For years, many of us have described Islamist terrorists as “barbarians.” And for years, we have been attacked as “racist Islamophobes” for doing so.
What exactly is a “barbarian?”
A barbarian is someone who finds joy in inflicting pain and death. Doing so makes them laugh. Literally. Thus, culturally and psychologically, Islamist barbarians are the equivalent of Western-style sadistic, sociopathic serial killers–only the barbarians do not work alone or in secret. They work in large theological-military paramilitary gangs and they do their grisly work quite openly.
Western serial killers are hunted down and are not valorized. Groups like Al-Qaeda, the Taliban, Al-Shabab, Hamas, Boko Haram, and ISIS are considered fearless and heroic warriors, purists, religious freedom-fighters by their followers and by a strong minority– some say a majority– of Muslims world-wide who have called for Sharia law. What these terrorist groups are doing satisfies the tenets of Sharia law–a law which has not been refined, modified, or re-interpreted to render it compatible with Western concepts of human rights and jurisprudence.
By making and releasing videos, such groups wish to terrorize onlookers as well as their captives. Terror is meant to subdue any opposition.
Beheading helpless captives and then playing football with their severed heads is a sport to them. Giving severed heads to children, forcing children to watch the beheadings (so as to de-sensitize them to the suffering of others), positioning guns in the hands of five-year-old boys and photographing them as future warriors–all creates a torture-oriented and death-oriented culture. Such behaviors characterize not only ISIS but also Hamas and the Taliban.
This year, both ISIS and Boko Haram released a series of videos. Beginning in August, ISIS released four videos which showed the beheadings of four Westerners–men whom they had tortured for months or years before-hand. They beat them, water-boarded them, starved them. They probably laughed when they did this, perhaps referred to Abu-Ghraib (so tame by comparison, so exaggerated by Western media), or to Gitmo; perhaps they also referred to the waterboarding of Al-Qaeda’s Khalid Sheikh Mohammed by Americans.
Note the difference: Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was a warrior, one of the master-minds of 9/11, and the clock may have been ticking in terms of other planned terrorist attacks. All the Westerners whom ISIS tortured and beheaded were civilians: humanitarians, journalists.
One ISIS video was released on November 3, 2014. In it, we see men laughing and joking about the Yazidi girls and women who are about to be sold at a slave auction. These men are enjoying themselves immensely. They know that such a video will discomfort all Yazidis who may see it as well as all Westerners and other non-barbarians.
These men are doing exactly what Mohammed himself did and said was the right thing to do. Conquer, expand, convert; execute the men by beheading them in full view of their womenfolk–and then either marry the women “in your hand” or sell them as sex slaves. Share them among the warriors. They are the just spoils of war.
The Koran (4:24) states that:
And [also prohibited to you are all] married women except those your right hands possess. [This is] the decree of Allah upon you.
The Hadith give us numerous examples of what Mohammed himself did, examples which are revered and followed.
For example, Mohammed gave the order to slaughter an entire Jewish tribe in Northern Arabia as their women stood watching. He then ordered that his warriors take the women as wives or concubines. He himself took one Safiya Bint Huyayy, whom he “married,” no doubt against her will and whom he probably converted against her will.
According to Bat Ye’or, in The Dhimmi: Jews and Christians Under Islam,”whenever the Muslims besiege an enemy stronghold who agree to surrender on certain conditions that will be decided by a delegate, and this man decides that their soldiers are to be executed and their women and children taken prisoner, this decision is lawful. This was the decision of Sa’ad b. Mu’adh in connection with the Banu Qurayza (a Jewish tribe of Arabia).”
Bat Ye’or describes and analyzes Jihad. She explains that “it is not prohibited to kill non-white Arabs who have been taken prisoner…women and children must not be executed (unless they have taken part in battle). The imam will retain a fifth of the booty captured by Muslims in the course of warfare and he will share the remaining four fifths among the soldiers.”
According to Ibn Warraq, in his 1996 work, Why I am Not A Muslim, the Koran “enjoins all Muslims to fight and kill nonbelievers. 47:4 “When you meet the unbelievers, strike off their heads; then when you have made wide slaughter among them, carefully tie up the remaining captives.” And in 5:51: “Believers, do not take Jews or Christians as friends. They are but one another’s friends.”
Iranian Parvin Darabi, in Ibn Warraq’s Leaving Islam: Apostates Speak Out lists the following from the Koran and from Muslim beliefs. This applies to Muslim women. Imagine what applies to non-Muslim women.
Prophet Mohammed: “I was standing at the edge of fire (hell) and the majority of the people going there were women.” An Islamic saying: “A woman’s heaven is beneath her husband’s feet.” An Islamic saying: “Women should be exposed to the day light three times in their lives: When they are born, when they are married, and when they die.”
As long as these practices and beliefs are not “abrogated,” abolished, outlawed, punished, they will continue to characterize political Islam.
The most recent ISIS video should–but may not–convey to Westerners, especially Western feminists, the sub-human status in which Islamist barbarians view women–their own and infidel women especially. ISIS warriors are talking about the preference for “green” or “blue” eyes, for a mouth full of teeth, for fifteen-year-olds. It is as if they are talking about horses or cows–and to them, that is what women are. Beasts of burden, slaves, and “fields” in which the sons of men are to be planted.
Here’s another example of what characterizes a “barbarian.”
In a May 2014 video, the leader of Boko Haram in Nigeria, Abubakar Shekau, talks at length, in Hausa and in broken English, about having married off, sold, and converted the mainly Christian girls he had kidnapped. He is defiant, taunting, and very happy to crush the families of the kidnapped girls.
Here is what he says: “Just because I took some little girls who were in western education, everybody is making noise. Let me tell you: I took the girls. Girls: Go and get married. We are against western education and I saw ‘stop western education’. I repeat, I took the girls, and I will sell them off. There is a market for selling girls.”
“In every nation, every region, there is a decision to make. Either you are with us, I mean real Muslims, who are following Salafism. Or you are with Obama, Francois Hollande, George Bush, Clinton…I haven’t forgotten Abraham Lincoln. Ban Ki-moon and his people generally. And any unbeliever. Kill, kill, kill. This war is against Christians.”
He clearly states that Boko Haram opposes “Western education;” states that girls (whom we may consider children but whom Islamist warriors consider almost too old to marry), must, indeed, be married off and always against their will. Abubakar Shekau names all the Western leaders, beginning with Obama and including Francois Hollande, George Bush, Clinton, Ban-Ki Moon. All are to be killed, killed, killed.
Saying so makes him happy. He is not grave nor is he introspective. He makes no “rational” demands. He is not negotiating. His goal is to subdue the world and turn everyone into a Muslim. His goal is to turn the global clock back to the 7th century.
President Obama, Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon: Are you listening? Do you understand that you are on Boko Haram’s hit list because you are infidels? What do you plan to do about the Sunni barbarians? And after you have solved that problem, what do you plan to do about the Shiite barbarians, funded by Iran, and active in Syria, Lebanon, and Gaza?
Will you at least publically condemn their colonialism, imperialism, and apartheid?
If you do not act now–and act decisively–it will mean that the barbarians will command more weaponry, more oil, more territory and more slaves and will be harder, not easier, to defeat.