Khalid Adem Has Been Convicted

Khalid Adem was convicted today and sentenced to ten years in prison for performing a female genital mutilation on his little girl.

Khalid AdemA verdict was reached Wednesday afternoon in the case of a Gwinnett County man accused of mutilating his daughter.

After less than three hours of deliberations, a jury made up of seven women and five men decided that Khalid Adem is guilty on charges of cruelty to a child and aggravated battery.

Now that the trial is over, I can say that both Dymphna and I think this guy was railroaded. The most likely scenario is that he knew about the “circumcision”, and may even have suggested it, but did not perform it. Men in Ethiopia never perform this operation; it is always done by the women. This is a travesty.

See Dymphna’s earlier posts for more on this sad affair.



Update: Fausta has reminded me that Mr. Adem was not convicted under the female genital mutilation law, which was passed after his crime was committted, but under a previously existing child battery law.

Dymphna, of course already knew this — I should have run it by her first!

Thanks, Fausta.

21 thoughts on “Khalid Adem Has Been Convicted

  1. I cry no tears for this man. Now will the state go after the mom and grandma as well?

    The mom, dad and maternal grandma all have blood on their hands and none should retain custody.

    Castrate and deport them all.

  2. In a patriarchal culture, wouldn’the have been the approving voice in his family? I doubt it was done without his knowledge, and I’m willing to bet that point was brought up in the trial.

  3. I’m with Stephen here. The actual act may have been done by the women, but I doubt that it would have been done over his objection

  4. I agree. It sounded like the daughter was coached. And the mother never noticed the scarring? Not bloodly likely. The jury sent a message to Islamists that this behavior will not be tolerated in America. Good, but the defense was weak, and let this man down. Adem may be culpable, but don’t think he performed the clitoridectomy. He will probably win on appeal. If it is appealed.

  5. I don’t think this man is innocent; I doubt the act occurred without his knowledge and consent.

    But justice was not served. At least half of the perpetrators have escaped scot-free.

    His co-conspirator has become a darling of the feminist left, crusading against what she herself escaped punishment for colluding in.

    As I said: a travesty.

  6. No apology – I’m not sure that is the message the jury sent. I think the jury sent the message that the women get off scot-free. Why didn’t the prosecution charge the women? We are way behind on understanding the cultural incursion into our country and the primitive/barbaric nature of people like these women.

    Simply put, American juries as well as judges will fall into the trap of siding against the man in cases involving a minor child no matter the charge whether he is black, white, pink, purple, Muslim, Christian, or Jew. I don’t know if it is because we have been polluted by political correctness or not, but in domestic cases which this at its heart is – mutiliation is the only charge the prosecution thought it could win on – men don’t have even the presumption of innocence. I’ve seen it and the damage that is caused.

    The women should be charged as accomplices at the very least but that will never happen. Wouldn’t hold my breath for him to win on appeal. This man is looking at a long jail term and maybe even longer than the 10 years when all is said and done – how? In some states they can argue that he’s a danger to the community and cart him off to a mental institution for the rest of his life.

    Had the prosecution sent the message to Islamists, the women would be in jail too. What the prosecution did was say that if you are a Muslim woman and you want to get out of the marriage, keep the children, and get the man’s resources if he has any, if all else fails, try this ploy.

  7. Rail roaded??? This is entirely a common practice where this man comes from.

    Dymphna, I’ve replied to your earlier post on this….

    Baron, I cannot believe you really mean that! Tell me it’s not true!

  8. By the way, I think Mr. Khalid Adem should be released from prison. How can we condemn him or anyone else for practicing their own cultural and religious beliefs? The problem is that he and his family were allowed to immigrate to the US in the first place. Will we ever learn from Europe’s mistakes? Apparently not. Does anyone even understand my point of view? These people have completely different world views and traditions than we do. I don’t condemn them for that. But they need to practice those beliefs in their own countries.

  9. Let me say this another way,

    How can we welcome hordes of people who practice Islam, for example, to the US then, after their here, expect them to conform to our secular atheistic society? I’m awaiting intelligent responses to that question. It boggles the mind. We are, in fact, sowing the seeds for future cultural problems. Are we not? Who is to blame for this? Them or us? I say it is we.

