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Stop me if you’ve heard this story before.
A Muslim convert who recently became very religious beheads a woman while reportedly shouting Islamic phrases. The authorities rush to convince everyone in sight that it has nothing to do with Islam.
The bios of both men are fairly similar to the beheaders of British soldier Lee Rigby. The perpetrators were Nigerian converts to Islam. Alton Nolen was a black convert to Islam. They had a history of criminal behavior followed by a conversion to Islam and the inevitable bloody ending.
On his Facebook page, Nolen posted, “Sharia law is coming!!!” The killers of Lee Rigby had chanted for Sharia law in the streets of London. That is the same Sharia law of stonings and beheadings.
It is the law of the Koran which states, “When you meet the unbelievers in Jihad smite at their necks until you have slaughtered many of them.” (Koran 47:4)
Or as Nolen quoted after posting a gory beheading photo on his Facebook page, “Thus do we find the clear precedent that explains the peculiar penchant of Islamic terrorists to behead their victims: it is merely another precedent bestowed by their Prophet.”
The quote underneath the beheading photo backed that up, “I will instill terror into the hearts of the unbelievers: smite ye above their necks and smite all their finger-tips off of them.”(Quran 8:9-13)
An unbeliever is anyone who isn’t a Muslim.
This latest “Nothing to do with Islam” atrocity follows the Islamic State’s beheading of two Americans. These acts were admired by an Oklahoma City nursing home worker who was arrested for threatening a female co-worker with an ISIS style beheading on account of her being a Christian.
Again, nothing to do with Islam. Much like the Islamic State beheadings which we have been told also have nothing to do with Islam.
This sort of “Nothing to do with Islam” beheading pops up now and again.
A decade ago Ariel Selloul was nearly decapitated in Texas by Mohammed Ali Alayed. Mo had recently gotten religion and become a devout Muslim. His victim was Jewish. Before Mohammed got serious about Islam, the two men had been friends.
Again, it had nothing to do with Islam. At least that’s what the authorities said.
Around the same time a Jewish disc jockey was murdered in Paris by a Muslim friend who announced, “I killed a Jew, I will go to paradise. Allah made me do it.”
The Muslim killer, Adel Amastaibou, had threatened a Rabbi and a pregnant Jewish woman before. Instead the authorities decided that he was mentally ill.
Nothing to do with Islam. Not a thing.
Islam4UK Spokesman Anjem Choudary (C) leaves a press conference in Millbank Studios on January 12, 2010 in London, England. Government Set To Ban Islamist Group That Planned Wootton Bassett March
And so we have a rash of mysterious beheadings and vicious stabbings that we know nothing about except that they have nothing to do with Islam. The more they obviously seem to have something to do with Islam, the more it has to be denied that they had anything to do with Islam.
Alton and Adel, Mohammed, Mujahid and Ismail, the latter two being the Muslim names of the Lee Rigby killers, have nothing to do with Islam. Even the Islamic State has nothing to do with Islam.
And yet Alton Nolen decided that beheading had quite a lot to do with Islam. All he had to do to figure that out was open a Koran. Expecting to convince Muslims to believe that the Koran has nothing to do with Islam will be even harder than convincing them that beheadings and the Islamic State have nothing to do with Islam.
You might as well argue that Islam has nothing to do with Islam.
The CVE programs under Barack Obama keep promising to counter the Islamic narrative on Twitter, but instead Twitter is full of ISIS Jihadists displaying severed heads as trophies and quoting the appropriate verses from the Koran.
Obama denounces ISIS as un-Islamic for beheading people while leading a coalition against them which includes Muslim countries that use beheading as an Islamic punishment. The Saudis recently beheaded a man accused of sorcery. What’s the difference between the Islamic State and the Saudis? They both have lots of oil, terrorists and a penchant for beheading people, but the Saudis have better public relations.
Maybe when the Islamic State starts funding chairs at Georgetown and UCLA, and donating to the Clinton Global Initiative, it’ll start getting better press.
The Saudis can’t possibly be un-Islamic because the establishment’s official definition of Islam comes from them. Even the idea of denying that the Islamic State is Islamic is a Saudi strategy. But if Alton Nolen is un-Islamic then ISIS is un-Islamic and if ISIS is un-Islamic then Saudi Arabia is un-Islamic. And then Islam, whose holy book contains numerous verses calling for the brutal murder of non-Muslims, must also be un-Islamic.
Perhaps then there really isn’t an Islam. Or rather there are two Islams.
One is the oriental Unitarianism of the Western imagination whose practitioners are liberals with prayer rugs. The other is a grim relentless Jihad of murderous men who chant the Koran while severing heads. This is the Islam of the Arabian imagination. It is not always what it is, but to them it is the purity of what it should be.
The convert to Islam rarely becomes a liberal with a prayer rug. To become devout is to become more certain, not less certain. And that certainty ends in Jihad. It ends in a murder commanded by Allah.
The real Islam’s symbols carry powerful meanings. The beheading is the final and ultimate meaning. By killing non-Muslims in the name of Allah, its followers become Allah, they gain the power of life and death, to kill and enslave, to rob and rape; they become the murderous masters of creation.
When they say that “Allah made me do it” what they really mean is that the part of them that wants to kill, to rob and rape, to burn and kidnap, made them do it. By submitting to Allah, the Muslim becomes Allah. When he kills, it is Allah killing. His religion is reducible to his will to kill. This is ISIS. This is Islam.
It has nothing to do with the imaginary Islam of the liberal. It has everything to do with the real Islam.
