Ethiopian Friend of The Sadistically Beheaded American Photojournalist Has His Say on The BBC

 

Why do Muslims Like Beheading So Much?

The incredible spate of beheadings which are perpetrated by Islamic militants around the world had many asking the question, “Why do Muslims behead so many people?” In the modern age, there are swift and almost bloodless ways to kill, which makes the use of beheading subject to question.

Islamic terrorists continue their reign of terror over the world as they murder their way into our living rooms and television sets, iPads and offices, where we see the gruesome results of their handiwork. Hardly a person in the modern world has gone without witnessing some of the atrocities of the Islamic State or Al Qaeda-affiliated terrorists around the world.

Among their most astounding choices is the decision to brutally decapitate victims and film or photograph the deed. Many of the Islamic State terrorists have gone further and posed with the decapitated heads, distributing the images via social media. Twitter has recently started blocking some of these images, but the world has both a right and a need to see the truth.

It’s a gruesome decision, to kill by decapitation. We live in an age where there are no shortages of ways to kill. We can kill swiftly will bullets, or painlessly with drugs. Furthermore, decapitation is a messy affair with the warm blood of victims spilling everywhere as they instinctively strain against the sawing blade. It’s a lot of trouble to go through for both the killer and the victim.

So why is it happening?

First, most of the people being killed by the Islamic State and other terrorists are not killed via beheading. Shooting remains the most common form of execution, and the Islamic State is filming these executions, publicizing their handiwork. A large number of people are also killed by various means including suicide bombings. Exposure to the elements and live burial have been alleged in a few cases. However, the Islamic State and other terrorists are making a spectacle of beheadings in particular.

We are dealing with terrorism and the point of terrorism is spectacle. It’s a way for those who feel disenfranchised to get their message noticed around the world. Historically terrorists hijacked airliners, performed car bombings, and suicide bombings. Within the past decade, beheading has become a way for terrorists to force their message back into the public spotlight.

The change in tactics is required because car bombings and suicide bombings have become cliche. They’re so commonplace the media has stopped reporting on them in any detail. As for airliners, they’ve become very difficult to hijack so such deeds have become rare.

However, beheading has a gruesome allure that practically compels people to watch. The viewing of an execution or a killing has an illicit allure to people and even in a society steeped in violent media on the television and in computer games, nothing beats the real thing. It’s a gruesome critique of our modern civilization that footage showing the horror of death in graphic detail is widely consumed.

This plays into the hands of the terrorists who want to propagate their message, however it also works against them. Instead of building sympathy it spreads fear and people do not always fly in the face of fear, sometimes they fight.

Indeed, beheadings of Americans by Al Qaeda have sparked major campaigns to find and kill or arrest those responsible for such deeds.

Yet this fact does not answer the question entirely. Muslims also behead because they believe they have a mandate to do so, granted by the Quran.

Several scriptural passages in the Quran mention decapitation of those captured in battle or as a punishment for alleged crimes. Historically, beheading has been widely employed by Islamic nations, including the Ottoman Empire which used the penalty to great effect throughout the centuries.

In 1480, Muslim raiders beheaded an entire village of 800 Italians after they refused to convert to Islam. The site of their mass execution in Otranto, Italy remains important to the Catholic Church.

The terrorists who are carrying out these executions prefer beheading because the act itself has precedent in Islamic tradition.

Islamic apologists will argue that the act of beheading does not have sanction in the Quran, and that the killing of “infidels” has no place in modern Islam. However, there is no question that today’s terrorists would differ with these apologists and as far as the world is concerned, the knife is just the way to send the most prominent infidels to their doom.

Even more gruesome, the manner in which victims are beheaded is also deliberate. While the Ottomans and the Saudis used a single stroke of the sword, the terrorists posing for their 15 minutes of fame prefer to use a small knife, sawing at the necks of their victims. This takes longer, usually just under a minute, and it’s far more intimate than using a sword.

This is another deliberate choice and it underscores the brutal revelry of the Islamic State and other terrorists. These people prefer to embrace their role in killing, and even seem to relish it. Few things could be more horrifyingly evil. While it is bad enough to kill, we may be able to relate, however tenuously, to the reluctant killer who although misguided, commits the deed out of a feeling of existential necessity. We afford this level of respect to our enemies in war, for example.

However these are not reluctant killers. These are not people endowed with the same conscience that most others possess. Whereas we could never imagine ourselves committing such an act of brutality, they cannot imagine themselves doing anything less. The proof is in the photos they take afterwards, posing with the heads in photos and captioning their tweets with crude jokes.

So terrorists behead people because they want the attention it brings, because they believe they have a mandate to use that method, and because some of them actually relish the act of intimate murder.

It will be difficult to argue that a greater, more sadistic evil that this exists amongst men.

Source (WARNING GRAPHIC, RAW IMAGES)

• We know all too much about the cruelty of Isis – but all too little about who they are

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Persecution: Who Will Stand Up For The Christians?

WHY is the world silent while Christians are being slaughtered in the Middle East and Africa? In Europe and in the United States, we have witnessed demonstrations over the tragic deaths of Palestinians who have been used as human shields by Hamas, the terrorist organization that controls Gaza. The United Nations has held inquiries and focuses its anger on Israel for defending itself against that same terrorist organization. But the barbarous slaughter of thousands upon thousands of Christians is met with relative indifference. 

The Middle East and parts of central Africa are losing entire Christian communities that have lived in peace for centuries. The terrorist group Boko Haram has kidnapped and killed hundreds of Christians this year — ravaging the predominantly Christian town of Gwoza, in Borno State in northeastern Nigeria, two weeks ago. Half a million Christian Arabs have been driven out of Syria during the three-plus years of civil war there. Christians have been persecuted and killed in countries from Lebanon to Sudan.