  10. This is a classic case of feminism meeting and defering justice. A strong message was needed but the wrong message was sent.

    It is doubly dangerous, in that western women have a virtually free ride in western courts, but are used to it. Islamic women are not used to it, and the sudden knowledge that an exculpatory lie is not only looked for but welcome will do far more damage.

    Ultimately the backlash will do women more harm than good…on both sides of the veil.

  11. scottsa:

    What evidence do you or anyone else have that this is an “exculpatory lie?”

    The very concept of Western style judicial proceedings is alien to these people. We’ve assumed they have the same traditions as we do and they clearly don’t.

    Again, female “circumcision” is common there. It isn’t here.

  12. You have that right, ScottSA. It won’t do Western men any good either. Remember the days when in ugly divorces the wife would scream “sexual child molestation” and everyone would go – gasp! Well, these women have just lowered the bar to include “sexual mutilation”. These women probably wanted custody so that they could get all kinds of benefits (aka your and my tax dollars).

    Our one-size-fits-all multiculturalism and cultural moral equivalency is sowing seeds that we cannot begin to imagine fully. But our elites cannot build communities with gates high enough to protect them from what they have wrought.

  13. If he’s not guilty of mutilation, he’s guilty of conspiracy to mutilate.

    Let’s hope they get the other perps too. But at least for this guy: justice served.

  14. One detail,
    The law against FGM came into effect after the crime was committed. Adem was pronounced guilty of child abuse, specifically aggravated battery and cruelty to children

  15. I don’t know about a lot of this. I’ve read a number of accounts where men perform the circumcision on their own daughters. Maybe they were all wrong. It’s not the same as another man giving your wife or daughter a pap smear. They’re your property, ergo, it’s your right.

    Mike, I don’t think you’ve got all of your reasoning working together.

    Let’s imagine you’re going on a vacation – not planning to live – but vacationing in Saudi Arabia. You – not the house of Saud – are responsible for recognizing the laws. That means you leave your Bible at home and you don’t go looking for booze and hookers.

    They aren’t being dragged into this country. This isn’t Greystoke: the Legend of Tarzan. They’re coming here on their own volition. Which means they – not us – are ultimately responsible for knowing and obeying the laws. It’s irrelevant what their cultures are or were. This is not a global village. It’s not Rome at the time of Caesar. But, you know, even when in Rome, you do as the Romans do.

    The law does not discriminate between genital mutilation for Islamics and genital mutilation for atheist sadists. How atheist? How sadist? How Islamic? These things are not even definitive labels, much less things we should – or should care – to incorporate into our laws. You cut off a girls clitoris, you go to jail. Personally, I think you should be hanged for that, but that’s just me.

    We expect EVERYONE who comes here to conform to our secular atheist society. Hell, we expect Native Americans and the Amish to conform to our secular atheist society. It’s irrelevant if you’re Jewish, Animist, Buddhist, Catholic or Unitarian. You still must conform to the laws, and they apply to all men and women equally.

    Yes, multiculturalism created the problem by letting the barbarians in the gates. But that doesn’t mean we should stick with a multiculturalist attitude in how we deal with the problem now that we see it.

    There’s an old story about when the British were in India. A constabulary happens upon the scene where a group of people are about to immolate the wife of a deceased man, as was the custom for some people. The officer calls out for them to put a halt to the situation.

    “But this is how we do things in our country,” they replied.
    “Yes, well in my country,” says the Briton, “we hang people for that.”

    Castrating a girl is evil regardless of where you live – and regardless of where you’re from. It’s evil in America. It’s evil in Sudan. It’s evil in Yemen. It’s evil in Saud. It’s evil in Denmark.

    It’s not just that we should punish the guy and whoever else is responsible for the heinous act, we should be announcing from the rooftops that countries and cultures that do these things are monstrous and vile. We should be saying, “Islamic cultures are hideous, foul, disgusting, inhuman and horrible.” Because it’s true.

