Customer Reviews

Guarding the Secrets: Palestinian Terrorism and a Father's Murder of His Too-American Daughter

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In November 1989 in St. Louis, the FBI inadvertently tape recorded the entire episode of a teenage girl's being killed by her Palestinian father and Brazilian mother (the Feds were looking for evidence of terrorism, which they also found). In a ghastly eight-minute sequence, Zein Isa stabbed his daughter Palestina thirteen times with a butcher's knife as his wife held the girl down and responded to Palestina's pleas for help with a brutal "Shut up!" The killing ends with Zein screaming "Die! Die quickly! Die quickly! . . . Quiet, little one! Die, my daughter, die!" By this time, she is dead.

Harris, a St. Louis television reporter, has done admirable spade work going through the court transcripts and interviewing everyone connected to the case in an attempt to piece together the interlocking stories of family murder and active support of Abu Nidal's terrorist organization. In addition, she successfully conjures up the small and exceedingly unpleasant world of Zein Isa and his family of rabid anti-Americans living right in the American heartland. The murder culminates their lives of frustration, greed, and vulgarity. Unfortunately, Harris spent more effort digging up information than she did writing the book; so the more-than-casual reader must read and reread its pages to piece together the sequence of events and the scope of the Isa family's involvement with Abu Nidal. Doing so repays the effort, however, for Harris has compiled a treasure trove of materials on two usually elusive subjects.

Middle East Quarterly, September 1995

This book starkly frames the force of hatred which overtook New York City and the world with the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. It relates specifically to Zein Isa's November 1989 murder of his daughter, Palestina. The West Bank immigrant and his Brazilian wife co-conspired in the brutal St. Louis murder of their teenage daughter, whose friendships they believed had endangered their terrorist plans.

In their search for terrorists, the Federal Bureau of Investigation inadvertently taped the actual killing. Zein Isa and his wife were sentenced to death.

The book reveals much about the village life in the West Bank, where most families, according to Maria Zein, belong to radical military groups whose ultimate goal is to destroy Israel. Many West Bank residents are actually "refugees from other countries." According Maria Zein's account, her husband knew "men from Syria, Libya, Kuwait, Saudi." Maria Zein told the author that her husband had traveled from the West Bank village of Beitin, to Jordan, Syria, Libya and Bolivia. He lived undetected for years in the US, and also claimed to have lived in Europe.

The book reveals twisted morals, which condone murder for the sake of family honor. It unmasks intense hatred that evolved into conspiracies to slaughter Jews, blow up the Israeli embassy in Washington and to murder Tina because she posed a threat to these plans.

It also exposes the frighteningly broad inroads that the Abu Nidal terrorists have made into American cities and life. Alyssa A. Lappen

This true-crime story is written in the sensationalistic fashion typical of the genre. It grabs your attention right from the beginning and doesn't let go.
The author describes the irony of Tina Isa's life: to any otherAmerican family she would have been cherished as a charming, friendly, hard-working teen...
The author also describes the network of Palestinian terrorist groups living in the U.S. and the role they might have played... This story is gripping and very informative because the author did a lot of research and provides so much background information about the Palestinian culture, the lives of generations of the Isa family, the Abu Nidal terrorist organization and more.
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Ellen Harris' GUARDING THE SECRETS is the well researched true crime saga of a St. Louis Palestinian couple, Zein and Maria Isa, who savagely murdered their daughter in their apartment. The main reason for the murder was that the daughter, 17 year old Palestina, had become too Americanized, enjoyed a normal 17 year old girl's American life, and refused to be the family Cinderella. Tina was expected to go to school, work in the family's ghetto corner food store, and go home. And though she did those things, she also had a life. She played sports at Roosevelt High, was an honor student, and was the kind of girl that anyone but ignorant parents who demanded total obedience to their anachronistic old world customs would love to have. But Tina had a black boyfriend, which drove Zein wild, and she then committed her final disobedient act. She got a job at a fast food restaurant without telling her parents, who would have forbidden it, and got home from work at 11:30, thereby once again showing disregard for Zein's authority over the women in his household. Amazingly, the murder was encouraged and later applauded by the Isa's extended family including Tina's sisters.
But there may have been another reason for the Isa family and their acquaintances to have wanted her dead, and the book explores this angle as well.

Besides the story of the crime itself, Harris presents extensive - and I mean extensive - and wonderfully interesting information about Palestinian history and culture, and the intertwined theme of Palestinian terrorism is always present and is intimately connected to the crime itself.

Harris is a good if not exceptional writer, and the effort and research that went into GTS is impressive. She has tried to write a serious and fast paced book, and she has succeeded. I loved reading it and would have easily given it 5 stars had not Harris so breathlessly - a la Ann Rule - provided us with so many personal descriptions of so many cops and lawyers. And in the case of Lt. Harry Hegger, she gushes at such length and with such passion that it seemed for a while there that she may have been entertaining dreams of having an Heggerian love child. Obviously I feel that hero worship of law enforcement and court officials - as opposed to a discussion of their roles in the story - seriously detracts from any work of true crime. But I completely loved the rest of it, and Harris' work in explaining Palestinian culture both in the Middle East and in the United States is outstanding.
Almost, but not quite, 5 stars.

In the wake of the tradegy of 9/11 this book is eye-opening. It goes into detail about how this family/group operated here right under our noses.

Read this book to shed light on the fact that, yes, some cultures are simply less moral than others in truly horrific ways.

This was such a horrible story of Palestinian parents who murdered there daughter. They called it all in the name of Honor for she was becoming to American. What it's called is murder. The story was not written very well though. The author was all over the place and did not keep the story in one place.

The show forensic files has an episode on this. It gets to the point with out traveling all over the place as the book did.If your curious about the story wait for it to come on forensic files or look it up on line. There is tons of information on line about this tragic story of the lovely , kind innocent girl who did not deserve to die.