of honor killings are already serious problems in the United States, Hirsi Ali believes. The difference between an honor killer and the more typical killer father in the United States is that most abusers in a case of domestic violence know that “when he hits his wife or child, he's doing something wrong, and the wife knows she should not be taking the abuse,” she said at the symposium. “Domestic violence, even though it occurs a lot in the West, is morally unacceptable and socially wrong. Things are different in cultures governed in shame, however.”

Jasser has spoken out strongly against honor killings in America—at the same time, he defends Islam. The religion does not sanction murder of a child, he emphasizes, but he acknowledges that the religion has been “hijacked” by “pre-Islamic, tribal and medieval,” even “Neanderthal” cultures by those who use Islam to mask other murderous motivations or sanction killings, he noted in his
USA Today
article. Honor killings are “completely wrong and immoral,” and it's up to moderate Muslims to address this issue and set up family processes to protect women and daughters in danger, he wrote.

The motivations behind Jessica's murder were complex, but AHA believes the crime had several aspects of an honor killing—the extreme control, battles over the hijab, Jessica's marriage to a boyfriend at her stepfather's insistence. Marriages may be forced or quickly arranged by a father if he fears his daughter is, or is about to become, sexually active. The marriage is a way to “legitimize” the sex and therefore not bring dishonor to the family, Parker explained to me. The perceived support of a family or a community marks the difference between other kinds of domestic violence and an honor killing, Parker emphasized. Amnesty International has defined
“so-called honor killings” as “part of a community mentality. Large sections of society share traditional conceptions of family honor and approve of the killings to preserve that honor. Even mothers whose daughters have been killed in the name of honor often condone such violent acts.”
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However, no one in Alfetlawi's community or family supported the killing of Jessica Mokdad or aided Alfetlawi after he was arrested—though he may have imagined some kind of cultural justification for his actions.

Though Jessica's case continues to be controversial, other murders in North America were clearly considered honor killings by murderous dads who took their daughters' lives, and by authorities who prosecuted them. The murderers represent a distinct form of killer dads, whose motivations present more clues into what drives a father to kill his own child.

In the first widely covered honor-killing case in 1989, naturalized American citizen and Palestinian immigrant Zein Isa stabbed to death his screaming 16-year-old daughter, Tina, while his wife held her down in their St. Louis, Missouri, home, as Zein shouted in Arabic: “Die! Die quickly! Die, my daughter, die.” The murder was recorded on electronic bugs planted by the FBI, whose agents were tracking Zein's participation in a possible American terror plot at the time. The jury concluded that Zein killed his daughter because he believed she had shamed the family by becoming too rebellious and Westernized, listening to American music and dating a non-Muslim boy. Zein was sentenced to death (he later died of complications from diabetes while in prison).

In 2009, unemployed Arizona trucker Faleh Hassan Almaleki ran down his 20-year-old year-old daughter, Noor, and the mother of her boyfriend while they walked in a parking lot outside a welfare office in the Phoenix suburb of Peoria. Noor died thirteen days later, her spine crushed. Her boyfriend's mom, Amal Khalaf, with whom Noor was living, survived with several broken bones and had difficulty walking for months. She saw Almaleki's “angry face” through the car window just as he struck her, Amal later testified at his murder trial, throwing her some 30 feet and shattering her femur and several vertebrae. He then made a beeline for Noor, and the impact of her body cracked the grill of his Jeep Laredo in half, a police investigation revealed. He ran over his daughter, snagging
her body on the undercarriage as he drove across the parking lot, and Noor tumbled from beneath the car at a curb. The “weapon was a motor vehicle, a 4,000-pound piece of metal,” said Detective Chris Boughey, the key investigator in the case.

Minutes before she was struck, Noor had spotted her dad walking into the welfare office where she was applying for benefits. “Dude, I'm so scared,” she texted a friend, according to evidence presented at Almaleki's trial. “At the welfare place, and guess who walks in? My dad! I'm so shaky!” She added: “I've never known a person with so much evil.”

The eldest of seven children, Noor, at the age of four, had moved from Iraq with her parents in 1998 to escape Saddam Hussein's regime. She straddled two cultures, quickly absorbing her new American culture at school but remaining true to her religion. She traveled to Iraq at the age of 18 to wed a man chosen for her in an arranged marriage, but she fled just months later to move back to America, the jury learned at Almaleki's murder trial.

After Almaleki mowed down his daughter, he fled across the border to Mexico, then flew to England, with the help of money from a relative, police learned. As police hunted for the missing father, his eldest son explained in a news interview that his sister had “triggered my dad's anger” and went “out of her way to be disrespectful to the family,” adding, “I don't like Noor's boyfriend,” and “there are different values in different cultures.”
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Police tracked Almaleki to London, where immigration officials allowed Peoria investigators to question him. “The interview was long. It was frustrating. It was a cat-and-mouse game for several hours,” Chris Boughey explained at the 2011 AHA-sponsored Manhattan seminar on honor killings. “He was not very forthcoming. He changed his story several times. It went from being an accident. He lost control and lost his mind. Then, he said he wanted to scare them. He was always blaming her boyfriends for ‘being out of their culture' and being bad people because of that. He never took responsibility for anything he did. He said if he wanted to kill them, he would use a gun or knife. Then, finally, he admitted he did mean to hurt them. During the interview, he made an analogy, saying that if you have a little fire, you have to put it out or that small fire will burn the whole house down. Noor was the fire. The whole house was the family.”

Boughey added that while Noor clung to life, “not once” did Almaleki “ask how his daughter was. We had a five-and-a-half-hour plane ride back to Phoenix. He never asked how his daughter was doing.”

In phone calls from prison secretly taped by police, Almaleki told a cousin to ask the Iraqi consulate to intervene with the American government on his behalf. “Connect it to honor and dishonor and, I don't know, whatever,” he said in a transcript of the call. “An Iraqi is worth nothing without honor.” He later told his wife on the phone, “No one hates his daughter, but honor is precious, and nothing is better than honor, and we are a tribal society that can't change.” He told her to write “‘honor' on signs” in a demonstration outside the embassy. “I'm not a criminal. I didn't kill someone off the street. I tried to give her a chance, but no result.” At one point, he says, referring to Amal, “What can you do about these bitches who are burning us?” and “No one messed up our life except Noor.” His wife, who appears to fluctuate from support to anger over the killing, at one point suggests, “We can say that you have . . . a psychological problem. You have to tell them, ‘I am suffering because of the war.'” He agrees it's a good idea. “Tell them I am tired and feel nervous,” he says. “Tell them I got sick in Iraq. OK?”

Prosecutor Laura Reckart told jurors in her closing arguments that Faleh Almaleki believed his “own law was above all others.” It's “chilling that you could mow down your own flesh and blood with your car because it suits your culture. It's just cold,” said Reckart. Defense attorney Jeffrey Kirchler argued that Almaleki cared deeply about his daughter, showing a blown-up photo of the newborn Noor gripping her father's finger with her tiny hand on the day “everything changed for him.” As a father, “you want your child to be good, to have manners, to have values,” Kirchler said. Before he was sentenced to 34 years in prison, Almaleki told Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Roland Steinle, “I wish I was dead and not her.” As Steinle sentenced Almaleki, he called the case “the most difficult in my six years on the bench.” He said the “press moniker” labeling the case an “honor killing bothered me. I cannot believe that a religion would allow” the killing of “other human beings.” He concluded that the case had nothing to do with religion and that, more accurately, it was about a defendant who apparently believed, “‘I brought Noor into the world, she's my property,
and I will take her out of the world,” adding: “To me, he became Saddam Hussein in Phoenix. He became the man he fled from.”