  16. Stephen Browne is a writer, editor, and teacher of English as a Second Language and martial arts. He has been living and working in Eastern Europe since 1991, though currently he is at the University of Oklahoma pursuing advanced course work in journalism. He is the founder of the Liberty English Camp, held annually in Lithuania, which brings students from all over Eastern Europe for intensive English study using texts important to the history of political liberty and free markets.

    I trust his observations on Arabs, for example, which are as follows:

    Journalist Jill Carroll is back home now, and detailing her experiences as a captive of the jihadists in Iraq in the Christian Science Monitor.

    I’m sure the details will prove fascinating, but the upshot of what she has learned is that the Islamists are — gasp — different from us! Furthermore, I believe that she’s beginning to suspect that they are really not very nice people.

    Since the beginning of the Iraq phase of this conflict of civilizations, I’ve experienced the teeth-grinding frustration of watching both pro- and anti- Iraq sides make the exact same mistake — that of supposing that these people are bascially Americans in funny costumes. In this respect, George Bush and Michael Moore are equally clueless, as Jill Carroll apparently was as well.

    I went to live and work in Saudi Arabia in 1998, and I “made my year” as expats there put it. That phrase means that I actually stuck out the whole year, instead of “running” from my contract, an occurrence so common that you only have to say “he did a runner” to explain why someone isn’t showing up for work anymore.

    And while my experience wasn’t nearly as unpleasant as Jill Carroll’s, I could have told her a thing or two before she went to Iraq armed with her overflowing good will.

    I went to the Kingdom with a certain sympathy for Arab grievances and a belief that America had earned a lot of hostility from “blowback” from our ham-handed interventionist foreign policy and support for Israel.

    I came back with the gloomy opinion that over the long run we are going to have to hammer these people hard to get them to quit messing with us.

    So, with the caveat that one of the first things I learned was that the term “Arab” covers a lot of territory, here are some observations and some tentative conclusions about Arabs, particularly Arabs from the oil states, about why we have misunderstood each other to the point that we are fighting a war with some of them and angering the rest of them. I suspect that many of these also apply to Iranian Islamists, but I have never been there and note that Iranians are not Arabs and have a different cultural history.

    1) They don’t think the same way we do.

    No, I mean THEY REALLY DON’T THINK THE SAME WAY WE DO. Yes, yes, I know we are all human and share the same human nature (perhaps the most disastrous mistake of Marxism was the denial of this elementary fact). But within the scope of that shared human nature, there are a lot of different ways to be human.

    We Americans have a basically open attitude to our fellow human beings and sometimes forget this. Combined with the fact that most Americans are linguistic idiots, we tend to assume that anyone who learns to speak English learns to think like us.

    2) When you meet them in just the right circumstances, they are a very likable people.

    Arabs are often easy to like, but difficult to respect — as opposed to Israelis, who are often difficult to like but impossible not to respect. From their nomadic heritage they have a tradition of generosity and hospitality to guests that warms the heart.

    Arab shopkeepers have a talent for making you feel guilty that you didn’t buy anything (once you get past a dislike of having them lay hands on you). Haggling is a social grace with them and when you ask the price, and agree to the first one quoted, they will often come down on the price just out of pity for your social ineptness.

    This does not in the least affect the fact that no friendship with you is ever going to remotely equal the obligations they have for their family, tribe, or the community of the Believers.

    3) Their values are fundamentally different from ours; their self-esteem is derived from a different source.

    And you know what? Theirs is PHONY. Yes I know, I’m making a cultural value judgment, the cardinal sin when I was a grad student in Anthropology. With us, the most important sources of self-esteem are useful work and the love of a good woman. We value being good at something that requires skill (even a hobby) and being of primary importance to somebody just because you are who you are.

    Work for them is something to be avoided. The basic forms of work: making stuff, growing stuff, and moving stuff around, is taken care of by a class of indentured servants, usually non-Arab Muslims from the Third World, and, even today, by outright slaves. The Kingdom is a modern country that abolished slavery in 1967, but old expats have reported seeing slave auctions as late as 1981.

    On one occasion a student of mine asked me, “Teacher, what do you call a man who can be sold?” (Excellent use of the passive voice, I was proud of him.) I explained, “He is called a slave, the condition is called slavery, the verb is to enslave.”

