Was the beheading an instance of “voluntary jihad syndrome”? And why we will never find out if the killer is a Muslim

Developing a a conceptual framework for understanding the Canadian bus beheading, the blogger Hesperado introduces the ideas of sudden jihad syndrome and voluntary jihad syndrome:

Where SJS is the spontaneous psychological combustion of a Muslim who vents his traditional Islamic hatred for Infidels, which he carries around as generalized mental baggage, by suddenly going postal one day, the VJS is more specific: it relates to a Muslim individual (or individuals) who, directly or indirectly inspired by a specific call to action by agitating Islamic clerics or terrorists, takes it upon himself (or themselves) to go out and kill some Infidel voluntarily.

He then wonders if the Canadian bus stabber and beheader was a Muslim acting out voluntary jihad syndrome:

We know that multiple stabbing and beheading seem to be common, indeed traditional, behaviors of Muslims engaged in their murderous frenzy of variously enacting the repeated injunctions, in the Koran and in mosque sermons utilizing both the Koran and the Sunnah, to kill non-Muslims.

As an example of VJS, Hesperado speaks of two Muslims in Somalia who

last year shot a nun in the back three times, thus murdering her, as the specific and dutiful response to the call by a Muslim imam in a mosque sermon in Mogadishu for Muslims to go out and kill Christians to avenge the “insult” of the Pope’s lecture that caused indignation and menacing protests from Muslims world-wide.

A more gruesome possible example of VJS was the triple torture and murder of three Turkish Christians (though one of them had German nationality) in Turkey in April 2007. Christian Persecution Info called it the first martyrdom of Christian converts in Turkey since the founding of the Turkish Republic. Below is an excerpt from a story by Christian News of the International Christian Concern (ICC), April 30, 2007 describing the tortures and murders in great detail. Note: the following is very extreme.

ICC, based in Washington DC, said the troubles began on Easter Sunday when five of the alleged killers had been to a service that Pastor Necati arranged in the eastern town of Malatya, the capital of Malatya province.

The men were reportedly known to local [Christian] believers as searching for the faith in Christ. The suspects, one of whom is the son of a mayor in the Province of Malatya, are part of a tarikat, or a group of “faithful believers” in Islam, ICC added.

Tarikat membership is “like a fraternity membership” and means that “no one can get into public office without membership” of such a group, ICC said. “On the day of the killing, the young Muslim men had arranged to meet the Christians at 10:00 am [local time] to ostensibly learn more about the Bible. They had gathered guns, bread knives, ropes and towels [as] they knew there would be a lot of blood, ready for their act of service to Allah,” ICC stressed.

After Necati read a chapter from the Bible the assault reportedly began. “The young men tied Ugur, Necati, and Tilman’s hands and feet to chairs as they videoed their work on their cell phones,” ICC said, adding that what “followed in the next three hours is beyond belief.”

Warning: The following is very graphic.

ICC said the men were “disemboweled, and their intestines sliced up in front of their eyes. They were emasculated and watched as those body parts were destroyed.” The group added that “fingers were chopped off” and “their noses and mouths and anuses were sliced open” as part of what it called “satanic torture.”

It added that “possibly the worst part was watching as their brothers were likewise tortured. Tilman was stabbed 156 times, Necati 99 times and Ugur’s stabs were too numerous to count.”

Finally, their throats were sliced from ear to ear, and their “heads practically decapitated,” ICC said.

It’s not immediately clear to me that this is an example of VJS, since the story doesn’t mention any orders given to the killers by some cleric or other superior. But perhaps insructions came from the tarikat, the group of faithful believers in Islam to which the men belonged. While that point remains uncertain, what is clearly established is the Muslim custom of committing a maximum, satanic degree of slaughter on the victim before beheading him. And when we remember the sadistic bloodymindedness that informs almost every page of the Koran, it begins to make sense tha the ideal of the total destruction of an enemy is inculcated into many Muslims from their childhood. Not that all Muslims do it or want to do it, but it’s a syndrome planted deep within the Muslim mind, ready to be activated by the right circumstances or influences, as has been seen over and over again.

Before I had read these articles, it had already seemed overwhelmingly likely to me (say 95 percent) that the Canadian beheader is a Muslim or under Muslim influence. Based on Hesperado’s work, I would say it is even likelier.

However, if Vince Weiguang Li is indeed a Muslim, then, for reasons I have touched on here in a somewhat different context and will explain further, I think it is highly probable that we will never learn of it.

A hint of how the case will be disposed of can be found at yesterday’s Jihad Watch. Two years ago Omeed Aziz Popal drove an SUV into 16 people in San Francisco with the clear intent to harm them; he was calm and peaceful while doing so; and he told the police he was a terrorist. But this week he was ruled insane and will be spared trial and imprisonment. He will be confined to a mental hospital for a long time, perhaps for life, but the obvious jihadist nature and motivation of his act will henceforth be officially buried under the finding of insanity.

Popol of course is a known Muslim, with a Muslim name. So the challenge for the PC authorities in his case was not to cover up his Muslim identity, but to cover up his jihadist motivation. The beheader, by contrast, does not have a Muslim name; he is not known to be a Muslim; and his crime is far more terrifying and threatening to society than Popol’s. If the people of Canada and the U.S. learn that there are Muslims among us who may slaughter and behead us at any moment, in a bus, a train, a fast food restaurant, a college classroom, on a park bench, on a city sidewalk, then their entire attitude toward Muslims will change to openly expressed suspicion and fear, and there will be public demands for the exclusion of Muslims from our countries, or at least for legal restrictions on them. The heart of the modern liberal regime itself, which is openness to and inclusin of the Other, no matter how alien they are, will be threatened. Therefore, assuming that the bus beheader really is a Muslim (which we do not know), the thing that will be covered up in his case will not be his jihadist motivation, but the very fact that he is a Muslim.

—end of initial entry—

And by the way, two and a half days after the news of the Canadian bus beheading had sptread all over the Web (though not all over the U.S. mainstream media), Jihad Watch has still not said anything about it. Nor has the Corner.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at August 02, 2008 09:36 PM | Send