British newspapers are reporting on the retrial of the disturbing case of a Muslim mother in Cardiff, Wales who beat her son to death in July 2010. Why would she commit such a heinous act? Because he had failed to memorize enough of the Koran.
Seven-year-old Yaseen Ege was originally thought to have died in a house fire. But a postmortem showed that the little boy had been beaten and abused for months prior to his death, and had been beaten so severely on the day of the fire that he died. Doctors found that he had previously suffered bone fractures and ultimately died from severe abdominal injuries caused by multiple blows which split his bowel, leading to organ failure.
Sara Ege, 32, a university graduate from India, confessed and told police she had used a stick to beat her son “like a dog,” as she herself put it, over a period of months when he couldn’t sufficiently recite passages from the Koran. As if that isn’t horrifying enough, she also revealed that she started the house fire deliberately to burn the body and cover her crime, according to testimony in the Cardiff Crown Court. She admitted pouring lighter fuel over her son’s remains, saying, “I know he was gone but I was just trying to protect myself.”
In a video interview, she told police, “I was trying to teach him the Koran” – a task this “devout mother,” as one report described her, told police was a 10 on a scale of 1 to 10 in importance to her. “I was getting more and more frustrated. If he didn’t read it properly I would be very angry. I would hit him.”
Sara and her husband Yousuf Ali Ege, 38, had enrolled the prematurely bornYaseen, who had eating problems and was small for his age, in advanced classes at the local mosque. Both parents, whom a BBC report describes as being “known for being devoutly religious,” wanted him to become a hafiz, or someone who has completely memorized the Koran, by the time he was 10years old.
The little boy endured 13-and-a-half hour days focusing on the Koran, beginning at the mosque at 6:30 a.m. He also attended extra math and English lessons and went to Arabic classes on the weekends. “We had a high target. I wanted him to learn 35 pages in three months. I promised him a new bike if he could do it” – but only, according to her initial confession, if his recitation of the first two chapters was word perfect. “But Yaseen wasn’t very good. After a year of practice he had only learnt a chapter.”
The mother told officers: “I was getting all this bad stuff in my head, like I couldn’t concentrate, I was getting angry too much, I would shout at Yaseen all the time.” She apparently also hit him with a hammer, a rolling pin and a slipper, as well as repeatedly punching him. She allegedly locked him in a shed, tied him to a door, and forced him to do pushups. “I have become so harsh, I even killed my own son.”
And what was her excuse for all this “harsh” and ultimately murderous abuse? The devil made her do it. Months after the fact, Ege told a doctor she had been commanded to kill Yaseen by Shaitan, Arabic for Satan. She also admitted to believing in Islamic spirits called jinn, and that her house was inhabited by them.
Meanwhile the husband in this arranged marriage, a taxi driver and Royal Mail worker, denies the charge of causing or allowing the death of the child by not stopping the beatings, and denies even knowing that his son was being beaten at all.
It’s difficult to know exactly what did happen, because both parents have blamed each other and/or lied through every step of the trial and retrial. The mother has given too many conflicting accounts to keep up with. She initially admitted the beatings, the killing and the coverup but blamed it on Satan’s voice in her head. Then she retracted her confession and blamed her son’s beatings on her husband, claiming that he killed the boy, that one of his brothers started the fire, and they forced her to take the fall. At one point she claimed that the boy was in the middle of reciting the Koran to her when he simply collapsed and died. At another point she confessed to the coverup but pretended not to know why she attempted it, and blamed the crime on her cancer medicine. “When you are faced with a piece of evidence,” the prosecutorsaid, “you come up with a new account.”
A jury was unable to come to a decision the first time around, and the retrial is still ongoing. But whatever the truth, one or both of these disgusting excuses for parents gradually beat a helpless seven-year-old to death for failing their excessive demand that he memorize the Koran, then tried to cover it up by roasting his body.
Islamic fundamentalism is cancerous for kids worldwide, whether it’s the horror of Beslan, a jihadist grenade attackon a Sunday school in Kenya, the rape and murder of Christian children in Pakistan, the torture and murder of Christian kids for blaspheming against Islam, or the full-on terrorist war against Israeli children, to list just a few examples.
It’s cancerous even for the children of Muslims, whether it’s Hamas usingPalestinian children as human shields or indoctrinating them to be Jew-hating suicide bombers; the Taliban hanging children they suspect of being spies, orbeheading them to intimidate the populace, or shooting or throwing acid on those wanting an education; parents committing honor killings; al Qaedarecruiting mentally ill kids and orphans as suicide bombers in Iraq; or parents beating a child to death for failing to memorize the Koran fast enough.