    Later I had occasion to ask them about the headsman, the fellow who cuts heads and hands off in the chop-chop square in front of the mosque on Fridays. The reason I asked was that from my studies I knew that in tribal societies converting from a tribal or feudal system into a system of common laws, a man condemned to death by a court of law must often be executed by a member of his own tribe or a complete outsider so that the execution does not spark a blood feud.

    In the Kingdom, the headsman is usually a Sudanese. My students explained, “Yes teacher, he’s a slave.” i.e. he’s a person of no importance and therefore outside the web of obligations of vengeance.

    The point being, in a slave society, work is not honorable (as De Tocqueville pointed out) and cannot be a source of self-worth.

    “Of conjugal love they know nothing.” (Thomas Jefferson on the French aristocracy.) In a land of arranged marriages, where the whole society is geared towards a strict segregation of the sexes and women are at least semi-chattels, romantic love is rare — and greatly desired.

    In the Kingdom I found a few students with a consuming interest in romantic poetry, whom I had to teach very discretely. Most of them were just obsessed with sex, however. And interestingly, when visiting the West or the fleshpots of Bahrain, they are said to have a tendency to fall in love with the prostitutes they patronize.

    Without honorable work, romantic love, or any accomplishments not overshadowed by those the West, their sense of self-worth comes from being the possessors of the One True Religion. And Allah doesn’t seem to be delivering on his promises of being exalted above the unbelievers these days.

    On the plus side, they are willing to spare you and absorb you into their community as a respected member if you convert to the One True Religion. The Brotherhood of Believers is a reality in the lands of Islam, and while it sometimes falls short of the ideal (as does our democratic ideal) it is a reality, and in its way admirable.

    4) They do not think of obligations as running both ways.

    With us, contractual and moral obligations tend to be equal and reciprocal. They don’t see it that way. The obligations of the superior to the inferior do not equal those of the inferior to the superior. Obligations within a family or clan outweigh all others.

    That is why we had to take care not to sit members of the same clan near each other during exams. If one asks another for help, he has to give it, in spite of promises to the school, even when the clansman is a total stranger.

    Obligations to other believers outweigh all obligations to unbelievers and especially when the believers are fellow-Arabs. And in contracts with unbelievers, the obligations of the Believer to the kaffir are not equal to the obligations of the kaffir to the Believer.

    Consider that Muslims in England have quite un-self-consciously demanded that a pub near a mosque be shut down as offensive to their religion — in spite of the fact that the pub had precedence by six hundred years! Or that they demand the right to broadcast the prayer call on loudspeakers in London while it is illegal to have a church at all in the Kingdom.

    5) Not only can they not build the infrastructure of a modern society, they can’t maintain it either.

    The very concept of “maintenance” is foreign to them. This is what drives the foreign instructors in the Gulf absolutely mad. The per-capita richest countries in the world resemble Eastern Europe or Latin America in the tackiness and run-down appearance of the buildings and streets.

    An electronics technician new to the Kingdom once told me how his first job was to inspect a junction box in the desert. He had to pry it open with a crowbar as it had evidently not been opened since it had been installed several years earlier.

    This is expressed in the inshallah philosophy, “If God wills it.” A Palestinian friend of mine explained to me that even the weather forecaster will qualify his prediction, “It will rain tomorrow. Inshallah.” Or, “I will meet you tomorrow, inshallah.” (But God understands that I am a very unreliable person.)

    I remember giving a pep talk to my students before a crucial exam, “You are all going to pass the exam, right?” “Inshallah teacher.” “No, no!” I shouted, “No inshallah. Study!”

    In the next column, we will explore the major differences in values, from notions of truth to notions of war, that are ultimately responsible for today’s culture clash.

    6) In warfare, we think they are sneaky cowards and they think we are hypocrites.

    In our civilization, when two men get ready to fight, either seriously or just “woofing,” what do they say? Some variation of “I’m going to kick your butt.”

    Here’s what I heard in the Kingdom, “Hey, don’t mess with me, or someday you’ll get a knife in the back.” I’m not saying that wouldn’t happen to you in the west, but most men would be ashamed to make a threat of that nature.

