It’s always the same question after a Muslim goes on a deadly rampage. What was the motive? And it’s always the same answer. Islam. The word means “submission.” It also means “peace” they tell you. Yes. You want peace? Submit to Islam.
Searching for a motive beyond that is like distinguishing between radical and moderate Islamists. It’s a fool’s game. John Kerry’s game: “There’s something different about what happened from Charlie Hebdo [and the November Paris attacks], and I think everybody would feel that. There was a sort of particularized focus and perhaps even a legitimacy in terms of — not a legitimacy, but a rationale that you could attach yourself to somehow and say, okay, they’re really angry because of this and that [Mohammad cartoons].”
Contrary to Kerry, the November Paris attacks that targeted the Stade de France, the cafes, restaurants and a music venue — all locations frequented by young adults with a joie de vivre — were as rational, from an Islamic point of view, as the Charlie Hebdo attack. This would become immediately obvious to you if you were to drive the 3.5 miles from Tel Aviv to Jaffa one evening. You leave an area teaming with night life, twinkling lights, music, families enjoying dessert while their little ones play tag and scream for the sheer delight of it all, young adults celebrating the completion of their mandatory two-year stint in the army, flirting with each other, sharing a beer.
You arrive at an area that is as inviting as a graveyard. There are no women to be seen, only gangs of young men standing about and smoking. The cafes are joyless. Old men sitting silently beneath posters of Che Guevara. The dim light that escapes into the night outside doesn’t begin to mitigate the darkness, for it is a darkness visible. It assaults your senses and your soul.
But Jaffa is Koran compliant, and Tel Aviv is not, just as the targets of the November Paris attacks were not. And that is reason and justification enough for the latter attacks. Paris must be made to submit to Koranic law. It must become like Jaffa.
One commentator suggested that someone might have referred to the party that Syed and his wife crashed as a Christmas party, and that might have been the trigger that set the couple off. Indeed, if Syed preferred that an office party to which Muslims are invited not be associated with Christianity, he might have achieved his goal, for what is banning references to Christmas during the Christmas season other than submission to the sensitivity of non-Christians with a jihadist bent. It’s no different than drawing a harmless cartoon of Mohammad.
Now another possible motive has cropped up. One of the San Bernardino victims was 52-year-old Nicholas Thalasinos, a strongly pro-Israel Evangelical Christian originally of the Catholic or Greek Orthodox faith who’d recently joined the Shiloh Messianic Congregation church in Crestline, California, and Syed’s fellow restaurant inspector. A co-worker told the Associated Press that a couple of weeks before the rampage she’d been privy to a discussion between the two, with Thalasinos informing her that Syed “doesn’t agree that Islam is not a peaceful religion,” and Syed countering that Americans don’t understand Islam. As it turns out, both were right. Thalasinos did not understand that the freedom inherent in a liberal democracy — the freedom that allowed him to choose how he wished to worship God — was on that Islam by its very nature could not tolerate.
On the day before the massacre, Thalasinos posted on Facebook that he’d received a message full of threats, including one stating he “will die.”
Syed’s reaction to Thalasinos will likely have a chilling effect on any future frank and open interfaith discussions with Muslims. Indeed, Red State boils down a CNN interview with Thalasinos’ widow as trying to establish that her husband had been asking for it.
It’s never a good idea, in my view, to raise controversial topics such as religion and bike lanes with a co-worker, even if you are a recent convert to an evangelical religion. You risk spoiling a perfectly good office party.
Syed and his wife weren’t deterred from blowing up the party by the fact that it included folks who’d earlier thrown a baby shower for the new mother. If your goal is to render the infidel submissive, it is so much more effective if your run-of-the-mill murder rampage takes down people who’ve gone out of their way to be nice to you. By doing a kindness to you, they’ve already shown themselves to be worthy of your contempt. And the sheer moral perversity of it — from the infidel’s point of view — will only increase his sense of terror as he searches for a “rationale.”
We, as a country, are being conditioned by the left to be submissive. We must submit to the lunatic demands of the likes of Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, the BDS movement, and intellectually challenged campus crazies who’ve been given the power to have learned and accomplished people fired by claiming to have suffered microaggressions at their hands. We have been inculcated with the fear of being labeled racist to the point where we just shut up and keep our heads down. A number of Syed’s neighbors, and workers in his neighborhood, reported having seen suspicious activity around his house which they feared reporting. Who needs to risk being investigated by Obama’s corrupt Justice Department?
“See something, say something” is a big lie, we’ve come to understand. “Clock Boy” Ahmed Mohamed’s teacher said something when he brought to school a contraption that looked very much like a suitcase bomb last September, and all hell broke loose. Rep. Mike Honda (D-CA)., himself under investigation by the House Ethics Committee, held a press conference demanding a DOJ probe into the incident.
On the day following the San Bernardino massacre Loretta Lynch complied, announcing the opening of an investigation to a Muslim advocacy group in Virginia. Lynch didn’t mention the massacre, but did note that she was disturbed by the “rise in anti-Muslim rhetoric.”
“‘My message to the Muslim community is we stand with you in this,’ Lynch was reported to have said to Farhana Khera, the executive director of Muslim Advocates.”
Our country is coming to a crucial juncture in the upcoming presidential elections. We have been so beaten down and rendered bovine by the Left’s agenda of political correctness that even those on the Right cringe at the prospect of the media onslaught that follows the utterance of anything that might conceivably offend someone favored by the Left. In their fear and trembling they are setting, like a pack of rabid dogs, upon the one person who has shown himself impervious to such attacks: Donald Trump. Trump will never submit.
In drawing the invective of the political establishment and its media lackeys, Trump is forcing us to confront the distance we have travelled away from sanity and freedom. It’s a frightening realization and one that is easier to ignore than to confront. It’s a fifteen-minute drive from Tel Aviv to Jaffa, from freedom to submission. And Jaffa is closing in on the cities of the West. Look at Detroit. It can happen here.
