In what has to be the most specific “Not All Muslims” item ever, the Smoking Gun reports:
The New Orleans man whose post-Hurricane Katrina heroics and tribulations were chronicled by best-selling author Dave Eggers in the book “Zeitoun” was convicted last year of battering his wife, who told police that she had received several prior beatings, but never called cops on her spouse.
According to a New Orleans Police Department report, Abdulrahman Zeitoun, 54, was arrested last March after officers responded to a domestic battery call at the Uptown home of his wife Kathryn and the couple’s five children…
Kathryn Zeitoun, 40, told officers that she was separated from her husband “due to finances,” and that he was living next door in a home on Dart Street. She said that after her estranged husband entered the home around 6:30 PM on March 2, they got into a “heated verbal argument” that quickly became physical.
Zeitoun told cops that her husband pushed her to the living room floor, “mounting her and hitting her in the back of the head with a closed fist.” She added that, “her face was smashed into the floor of the residence several times during the battery,” police reported.
The assault ended when the couple’s 15-year-old daughter–responding to her mother’s screams for help–kicked her father in the neck, causing him to fall off Kathryn and flee the residence…
Zeitoun was represented by attorney William Sothern, whom Eggers has credited with helping him “all the way through” the preparation of “Zeitoun.”
Published in mid-2009, the nonfiction book describes how Zeitoun, a Muslim who was born in Syria, rode out Katrina after sending his family to Baton Rouge (where Kathryn grew up). After the levees broke, he used a borrowed canoe to rescue stranded neighbors and abandoned pets, while also distributing supplies and checking on tenants in buildings he owned.
So it all evens out. But what could’ve driven this man to such a terrible act? What could’ve motivated him to treat his own wife this way?
The book, which features on its cover a drawing of Zeitoun paddling a canoe, also details how he was detained in a makeshift jail when cops and National Guard members suspected that he and several companions might be terrorists.
A-ha! That’s it, that’s the answer: Abdulrahman wouldn’t have beaten his wife if American society wasn’t so racist. I blame George W. Bush.