Denial is the first stage of coming to terms with the unthinkable.
In Westgate, a Kenyan mall oriented toward expats, terrorists separated Muslims from non-Muslims before killing them. The Muslims were allowed to go free if they could recite a Muslim prayer.
During the attack, Al Shabaab’s Arabic Twitter account quoted the Koran, “Plant firmly our feet and give us victory over (Al-Kafireen) the disbelieving people.” (Koran 2:250). The Kuffar, the non-Muslims of Westgate, included small children.
“I don’t understand why you would shoot a five-year-old child,” one of the survivors said. But the five-year-old was not a Muslim.
Moments like these put the Clash of Civilizations into bloody context. This isn’t abstract politics. It’s not about economics, the environment or foreign policy. It’s about a worldview in which a five-year-old who can’t recite the Islamic confession of faith deserves to be killed.
The crime is not being a Muslim.
Or as Al Shabaab put it on Twitter, “Only Kuffar were singled out for this attack. All Muslims inside #Westgate were escorted out by the Mujahideen (Islamic Holy Warriors) before beginning the attack.”
Not getting the message, UK Prime Minister David Cameron declared, “These appalling terrorist attacks that take place where the perpetrators claim they do it in the name of a religion – they don’t.”
“They do it in the name of terror, violence and extremism and their warped view of the world,” he elaborated. “They don’t represent Islam or Muslims in Britain or anywhere else in the world.”
Considering the number of British Muslims who have joined Al Shabaab or support it financially, including reportedly at least one of the attackers, that is not the case.
Cameron, hardly an expert theologian even on his own religion, describing himself as a “committed,” but “vaguely practicing” Christian, is in no position to expostulate on Islamic theology. But that hasn’t stopped him before.
When a British soldier was beheaded in London, Cameron called it “a betrayal of Islam and of the Muslim communities who give so much to our country.” Demonstrating again his utter ignorance, he added, “There is nothing in Islam that justifies this truly dreadful act.”
The attackers who had quoted the Koran during their butchery clearly disagreed. But every politician becomes an instant expert on Islam when it comes to giving it a clean bill of health after every attack.
Challenged on the Islamist orientation of the Syrian rebels, Senator McCain claimed that Allahu Akbar was just like “Thank God.” Allahu Akbar originates from a Hadith describing Mohammed’s attack on a Jewish settlement; a chain of atrocities culminating in the Muslim ethnic cleansing of Jews and Christians from what is today Saudi Arabia.
The Syrian rebels screaming Allahu Akbar are living up to its original use as a battle cry by Mohammed in the Khaybar Massacre. Syria is low on Jews, so the Allahu Akbarers are ethnically cleansing Christians from places like Homs using weapons supplied to them by the CIA.
It’s an authentic war crime overseen by John Kerry, who had built his political career on falsely accusing American soldiers in Vietnam of having “cut off ears, cut off heads… blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan.”
Now Kerry is helping run guns to the Genghis Khans who cry Allahu Akbar before cutting off a head. And they don’t mean “Thank God.” They mean Allah is superior to your god because he enables me to cut off your head.
In July, Al Shabaab terrorists burst into the African Inland Church in Kenya and opened fire. Among the eleven dead was a nine-year-old boy. Twelve other children were injured.
“The Mujahideen punished with their hands those believing and worshipping other than Allah,” Sheikh Hassan Takar, an Al Shabaab leader, explained.
In Nigeria, Boko Haram, another Al Qaeda linked group that cooperates with Al Shabaab, explained its motivations after the simultaneous bombings of three churches. The first of these bombings had targeted the children’s section of a church on Father’s Day.
“Today Almighty Allah has given us victory against Christian Churches in Kaduna and Zaria which led to the deaths of many Christians.” The Boko Haram spokesman added that Allah had commanded Muslims to kill Christians and Jews citing the Koran.
“Fight against those who (1) believe not in Allah, (2) nor in the Last Day, (3) nor forbid that which has been forbidden by Allah and His Messenger (4) and those who acknowledge not the religion of truth (i.e. Islam) among the people of the Scripture (Jews and Christians), until they pay the Jizyah with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued.”
(Koran 9:29 – the Hilali-Khan translation which is sponsored and distributed by the Saudi government)
The message of the Koran here is not subtle. Accept Islamic law and Muslim rule or die.
It’s not an artifact of a previous savage era that Muslims have left behind. The dead bodies in Kenya and Nigeria make that all too clear. As do the dead bodies in Syria, Egypt and Pakistan. And those murdered in the United Kingdom and the United States.
Cameron and every Western leader can insist that there is nothing in Islam that justifies violence, but Muslims know better. A quarter of British Muslims were willing to endorse the Al Qaeda 7/7 bombings in the UK where such opinions are all but illegal. What then is the true number?
The true number is much too frightening. That’s why denial is easier.
When Cameron wrote before his election that “it is mainstream Britain which needs to integrate more with the British Asian way of life, not the other way around”, he was, in his own way, getting at the same message as that of the terrorists.
Islam is not going to integrate into the UK. So the UK must integrate into Islam.
That same message was behind the election of Barack Hussein Obama to handle our foreign affairs. When he said that America is one of the world’s largest Muslim countries, he was demonstrating our willingness to integrate into the Islamosphere.
Islam in its most compact form is best represented by Aslim Taslam; “Accept the Religion of Peace and You Will Have Peace.” It was the offer that Mohammed made to the Jews before he killed them. It was the offer he made to Byzantium.
After September 11, Osama bin Laden wrote a letter to the American people. “In the Name of Allah,” it began. Explaining what he wanted, “The first thing that we are calling you to is Islam,” he wrote.
America and Europe have accepted Mohammed and Osama bin Laden’s call. Islam is praised incessantly. Its mosques have a special status, its Mohammedan icons are sacred and its Korans are protected by distortions of the law.
But none of that will be enough.
Ask the five-year-old murdered at Westgate. To believe that anything short of total and absolute submission will suffice is denial. And to hope that even that will be enough is wishful thinking.
At the Khaybar Massacre and the birth of the battle cry Allahu Akbar, Mohammed’s cousin asked why he meant to massacre the Jews. “Fight with them until they bear testimony to the fact that there is no god but Allah and Mohammed is his Messenger,” he replied.
That message in one form or another permeates Islam. It is the essence of the Jihad.
The five-year-old at Westgate, like the Jews of Khaybar, like the 3,000 dead on September 11 wouldn’t or couldn’t testify to that. So they were murdered for the glory of Islam and in the name of Islam.