A Wife Beheaded Barely Registers for the Press

I found an interesting article on the GetReligion blog dealing with Muzzammil Hassan. Hassan is probably not a familiar name to you – and that's precisely the issue. Hassan is a Muslim-American who is very active in trying to dispel negative Muslim stereotypes in the media. As the blog post notes, "Muzzammil Hassan had received some fantastic national media coverage a couple of years ago - NPR, Chicago Tribune, etc. - as the founder and CEO of Bridges TV. Bridges was founded, he said, to counter negative Muslim stereotypes."

So why the interest in Hassan now? Well, a couple of weeks ago his wife filed for divorce and asked for an order of protection against her husband. Unfortunately, it wasn't enough as days later Hassan summarily beheaded his wife and then reported her dead body to the police.

It's an understatement to say that beheading your wife is a shocking crime. So, why haven't we heard more about it? The story has received some press, but not to the level one would expect for this type of action. As the GetReligion post goes on to say:

So just on the irony or hypocrisy angle alone, I figured the story would get quite a bit of media coverage. But it kind of just floated out there - getting some coverage but nothing terribly substantive. Normally I would chalk it up to the news maxim that only violence against young blond women gets coverage but even with the domestic abuse situation involving Rihanna and Chris Brown, no one seemed interested in a particularly gruesome murder….

The thing was that Hassan was a prominent Muslim who had been championed for his efforts to dispel Muslim stereotypes. So while, very sad to say, even if he were simply accused of killing his wife in a more common manner as opposed to beheading her - something that is extremely uncommon in America - this story might not have had as much news value.

The stories that were out there seemed to lack substance. They didn't explore why beheadings are more common in some cultures and what, if anything, that has to do with various religious values.

These are good questions and I hope that our culture and the "watchdogs of justice" aren't afraid to at least ask them. The blog post does highlight at least one Associated Press article that begins to explore these questions. You can read the whole Get Religion piece here.

Image courtesy E.C. and licensed by the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-SA 2.0) License.