We cannot ignore the horror of ‘honor killings’ with ‘Islamophobia’ nonsense

“You think I’m a disgusting human being,’’ the teen girl cried out in court. “Well, I think you’re a disgusting monster!’’

The seething adolescent, known only as Fatima, stared into the face of her would-be killer: Her father.

The man who, in a fit of rage, was caught on camera last October strangling his own child in front of her high school, causing the youngster to suffer a seizure and pass out. She would have died had fellow students not saved her.

“How can you call yourself a father?’’ continued her victim-impact statement that brought me to tears. “You tried to kill me, my dad tried to kill me with his own hands.

“Do you have no love for me?”

What had Fatima done to deserve such brutal punishment? She refused a marriage arranged by her abusive, controlling, despicable parents to a much older man overseas.

She was 17.

Addressing the woman who gave her life, she spat, “My mom saw me almost pass away right in front of her own eyes and didn’t help me at all, didn’t see if I was OK . . . didn’t even try to be there for me.’’

And here’s the truly shocking part: This disturbing display of female hatred played out not in some Middle Eastern or Indian hellhole but in Washington state.

It was a suspected honor killing plot in which someone believed to have brought dishonor to her family, perhaps by dating non-Muslims, is sentenced to death, usually targeted for assassination by a male relative, often with her own mom’s enthusiastic consent.

In this case, Fatima’s vicious Iraqi-born parents, Ihsan and Zahraa Ali, got off easily. Acquitted of charges of attempted murder, the dad was convicted of assault and unlawful imprisonment and sentenced to 20 months behind bars.

Her mother was nailed for violating a court order and sentenced to serve just under a year in stir.

Even slaps on the wrists are a rarity, however. Many honor offenses go unreported and unpunished, those who follow these crimes say.

In recent years, as immigration has spiraled, honor killings have skyrocketed in the United States, experts contend.

But while these familial horrors exist among Hindus and Sikhs in India, honor killings stateside are committed almost exclusively by Muslims.

It is a disgrace that these crimes against our sisters and daughters are permitted to fester. But there exists no data base, no official count of how many girls and women in this country meet gruesome ends in the warped name of honor.

Still, the FBI and other law-enforcement agencies turn a blind eye to this evil, keeping no solid statistics, providing little outreach, training, not even warnings to budding honor killers to back off.

One researcher puts the blame squarely on officials’ terror of being branded as Islamophobic.

“In America, there is such fearfulness of talking about Muslim-on-Muslim crimes,” Dr. Phyllis Chesler, Ph.D, a New York City-based psychologist and author who’s published several works about honor crimes, told me.

“Many of these honor-murdered girls refused to marry an unknown man from their fathers’ country of origin (Egypt, Iraq, Pakistan) and were murdered in the USA. Most honor killing victims were seen as unacceptably too Western, too independent, too assimilated.

“This can’t be tolerated in the name of relativism, tolerance, anti-racism, diversity and political correctness,” she said.

The only study I could find to address the subject from a law-enforcement standpoint was published by the US Department of Justice in 2015, quoting research estimating that between 23 and 27 honor killings were committed on US soil annually, about one every two weeks.

The United Nations Population Fund estimates the number of yearly deaths as 5,000 worldwide, but other agencies claim the death rate is more like 20,000. These numbers are widely considered grossly undercounted.

Only infrequently do these hidden offenses garner media attention.

On Jan. 1, 2008, beautiful, brilliant sisters Sarah Said, 17, and Amina Said, 18, were lured into the taxicab driven by their Egyptian-born father, Yaser Abdel Said, in the Dallas suburb of Irving, Texas, with the promise of going out to dinner. It was a sham.

The father pumped 11 gunshots into the backs of his daughters’ heads, payback for resisting marriage to men in Egypt old enough to be their fathers.

Sarah’s last words were recorded by a 911 dispatcher.

“Oh my God. I’m dying!” she cried. The Said sisters’ bodies were later found in their dad’s cab.

After spending 12 years on the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted Fugitives list, Yasser Said, an American citizen, was finally apprehended in 2020, tried and convicted of double murder in 2022 and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

But who will speak for the girls and women so savagely sentenced to death?

As long as authorities ignore this vicious practice, honor murders will continue to flourish.