    We don’t understand that direct shock battle is not necessarily the law of nature. When overwhelming force is brought to bear on them, they become cringing and obsequious. To put it bluntly, they lie their heads off to get you to turn your back on them.

    Try to see it from their point of view — how else do you expect them to act when you have the overwhelming force? You expect them to meet you on equal terms when the situation is so unequal? What other tactics are available but prevarication and delay, followed by a sneak attack?

    Folks, what we call “terrorism” is quite close to the historically normal way of warfare among these people.

    7) In rhetoric, they don’t mean to be taken seriously and they don’t understand when we do.

    Thus, an ultimatum is often not taken seriously and reality comes as a shock. Like many other Mediterranean peoples, Arabs don’t seem to mind making a scene in public and have a high blown sense of drama.

    Paul Harvey once described how he had spent the Suez Crisis hiding under the bed in his hotel room because of the blood-curdling radio broadcasts, before he learned that Arabs talk like that when they’re arguing over a taxi. “This is my taxi and I will defend it to the death!” “You lie, it’s mine and rivers of blood will flow in the street before I give up my taxi!”

    An Arab will scream at you, get into your personal space and sometimes kick dirt on your shoe — and then react with utter surprise when an American comes up and decks him. “What did I do?” To say the least, this makes negotiations difficult.

    8) They don’t place the same value on an abstract conception of Truth as we do; they routinely believe things of breathtaking absurdity.

    I cannot begin to tell you some of the things I’ve heard from Gulf Arabs or read in the English language press in the Kingdom. “The Jews want Medina back.” (Medina was a Jewish city in the time of the Prophet.) The Protocols of the Elders of Zion has been turned into an immensely popular miniseries on Egyptian TV.

    The ‘Blood Libel’ (the medieval myth that Jews need the blood of non-Jewish babies to celebrate Passover) is widely reported in the Arab press, and widely believed. Allah will, of course, replenish the oil beneath Arabia when it runs out.

    I’ve been assured, by well-educated and otherwise sensible people, that Winston Churchill was Jewish and that Anthony Quinn had been blacklisted and would never work again after making Lion of the Desert (just before he made that turkey with Kevin Costner).

    9) They do not have the same notion of cause and effect as we do.

    This involves some seriously weird implications about other people being responsible for their misery because they ill-wished them. I’ve read in the English-language press of the Kingdom serious admonitions against using Black Magic to win an advantage in a dispute with a neighbor. The columnist did not deny the efficacy of Black Magic, he just said it’s forbidden to use it.

    On one occasion I was trying to explain the concept of “myth” to them and I used the example of the djinn. I wasn’t getting through to them at all and was concerned that I had mangled the pronunciation of the word when it dawned on me that the reason they didn’t understand what I was getting at, was that they had no doubt that the djinn were real.

    10) We take for granted that we are a dominant civilization still on the way up. They are acutely aware that they are a civilization on the skids.

    Anyone who looks at the surviving architecture of Moorish Spain can tell that Islamic civilization has seen better days. There was a time when cultural transmission between Islam and the west went overwhelmingly from them to us. (Note the recent discoveries of Sufi symbols engraved on the structural members of European cathedrals.)

    Now the situation is reversed, and it is humiliating for them.

    11) We think that everybody has a right to their own point of view; they think that that idea is not only self-evidently absurd, but evil.

    In the west, and America more than anyplace else, we have internalized the notion that everyone has a right to their own opinion, and that said opinion is perfectly valid for them. When we meet a people who think that that idea is insane and evil, we are sometimes left in the absurd position of defending their stance as “perfectly valid for them.”

    It doesn’t work that way for Arabs. God’s Truth is laid out in some detail in the Koran, and not to believe it is a sin. Yes, in America you can find lots of Christian Fundamentalists who believe that God will cast you into hell for holding the wrong opinions about Him, but even those who would make their religion into an established church seldom desire the level of detailed enforcement as the Kingdom does or the Taliban did.

    12) Our civilization is destroying theirs. We cannot share a world in peace. They understand this; we have yet to learn it.

    Another culturally-imposed blindness we have is the notion that everybody can get along with enough good will. There is absolutely no evidence to support this and a great deal to oppose it.