Historians may look back at this period and wonder if people had lost their bearings. Few reporters have traveled to Iraq to bear witness to the Nazi-like wave of terror that is rolling across that country. The United Nations has been mostly mum. World leaders seem to be consumed with other matters in this strange summer of 2014. There are no flotillas traveling to Syria or Iraq. And the beautiful celebrities and aging rock stars — why doesn’t the slaughter of Christians seem to activate their social antennas?

President Obama should be commended for ordering airstrikes to save tens of thousands of Yazidis, who follow an ancient religion and have been stranded on a mountain in northern Iraq, besieged by Sunni Muslim militants. But sadly, airstrikes alone are not enough to stop this grotesque wave of terrorism.

The Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) is not a loose coalition of jihadist groups, but a real military force that has managed to take over much of Iraq with a successful business model that rivals its coldblooded spearhead of death. It uses money from banks and gold shops it has captured, along with control of oil resources and old-fashioned extortion, to finance its killing machine, making it perhaps the wealthiest Islamist terrorist group in the world. But where it truly excels is in its carnage, rivaling the death orgies of the Middle Ages. It has ruthlessly targeted Shiites, Kurds and Christians.

“They actually beheaded children and put their heads on a stick” a Chaldean-American businessman named Mark Arabo told CNN, describing a scene in a Mosul park. “More children are getting beheaded, mothers are getting raped and killed, and fathers are being hung.”

This week, 200,000 Aramaeans fled their ancestral homeland around Nineveh, having already escaped Mosul.

The general indifference to ISIS, with its mass executions of Christians and its deadly preoccupation with Israel, isn’t just wrong; it’s obscene.

In a speech before thousands of Christians in Budapest in June, I made a solemn promise that just as I will not be silent in the face of the growing threat of anti-Semitism in Europe and in the Middle East, I will not be indifferent to Christian suffering. Historically, it has almost always been the other way around: Jews have all too often been the persecuted minority. But Israel has been among the first countries to aid Christians in South Sudan. Christians can openly practice their religion in Israel, unlike in much of the Middle East.

This bond between Jews and Christians makes complete sense. We share much more than most religions. We read the same Bible, and share a moral and ethical core. Now, sadly, we share a kind of suffering: Christians are dying because of their beliefs, because they are defenseless and because the world is indifferent to their suffering.

Good people must join together and stop this revolting wave of violence. It’s not as if we are powerless. I write this as a citizen of the strongest military power on earth. I write this as a Jewish leader who cares about my Christian brothers and sisters.

The Jewish people understand all too well what can happen when the world is silent. This campaign of death must be stopped.

Ronald S. Lauder is the president of the World Jewish Congress.

Source

Is Barack Hussein Obama an Islamist?

Rick Wiles of Trunews.com asks retired Colonel Allen West his opinion about Mr. Obama’s pro-Muslim foreign policies.

“The United States and The European Union have sever economic sanctions on Russia, but we don’t have any sanction on Qatar…I don’t see Mr. Putin beheading people, sanctions had to be on Qatar?”

“We should cut off all diplomatic relations with Qatar and Turkey”

Archbishop of Mosul: “Your Liberal and Democratic Principles Are Worth Nothing Here”

“Our sufferings today are the prelude of those you, Europeans and Western Christians, will also suffer in the near future,” says Amel Nona, 47, Chaldean archbishop of Mosul exiled in Erbil. The message is unequivocal: the only way to end the Christian exodus from the places that witnessed its origins in the pre-Islamic age is to respond to violence with violence, to force with force. Nona is a wounded, pain-stricken man, but not resigned.

“I lost my diocese. The physical setting of my apostolate has been occupied by Islamic radicals who want us converted or dead. But my community is still alive.” He is very glad to meet Western media. “Please, try to understand us,” he exclaims. “Your liberal and democratic principles are worth nothing here. You must consider again our reality in the Middle East, because you are welcoming in your countries an ever growing number of Muslims. Also you are in danger. You must take strong and courageous decisions, even at the cost of contradicting your principles. You think all men are equal,” Archbishop Amel Nona continues, “but that is not true: Islam does not say that all men are equal. Your values are not their values. If you do not understand this soon enough, you will become the victims of the enemy you have welcomed in your home.”

From an original interview by Lorenzo Cremonesi, Corriere della Sera

We have before us the present foreign-policy obsessions – Gaza, Syria, Iraq and Iran. Egypt, Pakistan and Afghanistan seem to come and go. We hear mutterings of Yemen and Qatar. Saudi Arabia rarely hits the radar, unless they’re flogging women or hanging gays. We flit about from one to the other trying to negotiate ‘peace’ while selling them missiles, bombs and bullets. Incredibly, we are about to ally ourselves with Shia Iran in order to defeat the greater evil of the Sunni Islamic State. This is profoundly misguided. Our enemies enemy is still our enemy.

The West must heed the stark warning of Archbishop Amel Nona, and do so before it is too late. Mosul has fallen: his warning is that Toulouse, Brussels or Liege might be next. For now, the battleground is fixed in the Middle East. But Jihadi-Salfist theatres of war recognise no state borders, and they have no time at all for democracy, diplomacy, or “moderate” notions of Islam which is not “proper” or “true” Islam. These fanatics find our governments weak and compliant; our liberal and democratic principles quite conducive to their political objectives; our Christianity favourably disposed to a multi-faith ecumenical love-in.

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