The story behind the article I will be covering today started nearly 12 years ago. That may make you wonder how this could be a current event at all but it is an issue that has been on going and is still current. 12 years ago Michael Shannon saw his two young sons, 10 months old and 4 years old, for the last time until he was shown a video of them in Egypt by CNN correspondents this year. This is a story of disputes, custody battles, deception, foreign policy and ultimately kidnapping.
Micheal Shannon was once married to Nermeen Khalifa, the mother of his two boys. They were divorced in by 2001 on terms that were not specified in the article but there was a history of domestic disputes between the two where Nermeen was accused of assault. Also she had lost custody of her children and Micheal had sole custody. The children were not allowed to leave the country let alone the state without their father's consent. Their mother and grandmother, Nermeen's mother, created a scheme to get Micheal to allow his children to spend a weekend in New York with their mother for a weekend. Once there the two women followed through with their plan and retrieved new passports for the children and took them to Egypt where the grandmother lives and the mother is originally from. In Egypt there are limited parental rights for US parents. So regardless of the laws enforced in the US to protect the boys from their mother their father has now become hopeless in getting his boys back home.
He has been fighting for 12 years to get custody of his two boys and because of the laws in Egypt he is failing miserably. He has questioned how the US could allow this to happen to his family and 22 other families in similar cases and not do anything about it. But on top of taking no action they are also provide aid and support to this country. The question that arises from this, is it wrong for america to neglect 22 children for the sake of peace with Egypt? Can families trust their government to help them? What will it take for there to be justice? or Is the relationship with Egypt more important than these families?
http://www.cnn.com/2013/04/12/world/kidnapped-to-egypt/index.html?eref=rss_mostpopular
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