    Can the subjugation of women coexist with western civilization and western media ubiquitous throughout the world? Can a pluralistic and tolerant society be governed by Islamic law? Can a modern economy exist where interest is forbidden and many forms of business risk-taking are considered gambling, and thus forbidden?

    Can a society that educates its young men by a process of rote recitation produce critically thinking, technically educated men to build and operate a modern economy? Can you even teach elementary concepts of maintenance to a people who believe that anything that happens is inshalla (As God wills it)?

    To compete, or even just survive in the world they must become more like us and less like themselves — and they know this.

  17. He was involved, he deserved what he got and worse. I agree castrate the SOB, revoke his citizen ship and send him anywhere. Same for the wife.
    Zero tolerance for that barbarity!
    As for those who advocate tolerance to his background, make ALL immigrants sign a pledge GIVING UP their prior customs and promise to adopt ours. I want to live in America, not some polygot abortion of neanderthals and barbarians!

  18. Grayson:
    “We expect EVERYONE who comes here to conform to our secular atheist society. Hell, we expect Native Americans and the Amish to conform to our secular atheist society. It’s irrelevant if you’re Jewish, Animist, Buddhist, Catholic or Unitarian. You still must conform to the laws, and they apply to all men and women equally.”

    Snouck:
    laws live in populations. Replace the population and the law will adapt to the population. Written laws are meaningless, unless it conforms to the habits and beliefs of the new population.

    If you want to protect US laws, you got to protect and safeguard the population. Otherwise it is a lost battle.

    And non-Westerners, all non-Westerners not just Muslims are utterly different from Westerners.

    Itonly becomes a problem if you try to mix populations or impose a Western political system on a non-Western population.

    Stephen Browne is right on the money.

    Westerners have the idiotic idea that the world will conform to their expectations, but what we are seeing everywhere is that Western influence is waning, even in Western lands itself.

    The Western self-confidence of Grayson is illusory. Prepare to grow sadder and wiser.

    Regards,

    Snouck

  19. I am a strong believer that Khalid was set up. I’ve followed this case closely. It was all about revenge.
    This case if full of loopholes
    – How can a mother and a grandmother (whos is a nurse) who both cared for this child not know that the child was circumcised?
    – She was circumcised when she was 2 years old. I can imagine this is a painful process and that it takes quite sometime to heal. I am assuming that some sort of treatment was done to heal the wound and stop the bleeding… how did the mother/grandmother not see it? How can a mother/grandmother as a care giver know this … especiallywhile they are changing her diaper or cleaning her!!!
    – Why did it take the mother so long to come forward with this issue once she found out (2years after the fact) . – Why only during custody battle did she bring it up? – Circumsion is also practiced among the Zulu in South Africa where the wife emigrated from. Why was this not taken into considerartion?
    – How can a 2 year old remember that her father used sicissors to do the act? – The mother claims that the father told her that the child should be circumsed …. so what action did you take as a mother with this kind of comment? If you know your husband has a strong opion on FGM wouldn’t you be on the look out and check your daughter frequently …. she claims she had no say!!!!! and here she is living in the United States claiming she didn’t have a right… why didn’t she inform the social services!
    – This was a set up during trial Khalid mentioned his ex-wife supposedly called him over for “dinner” along with many of her family members and confronted him in front of the family. So this sounds like the parents instead collaborated on this act.
    People that have read this case strongly believe that the mother/grandmother had a part to play in this case.
    Khalid (who is now serving his 10yr sentence) has family across the US. His sisters/friends were on the local radio stations in DC yesterday …. and they mentioned that Khalid and his hatefulex-wife were going through a nasty custody battle and which ended up in a revenge. They all spoke sobbing on the radioabout Khalid.
    The mother also claims that Khalid married her only to get his legal paperwork (greencard) through her. She now believes this was the only reason he wanted to marry her and that this was her way of getting even with him.
    It is highly questionable that the mother is “innocent” and that she has no knowledgew of this crime and instead accuse her ex-husand and set herself free.
    Khalid’s background and profile does not fit the crime.
    Men Watch Out

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