May 27, 2013
Paul Sheehan
Sydney Morning Herald columnist
The murder of Drummer Lee Rigby by a pair of psychopaths invoking the name of Islam has galvanised Britain and gained global media attention, but what about the other 176 or so people who were murdered by Muslim psychopaths last week?
Drummer Rigby was white, English and a soldier, so the gory, bizarre and provocative manner of his death garnered headlines around the world, but hundreds of families, mostly Muslim, are also in mourning because of the actions of psychopaths using Islam to justify their bloodlust.
One of the men charged with the murder of Rigby, Michael Adebolajo, 28, was a thug long before he gravitated to Muslim fundamentalism. At high school he cultivated a gangsta persona, got into drugs, then armed robbery, and became known for putting a knife to people's throats and stealing their phones and money. . . .
It is instructive to consider the reaction to the murder from one of the clerics that Adebolajo followed, Omar Bakri Mohammed.
He was banned from Britain, and lives in Lebanon, after being caught on film supporting jihad against the West and stating that decapitating enemies of Islam was permitted by Islam. When The Independent contacted Bakri Mohammed, he predictably rationalised the savagery: ''I saw the film and we could see that he [Adebolajo] was being very courageous. Under Islam this can be justified. He was not targeting civilians, he was taking on a military man in an operation. To people around here he is a hero for what he has done.''
There is no shortage of such heroes in the Muslim world, nor a shortage of rationalisations of violence. Thousands of Muslims, including Adebolajo, have cited the Koran to justify murder. Here is a sample from the more than 100 verses in the Koran that call Muslims to violence against the Unbelievers:
''Soon shall We cast terror into the hearts of the Unbelievers …So many Muslims have been encouraged to murder civilians by such exhortations that the rate of violent incidents perpetrated in the name of Islam is staggering, a toll that shows no sign of subsiding. The website thereligionofpeace.com, which maintains a record of terrorist acts committed in the name of Islam, has logged an astounding 20,939 terrorist acts committed in the name of Islam since the attacks of September 11, 2001. Thereligionofpeace.com keeps a monthly list of bloody incidents and during the past 30 days it records 222 incidents, in 25 different countries, including much of the Arab world and North Africa, and Britain, France, Russia, Nigeria, Thailand, the Philippines and China. (Apologists for Muslim violence claim that thereligionofpeace.com does not provide sources for its lists and thus has no credibility, which is nonsense as every incident is based on credible published reports.)
''And slay them wherever ye find them …''
''As to those who reject faith, I will punish them with terrible agony …''
''Whoso fighteth in the way of Allah, be he slain or be he victorious, on him We shall bestow a vast reward.''
''Slay the idolaters wherever you find them …''
''Fight those who believe not in Allah …''
And so on. So, too, does the body of jurisprudence which accompanies the Koran, the Hadiths, bristle with calls to jihad: ''I have been made victorious with terror …''
''And jihad will be performed continuously …''
''Kill any Jew who falls under your power.''
''Fight everyone in the way of Allah and kill those who disbelieve in Allah.''
Seventy per cent of these 222 incidents in the past month took place in four countries - Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Syria - all battlefields in the ancient religious civil war between Sunni and Shiite Muslims, a civil war more violent now than it has been for decades.
The existence of this violent sectarian schism, and the systemic repression of religious dissent throughout the Muslim world, demolish the absurd claim that Islam is ''a religion of peace''.
Most Muslims are peaceful, like most non-Muslims, but the Koran groans under the weight of its own contradictions, with entreaties to kindness co-existing with exhortations to merciless war. If the Koran were only a text of peace and mercy, tens of thousands of Muslims could not invoke its verses to engage in violence. Those who gravitate to the wrathful messages of the Koran bring their own pathologies with them, which they then cloak in zealous piety. Apologists argue that those who use the Koran to justify violence are not Islamic. And in the West there is fearfulness to trigger the belligerent victimology that extreme Muslims use to cloak intransigence, separatism and special-pleading. . . .
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