Christian site whacked by Muslim hack attack

Attorney Angela M. Lloyd listens to Rifqa Bary at Dec. 22, 2009, hearing (Photo: Columbus Dispatch

A website linked to a lawyer who defended Muslim-to-Christian convert Rifqa Bary, whose case made headlines when she, as a juvenile, ran away from her Islam-devoted parents, has been attacked by a hacker who attributed his actions to "Great Islam."

Officials with the Florida Family Policy Council said much of the site's code was "destroyed" by a hacker who left behind a message with a scatological reference to the organization's work

While the Bary case was not referenced by the hacker, the council's chief, John Stemberger, was a key part of Bary's case for a time while it was in the courts in Florida. He linked the case to the attack.

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Bary had reported her father, Mohamed Bary, threatened her life after learning of her conversion. She says she became a Christian several years ago and maintained her faith as a secret for a time. When her parents began preparing to move the family back to Sri Lanka, she sought refuge with a Florida pastor and his wife after connecting with them on the social networking site Facebook.com. The Barys reported their daughter missing to Columbus, Ohio, police July 19, 2009, then tracked her down in Orlando.

Before her case was moved from Florida to Ohio, court documents linked a mosque near the family's home to allegations of terrorism financing.

While in Orlando, Rifqa explained her plight in an interview with WFTV.

"If I had stayed in Ohio, I wouldn't be alive," she said. "In 150 generations in [my] family, no one has known Jesus. I am the first – imagine the honor in killing me."

She explained there is "great honor in that, because if they love Allah more than me, they have to do it. It's in the Quran."

When she turned 18, she became fully independent of her parents, and the dispute was resolved by her decision to seek permission to remain in the United States and pursue education.

Stemberger worked on Bary's case until it was moved to Ohio, and he linked the attack directly to the case.

The message said, " You got hacked due to you s**t thinking abt Great Islam. "(T)his is due to Jhon Tairy … do good and have good … **** all florida."

The image shows what appears to be images of Arabic characters.

[Editor's Note: WND is posting this image on this link. Please do not view this if the scatological text reference would offend you.]

"Rifqa's parents actively attended a mosque in Columbus that had ties to terrorists' organizations around the world. I wrote an extensive memorandum documenting this to the Florida court. Handling Rifqa's case was perhaps the most challenging and stressful thing I have ever done in my life," Stemberger wrote.

He said just days earlier, a lawyer representing Rifqa's parents sued him alleging "emotional distress" and seeking $10 million damages to his "reputation."

"In addition to all of this, last Friday a Muslim hacker somehow gained access to our FFPC website, (it appears through the server or some older code) and disabled the entire back-end controls on the site, erased most of the code, disabled the blog and left an obscene message on the events page explaining in broken English who he was and why he was hacking the site. Our web experts tell us that the seven-year-old site, which has served us well, is completely unusable and needs to be replaced," Stemberger said.

He estimated the cost of a new site, which the organization urgently needs at this point to offer counsel to voters on candidates for office in November through its voter guides, at about $20,000.