The Murders of the Armanious Family

Several days ago, Hossam Armanious, his wife, and his two teen-aged daughters, who are Coptic Christians, let some people into their Jersey City (NJ) house that they shouldn't have. After several days of not hearing from them, their relatives called the Jersey City police. The cops entered the house and found all four family members bound and gagged, with their throats cut.

The latest on the investigation is here on the Fox News Channel's site. Here is some background: Hossam Armanious and his family came here from Egypt, where Copts are routinely treated as second-class citizens. (Muslims have a word for this, of course: dhimmitude.) They went to a Coptic church, and by all accounts minded their own business. But Hossam also joined an Internet chat room, and left some comments on it. I have not seen those comments. I can think of half a dozen things he might have said, varying from the frankly inflammatory to just a simple statement of fact in the contrast between Christianity and Islam, or even about his own experiences.

Someone else in the chat room recently told him, "You'd better stop making comments like that, or I'll kill you." That we have from a friend of the family who prefers to remain anonymous. This tip appeared Sunday in the print edition of The Star-Ledger (Newark).

And from today's New York Post, as quoted by Fox News (The Post charges a subscription to see the current article, if they have it on their Web site at all), we now learn that someone--presumably the kiillers--emptied out the man's wallet, his pockets, and his daughter's purse and stole every scrap of money in the house, except for dropping a penny near the bodies. Fox News also said on their TV show that someone--presumably these same killers--made off with all the jewelry in the house. So now the police are officially investigating this matter as a robbery-homicide.

Now we all love our mysteries, in which someone, in a fit of pique, says something he shouldn't have to someone else who then winds up dead by another person's hand, and the guy who couldn't keep his temper gets arrested for a murder he did not commit. But that's not the way things happen, as any search of any big-city police blotter will show. The percentages tell us to suspect someone close to the victims--particularly since the cops, according to the Star-Ledger article which I've read, found no signs of forced entry. But the percentages also say that when someone makes a threat, you run down the threat and ask the guy who made it where he was at such-a-time--in this case over the course of the last week.

Veteran Internet users will surely say that Internet chat rooms are supposed to be an anonymous medium. Crimes of passion have arisen out of the chat, but usually when someone breaks anonymity and shares contact information in an unsafe manner. Presumably, Armanious did not do this. In fact, he didn't worry about the threat when he received it, because he relied on the anonymity to protect him.

But anonymity cuts both ways. You may think that "they don't know who you are," but in fact you don't know who they are. You could be talking to a business associate on the Internet and never even know it--but maybe they will, from some subtle hint you drop that they would recognize--and you're not prepared for them to recognize it. That's one reason I use an Internet "handle", and have been using it from the very early days, when just about every alley from the Information Superhighway ought to have been considered dark.

Furthermore, Jersey City has a nasty reputation. They suffered a spate of arson fires shortly before 22 Jumada t'Tania 1422 AH (excuse me: September 11, 2001 AD Gregorian; the "AH" stands for Anno Hegirae, meaning "in the Year of the Hegira."). And on Jumada t'Tania 22, some yo-yos were having a rooftop gawk party, looking at the dust flying from the New York skyline and shouting, "God is Great!" in Arabic. Then, of course, there's the verse in the Koran about fighting and slaying the infidels wherever you find them (9:5).

The acting head of the American Coptic Association is not fooled. He points out that this was a ritualistic killing--and I'll vouch that it looks almost like the beheadings we've heard so much about in Iraq.

A local Coptic bishop says in the Fox article that he's had some calls from Muslims in the community who say they feel bad about what happened to the Amaniouses and want to attend the funeral. Well, that's fine, and it's up to that bishop to decide who may or may not come--but once again, as Desi Arnaz, Senior would have said: Mah-mooooood, you've got some 'splainin' to do.