Sudden Jihadi Syndrome

The number of these domestic "events" has been growing, but there has been a reluctance to view them all together as a common thread.

Each instead is proclaimed loudly and insistently to be completely random and related to nothing.

But it's getting harder to deny.

Witness this interesting list of domestic islamic terrorism (but carefully undefined as such in the media) put together by a commenter here:

Unfortunately, the US and Europe are not only confronted by a still undefeated al-Qaeda, but by an increasing number of Muslims in their own populations who - inspired and religiously agitated by bin Laden - are prepared to pick up arms and spend their lives to act on that inspiration...

• A 30-year-old Muslim man, Naveed Afzal Haq, who went on a shooting rampage at a Jewish community center in Seattle, announcing "I'm a Muslim-American; I'm angry at Israel."

• An Egyptian national, Hesham Mohamed Hadayet, who shot two and wounded three at an Israeli airline ticket counter at LAX.

• A bearded 21-year-old student, Joel Hinrichs, who blew himself up with a backpack filled with TATP (the explosive of choice in the Mideast) outside a packed Oklahoma University football stadium not long after he started attending the local mosque.

• A 23-year-old student, Mohammed Ali Alayed, who slashed the throat of his Jewish friend in Houston after apparently undergoing a religious awakening (he went to a local mosque afterward).

• The D.C. snipers — John Muhammad and Lee Malvo, both black Muslim converts — who picked off 13 people in the suburbs around the Beltway as part of what Muhammad described as a "prolonged terror campaign against America" around the first anniversary of 9/11, which he had praised.

• Omeed Aziz Popal of Fremont, Calif., who police said hit and killed a bicyclist there then took his SUV on a hit-and-run spree in San Francisco, mowing down pedestrians at crosswalks and on sidewalks before police caught up with him, whereupon the Muslim called himself a "terrorist."

• A 22-year-old Muslim, Ismail Yassin Mohamed, who stole a car in Minneapolis and rammed it into other cars before stealing a van and doing the same, injuring drivers and pedestrians, while repeatedly yelling, "Die, die, die, kill, kill, kill" — all, he said, on orders from "Allah."

• A 22-year-old Iranian honors student, Mohammed Reza Taheri-azar, who deliberately rammed his SUV into a crowd at the University of North Carolina to "punish the government of the United States" for invading Iraq and other Muslim nations.

Add to that list the following recent curious and highly suspicious and suggestive events from the last few days.

First,

NASHVILLE, Tenn. — A local cab driver [named Ibrihim Ahmed] allegedly tried to run over two customers after a fight over religion became heated.

The incident happened early Sunday morning on the Vanderbilt campus and left one man hospitalized and a cab driver arrested, said police.

Two students visiting from Ohio were coming from a bar downtown when they got into an argument with their driver over religion, said police. After they paid the driver he allegedly ran them down in a parking lot.

Second, with motive still unclear,

FBI agent Patrick Kiernan declared to reporters Wednesday he had no reason to believe the random, dispassionately executed murder of five people by 18-year-old Bosnian Muslim immigrant Sulejman Talovic Monday night had anything to do with Islamic terrorism, calling it “just unexplainable.”

But Salt Lake Police spokeswoman Robin Snyder told WND the FBI is still working with her department on the case, and investigators continue to explore the terrorism angle.

And then this revelation about a 1997 shooting in the Empire State Building:

GAZA CITY - Ali Abu Kamal’s relatives say they are tired of lying about why the Palestinian opened fire on the observation deck of Empire State Building, killing a tourist and injuring six other people before committing suicide.

Kamal’s widow insisted after the shooting spree that the attack was not politically motivated. She said that her husband had become suicidal after losing $300,000 in a business venture.

But in a stunning admission, Kamal’s 48-year-old daughter Linda told the Daily News that her dad wanted to punish the U.S. for supporting Israel - and revealed her mom’s 1997 account was a cover story crafted by the Palestinian Authority.

Wake up!

