Death By Hatred in the Religion of Peace
"If Kassig was indeed beheaded then his murder is without a doubt a tragedy and an act of savage brutality. But there is one thing lacking in the narrative provided by Western governments and their media mouthpieces regarding the beheading – evidence."
"Unlike the staged Foley beheading which attempted to depict, albeit poorly, the first few moments of a decapitation, the Kassig beheading video is not a beheading video at all, but simply footage of a man standing next to a severed head that he claims belonged to Peter Kassig."
Centre for Research on Globalization
That the man who in his mortal distress had converted to Islam and renamed himself Abdul Rahman, has been murdered is a tragedy and is certainly true. That much is most certainly fact and reality. And it does represent a savagely brutal act, not the least of which is that he was abducted a year and a half ago, transferred to the custody of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, tortured, starved and held in a state of apprehended fear of death, that eventually did arrive.
That was his story, it was the way his life unravelled and it was the way his life ended. His conscience and his humanity led him to attempt to alleviate the suffering of people he commiserated with, under wretched duress by a government that undertook to suppress dissent by imprisoning, torturing, raping and killing those it declared traitors to the regime. For his pains in providing the Syrian refugees with medicine, food and water, he paid the ultimate price.
Soon after the video purporting to show the end of his life was made public, doubts arose as to its legitimacy. In the sense that suspicions were raised that he had indeed met his end through the gruesome but common enough punishment meted out by Muslim countries of beheading as a cultural form of dispatching those considered too offensive to Islam to continue living. Oddly enough, death is celebrated by Islamists as a passage to martyrdom when death meets the slaughter of others.
But if mutilation takes place and the body is no longer whole there will be a question of whether in such a defiled state the dead can ascend to Paradise. So death by beheading represents an ultimate sentence with no hope of resurrection. And Peter Kassig had converted to Islam. Which conversion did nothing to save him from the malicious malevolence of his captors who submitted him continually to exquisite torture regimes, until the final blow could be administered.
The hypothesis is that his death was required for its propaganda value in promoting horrific visions of beheading to enthrall future jihadists into navigating their way to Syria and Iraq to join the Islamic State, and to offensively disgust Western sensibilities. He was surely meant to be beheaded, but after expert examination of the released video it would seem he was already dead, shot to death, before the pantomime of the beheading was initiated.
Medical experts examining the video showing his severed head reached the conclusion Peter Kassig may have been shot before the decapitation could take place. "We have had a senior face and neck surgeon independently look at some of the screenshots we took. His initial assessment was that a contusion above Mr. Kassig's left eye was a gunshot wound. Closer analysis reinforced that initial assessment, leading him to believe that the wound was probably the cause of death, rather than beheading", according to Charlie Winter, a researcher at Quilliam, the British anti-extremist think-tank.
Exploring the thorny issue of when and how death occurred is rather like splitting academic hairs. How many angels can dance on the head of a pin? Death did take place, brutally and miserably. Whether it was by a shot to the head or the excruciating misery of someone hacking at the neck of a painfully alive victim is fairly inconsequential, since death arrived when it was summoned and a spirit of humanity left the scene of the atrocity.
Peter Kassig in his persona as a 26-year-old convert to Islam, believing it to be a religion of peace and tranquility in his hours of need when it gave him comfort and hope, struggled against the inevitability of death, resisting attempts to position him quietly to enable the beheading to take place as scheduled. His resistance garnered him an instant death by gunshot. Rescuing him from further pain. Do the details really matter all that much?
Labels: Atrocities, Controversy, Crimes, Islamic State
posted by Pieface @ Tuesday, December 16, 2014
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