Atlas Interviews Rifqa Bary's Friend

Listen here: Rifqa Bary's Best Friend: Brian Williams, The Atlas Interview

Impromptu and on the fly, I had the good fortune to do an interview with Rifqa Bary's dear friend, Brian Williams. We were exchanging emails on facebook and he was happy to talk to me, as the media was manufacturing a dishonest, anti-Christian, anti-Rifqa narrative. Brian is a missionary and is the Pastor in Ohio who baptized Rifqa this year. He was very much a big brother to her. Williams was very aware of what Rifqa was dealing with. She lived a double life. A life of constant fear: fear of herfather, her family and mosque members.

It was the mosque members who spied on her and ratted her out to her parents. According to Brian, they kept calling the house, warning Rifqa's parents to "get her under control or else". Her mother said to Rifqa, after to speaking to mosque members, "you are not my daughter" "I were to die I don't want you to come to my funeral"-- and that she would be "sent back to Sri Lanka and put into a place" for apostates.

When Rifqa Bary ran for her life and the police found religious writings among Rifqa's things, the police threatened Williams with arrest if "Rifqa did not appear in the next 24 hours". Immediately afterward he was contacted by the Kansas City police, who searched his home looking for Rifqa. The police had it wrong.

The interview is a half hour and reveals much. Rifqa's family is devout and has a deep pride in its many generations of pious Muslims. Her grandfather was an imam.

Brian also said the depiction of the father as a warm caring man is completely dishonest. The claim that the father came to the States for medical treatment of Rifqa's eye was just media propaganda. Brian explained that the family used Rifqa's medical condition to get into this country.

Does that media get any of this story? Newsweek did an article on Rifqa that broke today. It is pure evil. Truly disgusting.

It kicks off like this,

John Stemberger, a conservative Christian lawyer who was involved in the battle over Terri Schiavo, the Florida woman kept alive with a feeding tube until it was disconnected in 2005. He and various right-wing groups have unleashed a barrage of allegations against Bary's parents and a mosque they attend in Columbus, Ohio. Yet as Krista Bartholomew, Bary's guardian ad litem (appointed by the court to offer guidance on the girl's best interests), said in a hearing last Thursday, "This is not a holy war. This is a case about a frightened little girl and a broken family."

Get it? Then in describing the father:

Mohamed and Aysha Bary left Sri Lanka in 2000 with their two kids, Rifqa and an older brother, and moved to New York (their third child, a boy, was born in the United States). The reason: concern about Rifqa's well-being. As a child, she'd fallen on a toy airplane that pierced her right eye. Doctors in Sri Lanka wanted to remove the eye, prompting Mohamed to relocate the whole family so Rifqa could obtain better medical treatment. In the end, her eye was spared, though she can't see out of it. Then, in 2004, Mohamed moved the family again, this time to seek a better public education for the kids. He settled on the Columbus area, which had highly ranked schools. At New Albany High School, Rifqa excelled. She maintained a 3.5 grade-point average and became a member of the cheerleading squad.

Rifqa did not fall on a toy plane. Her brother threw a hard object at her eye and caused her blindness. And her father did not get her "better medical treatment". He used it to get to America (according to Williams). Newsweek goes on to say, "in the end her eye was spared, though she can't see out of it". Huh?

And what does Newsweek Newswrong say about apostasy? In the whole article there is one parenthetical remark. Did they interview any apostates in America and ask them about the constant threat of death they live under (ie Wafa Sultan, Nonie Darwish, Ibn Warraq)?

(Muslim scholars say that in Islam, there's no such thing as an honor killing for apostasy.)

That's it. Who did they speak to? Ibrahim Hooper?