Here's a name you'll be hearing more often in a few months when its owner goes to trial: Muzzammil S. Hassan. He's the guy who chopped off his wife's head in Orchard Park, New York, a few days after she filed divorce proceedings against him. You may remember that Hassan and his 37-year-old wife, Aasiya, had co-founded Bridges TV, a station established to counter "negative" Muslim stereotypes.
Muzzammil and his lawyer, Frank M. Bogulski, don't want you to think that little divorce issue had anything to do with Aasiya's beheading. No. They are launching a defense that Bogulski calls "revolutionary" and the "first of its kind in the country."
It's different all right.
In the eyes of Muzzammil and his lawyer, Muzzammil "was the victim." In his marriage to Aasiya, she "was the dominant figure." "She was verbally abusive. She had humiliated him." So he beheaded her.
In that last point, the prosecution's case is remarkably similar to that of the defense:
"He chopped her head off," [Erie County] District Attorney Frank A. Sedita III said of Hassan. "He chopped her head off. That's all I have to say about Mr. Hassan's apparent defense that he was a battered spouse."
[snip]
Nancy Sanders, a former news director at Bridges TV, expressed skepticism over the new abuse claim. She noted that Hassan stood over 6 feet tall and "filled a doorway," while his estranged wife was slender and several inches shorter.
"I never ever heard her disparage him in the workplace at all," Sanders told the Associated Press. "It just did not seem to be in her nature. She was very gentle."
I guess they see things a little differently back in Pakistan, where Muzzammil and Aasiya learned their "positive" Muslim stereotypes.
Hat tip: Jihad Watch
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