Sultan Knish

Islam's Mask of the Beast

The descent into deeper and increasingly vile levels of savagery by Al Queda terrorists in Iraq is met by a greater and more determined degree of apathy by the media. The same press that was reduced to hysterics of outrage at the sight of Iraqi prisoners with women's underwear on their heads remains silent at each terrorist atrocity. The more bestial the terrorists become, the more determined the press becomes to find the good in them and the bad in their victims.

In Gaza, the media has taken to reporting on stories of a lion saved by Hamas while forgetting all the stories of those thrown off tall buildings and gunned down in open view by Hamas. If Mussolini had to make the trains run on time in order to demonstrate his efficiency, all Hamas needed to do was drag out one bedraggled lion and British reporter out for the cameras. While Alan Johnson has made a point of expressing his gratitude to his Hamas liberators, the lion has wisely chosen to remain silent. Perhaps it is because the lion is a wiser than a BBC reporter and as a more seasoned predator, can recognize that the mercy of a beast is a deceptive thing.

Iraq has seen a veritable feast of bestial mercies. In the city of Baqubah in Iraq, Al Queda's procedure for convincing reluctant families was to put on a display of traditional Arab hospitality by inviting them for a meal and serving them their own children, baked and stuffed. This marriage of bestial cruelty and human cunning would never have occurred to a lion or to a man but Muslim terrorism thrives in the hearts of bestial men who employ the bestial sides of their nature to commit horrific outrages and the human side of their natures to embroider and dress up their atrocities with a human mask.

Al Jazeera and CAIR, Abbas and Haniyeh and the many spokesmen for terrorism who wear expensive suits and dye their hair, represent are the human mask on the beast, the lavish feast that hides the murdered child laid out on a platter. Their primary goal is to maintain the mask and employ misdirection when the mask becomes in danger of slipping.

At the Al Hamari village in Iraq the human mask slipped revealing the beast within. At Al Hamari, Al Queda killed the villagers, family by family and then killed their livestock. When American and Iraqi soldiers reached it, they discovered something very much like the Killing Fields in Cambodia, earthen piles concealing the dead. An abandoned village whose palm groves reeked with the stench of the dead, the bodies of adults and children were recovered from the shallow earth, brutally murdered. Yet Michael Yon who had uncovered the story found no media interest in the case.

Had an American soldier bruised a single toenail on an Iraqi boy there would have been endless weeks of coverage but when Al Queda massacred an entire village, men, women and children, the media can hardly conceal its disinterest. When the mask of the beast slips, it is the media that determinedly looks away to avoid seeing its true horrid face.

The nature of Al Queda in Iraq is similar to the underlying nature of Fatah and Hamas and most Muslim terrorists. They are primarily gangs overseen by Islamic thinkers with a sprinkling of college educated upper middle class professionals. The organizations themselves are rooted in clan, tribe and family. The gangs are the enforcers of their will. Al Queda did not expand in Iraq by turning formerly peaceloving Iraqis into homicidal madmen as the liberal media likes to pretend. Al Queda in Iraq simply began recruiting existing armed gangs and those gangs took on the name of Al Queda and began committing their atrocities in Al Queda's name.

Those same gangs then proceed to kidnap, terrorize and brutalize in order to extra money, to maintain power and spread terror. While these gangs formerly did many of these things in the name of greed and brutality, they now do it in the name of Allah under the authority of Osama Bin Laden. The power of Islamic doctrine magically transforms the acts of beasts into the acts of saints and martyrs. When a gang beheads children, it is an atrocity. When an Islamic gang beheads children, to Muslims it becomes a profound testament of faith.

When one returns to the dark and bloody foundations of Islam, the same gangs are waiting there. Then the gangs were led by Mohammed who directed his men to rob, rape and pillage, taking property, land, treasure and women as booty and distributing it among his men. Mohammed's gang was no different than that of many other bandits but for one principle, it had the sanctity of religion behind it, a religion which like everything else had been looted from the Jews whom Mohammed's men killed and enslaved.

There is a direct parallel between the gangs of Mohammed and the gangs at Al Hamari, across over a thousand years the pillaging, the looting and the massacres continue. Viewed through the filter of historical revisionism as practiced by Muslims and their Western apologists, Mohammed is transformed from a caravan bandit, murderer and rapist into a man of faith. Viewed through the filter of Islamic triumphalism and eternal victimization Al Queda's Osama Bin Laden too becomes a man of faith. The mask of the man conceals the beast within them both.

Liberals who accept Mohammed as a great spiritual figure cannot deny Osama Bin Laden's entitlement to the same role. There is nothing that Bin Laden did which Mohammed did not do. There is no crime that Al Queda has committed which the founders of Islam have not. Indeed Mohammed committed far more crimes than Al Queda has yet to manage. There is nothing at Al Hamari that would have shocked Mohammed and when Mohammed is accepted as a valid teacher and prophet, than the crimes of Al Queda are legitimized tenfold. Subconsciously aware of this, the liberal media insists therefore on ignoring it by ignoring the terrorism and focusing only on an orgy of national self-criticism.

The media which cannot gaze at the corpses of Al Hamari drying in the sun instead turn to berating Americans once again for being fat, ignorant and warmongering patriots. Unable to face the Islamic beast which they have nurtured, they instead berate the men confronted by it. And in the face of Hamas, Fatah and Al Queda, the beast looks back at the media from behind its human mask and growls.