It's like children's teasing in which someone takes your arm and by swinging it makes your hand slap yourself, all the while saying, "I'm not hitting you; why are you hitting yourself?"

Except it's deadly.

Here are islamic terrorists killing us, all the while saying "islam is not attacking you!"

That is designed to make it difficult for us to respond.

See through the deception!

The list speaks for itself.

Dress-up Game

Dress the Prophet, it's fun!

Blunting the Senses

Earlier I asked why it is we overlook obviously gross problems in the islamic moral system. The short answer is that the consequences of having to face this reality are uncomfortable.

Nobody wants to "judge." Postmodernist though has made judgement obsolete and socially unacceptable. I recall hearing a woman from the audience proclaim, with a straight face, on a CNN talk show in the 9/10 era, with respect to Gary Condit (remember him?), that we should move on because "Jesus wasn't judgemental!"

Never mind all that about

And He shall come again in Glory
to judge the Living and the Dead,
and His Kingdom shall have no end.

Apparently Jesus came to tell us, "If it feels good, do it!" according to today's heretical understanding.

If one must judge, preferably only Dead White Males can be the targets (I recall the movement on college campuses in the late 80s to rework the traditional "canon" to cut our culture off at the roots), or living ones if necessary. But certainly not the Third World Brown Man!

Which is why the LA Times suggests we will never see movies about the heroism in the GWOT from Hollywood, because it would require showing the white man (and woman!) defeating the brown man.

But I digress.

This essayist has a great take on it, first with Moral Tourism:

As the conversation continued, I was emphatically informed that to regard one set of cultural values as preferable to another was “racist” and “oppressive.” Indeed, even the attempt to make any such determination was itself a heinous act. I was further assailed with a list of examples of “Western arrogance, decadence, irreverence, and downright nastiness.” And I was reminded that, above all, I “must respect deeply held beliefs.” When I asked if this respect for deeply held beliefs extended to white supremacists, cannibals and ultra-conservative Republicans, a deafening silence ensued.

After this awkward pause, the conversation rumbled on. At some point, I made reference to migration and the marked tendency of families to move from Islamic societies to secular ones, and not the other way round. “This seems rather important,” I suggested. “If you want to evaluate which society is preferred to another by any given group, migration patterns are an obvious yardstick to use. Broadly speaking, people don't relocate their families to cultures they find wholly inferior to their own.” Alas, this fairly self-evident suggestion did not meet with approval. No rebuttal was forthcoming, but the litany of Western wickedness resumed, more loudly than before.
...
During her tirade against ‘muscular liberals’, Bunting argued that Enlightenment values should be “reworked” (in ways that were, mysteriously, never specified), then said: “One of our biggest challenges is how we learn to live in proximity to difference – different skin colours, different beliefs, different ways of life. How do we talk peacefully with people with whom we might violently disagree?” This sentiment echoes those of Ken Livingstone’s race advisor, Lee Jasper, who maintains that “you have to treat people differently to treat them equally.”

But judging by Bunting’s own assertions, and the claims of those who share her views, perhaps we should assume that “reworking” Enlightenment values means pretending they don’t exist in certain kinds of company. Perhaps we should pretend we don’t disagree at all - as demonstrated by Bunting’s own flattering interview with an Islamist cleric who advocates suicide bombing, the murder of apostates and the stoning of homosexuals. Though one can’t help wondering what would have happened if Ms Bunting had actually dared to challenge Qaradawi’s prejudices with any rigour. How would he have reacted? And what would this tell her – and us – about the limits of moral relativism?

Perhaps we should assume that when faced with bullies and bigots we should say nothing, do nothing, and pretend everything is fine. Though quite how that polite little lie will help the victims of bullying and bigotry isn't entirely clear. And one has to raise an eyebrow at those who will happily bask in the advantages of values that they refuse to defend and pointedly disdain for the sake of appearance. But such is the nature of cultural and moral equivalence, and those who espouse it.

Great stuff, read it all.

