BreakPoint | Murder in Jersey City

Chuck Colson joins Joseph L. Farah and lays it on the line: Hossam Armanious and his family died by a terrorist murder, and not a common garden-variety robbery.

Neither man, for reasons that each will have to explain on his own someday, is willing to address the most glaring breach of police procedure: that the Jersey City police have willfully misrepresented to the community the issue of whether someone took money and/or valuables from the Armanious house. While both men decry the "desperate" search for a motive other than the fanatical for these murders, and Chuck Colson remembers that Hossan's cousins stated that the money and jewelry were still there when they (the cousins) went to fetch Hossan's legal papers, neither man remembers that on Monday the cops were saying that the jewelry had been cleaned out and that someone had turned out the pockets of the victims and swiped the petty cash not just from the house but also from the clothes on the victims' backs.

Now in the first place, I never heard of a robbery-homicide in which the perp stayed behind long enough to rifle the victims' pockets and wallet and purse after they were dead. Nor have I ever heard of the perps of a robbery-homicide taking the time to bind and gag and stab their victims. What will the Jersey City cops say next? That robbers sought to make it look like a terrorist murder so that the local pawnbroker wouldn't question their showing up with a bunch of jewelry?

And in the second place, the Armanious extended family said that the money and the jewelry were on the scene when they arrived! So what happened to it? I'd hate to think that the Jersey City Police Department has a bunch of bad cops on its force who decided to help themselves to the booty--and turning out the pockets was just a bit thick, if that happened.

I think that money and jewelry are going to sit and moulder on some forgotten shelf of a precinct evidence room. I know how the system works. When you want to cover something up, you put it in a place where someone will never find it. Sometimes I wonder how the cops find half the evidence that they are supposed to produce in court--and what happens to evidence when no trial takes place? I shudder to think of so many people's personal possessions locked away as "evidence" in a case gone cold, that the cops don't even want to solve.

I have written already to Senator Jon Corzine (D-NJ)--who, by the way, wants to be our next Governor. If you, like me, are a New Jersey resident, I urge you to do the same. Tell him that the FBI needs to take over the Armanious investigation and treat it as a terrorist murder. Ask him whether he realizes that terrorism has struck home in his State, and in a very ugly fashion, and what he's going to do about it. Make this an issue in the upcoming Governor's race, and let him know you plan to do it.

And while you're at it, suggest that the Senate empanel a Select Committee on Religious Ideals and their Consequences, so that the Senate can re-examine, in public hearings, whether Islam has forfeited the protections that James Madison sought to enshrine in the Constitution. I'll tell you this: neither Madison nor Thomas Jefferson would have dreamt of anything like Islam being a significant presence in this country--and Jefferson would have recoiled in horror at the thought of citizens killing fellow citizens in support of the fundamental tenets of any faith. And that is exactly what Islam demands.

What shall we say of any faith when adherence to its fundamental tenets blackens its reputation? (I could also say that about political parties, but that's another topic.)