And further reflections follow here, on the consequences:

Blunting the Senses in the Name of Fairness

The size of an extremist ‘fringe’ and its relationship to mainstream conceptions of the faith have to be considered as they actually are, not as one might wish, or assume. When given a moment’s thought, all fundamentalisms are not in fact equivalent in their particulars, or the consequences thereof.
...
By way of further illustration, Rosie O’Donnell was happy to assert that, "radical Christianity is just as threatening as radical Islam in a country like America." But while red-faced evangelists may say, for instance, that gay people are wicked, damned to hellfire, etc, I don’t know of any internationally renowned Christian leaders who are calling for the imprisonment and killing of gay people. Unlike the supposedly “moderate” Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, who insists that gay men and lesbians should be “killed in the worst manner possible.” Not condemned, ‘corrected’, prayed for, or pitied, or any of the usual nonsense spouted by Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson et al; but murdered - as brutally as possible.

However studiously such distinctions are overlooked, this one in particular strikes me as significant. Especially considering the readiness with which some will enact Sistani’s wisdom - as illustrated by Rexhep Idrizi, a chairman of Australia’s Board of Imams who thinks beheading gay people is in order, and whose son is currently serving a four-year jail sentence for attacking a cyclist with a machete. Given the number of believers who listen very carefully to Sistani, both in Iraq and beyond, it would be unwise for gay Iraqis to treat the cleric’s fatwas as irrelevant nonsense. And while mad Methodists or Creationists can be laughed at with relative impunity, sadistic bigots like Sistani are mysteriously exempt from comparable scorn in the “progressive” left-leaning media.
...
The claim of alleged ‘humiliation’ touches on a central conceit in many discussions of this kind, whereby religious freedom is presumed to entail sparing believers any hint that others do not share their beliefs, and indeed may find them ludicrous. (There is, apparently, no corresponding obligation for believers to embrace ideas that are not clearly risible, monstrous or disgusting.) When given a moment’s thought, this protectionist claim is decidedly fascistic in its practical implications. If believers wish to be insulated from any differing opinion, and even statements of fact, they would have to create a closed religious order, somewhere atop a mountain where reality can to some extent be avoided.

Barack Not Black?

Colbert has a comedy show that parodies right-wing infotainment, but in this case, his skewering actually hits its target a little too accurately!

Hilarious.

Need I Say More?

Just following the holy example of their ideal and holiest man, the child-raping mohammed with his young bride Aisha:

4-yr-old Pakistani girl marries 45-yr-old

The minor, Sumaira, was given in marriage to the middle-aged man, Mahboob Ahmed, as a punishment because the girl’s maternal uncle, Mohammad Farooq, had eloped with the adult niece of the bridegroom, police said.

The punchayat imposed a fine of 150,000 rupees (2,500 dollars) on Farooq and ordered him to give a young girl from his family to Mahboob, police spokesman Malik Ramazan told AFP.

The bizarre marriage took place last month on the orders of a Punchayat or tribal council in northwestern Dera Ismail Khan town but police acted only last week after rights activist raised the alarm.

She is just a piece of property, like a slave, to her own "family."

It is a sick and twisted "culture."

Of course, there are attempts to insert doubt over the reported age (6) of Aisha at marriage, but they are all indirect arguments, and the bottom line is the respected and authoritative verses are clear:

A significant majority of Muslims respect the authority of the hadith, the source of much Islamic law (sharia) and therefore accept the hadith collected by Bukhari which quote Aisha as saying that she was nine years old when her marriage was consummated.

And the proof is in the pudding, isn't it?

The fact is, their belief in that leads them to continue the practice, so the arguments that someone from the far past can't be judged on today's standards flounders completely, since it is taken as an example to follow to this very day!

Can't have it both ways.

So what are we to think of people (i.e. all non-apostate muslims) who, today, knowing the life of mohammed, do not reject him as an evil man, but actually live their lives dedicated to following his teachings and examples?

How is that excused?