The Sanctimonious Pathology of Islam
"To the Muslims in America I have this to say: How can your conscience allow you to live in peaceful coexistence with the nation that is responsible for the tyranny and crimes committed against your own brothers and sisters? How can you have your loyalty to a government that is leading the war against Islam and Muslims?"
Anwar al-Awlaki, deceased Islamist Jihadi, Yemen
"He first became famous for his fundamental religious message and his ability to translate the complexities of Islamic history and law for a younger audience."
"So when he himself became radicalized, when he started talking about Western hypocrisy and injustice, and the obligation of jihad and the obligation to fight the oppressor, he already had a foundation of support and respect on which this message was received."
"These groups [Islamist-jihad 'clusters'] are important because they can inspire each other and talk each other into things."
Professor Amarnath Amarasingam, Dalhousie University Resilience Research Centre
A six-hour audio lecture titled "Constants on the Path of Jihad", where Anwar al-Awlaki declares that Muslims must fight without restraint and let-up on behalf of their faith, where success will be acclaimed at the end of the world when the Day of Judgement dawns has inspired young North American jihadists by the passion of its author's belief and the tenor of its argument lifted straight out of the Koran.
"If you're a disaffected kid living in Ottawa or Vancouver, you may not have the kind of background to understand a lot of what these other radical clerics are posting on the Internet: The messages are complicated. But al-Awlaki was able to distill things in a way that young people could understand", explained Simon Fraser University criminology professor Garth Davies, one among many studying the process of Islamist radicalization.
Anwar al-Awlaki, killed by a drone strike in 2011, one ordered by U.S. President Barak Obama, has entered the annals of celebrated Islamist figures of huge authority. His influence in North America owing to his fluid familiarity with the language that he was raised within -- born in New Mexico of a Yemeni father -- is immense. Though he returned to Yemen as a child, he came back to the U.S. to study engineering at Colorado State University, then education leadership at San Diego State.
Enrolled in a doctoral program at George Washington University, he knew America well. After 9/11 he left the United States for two years in London, before a return to Yemen to become a senior figure in Yemen's al-Qaeda branch (where Osama bin Laden also hailed from). He was considered enough of a threat to the United States by the U.S. administration that his convoy was targeted to be bombed, occasioning the first time that an American citizen was deliberately targeted in this manner.
He has been influential internationally, particularly among the youthful Muslims looking for guidance in their lives as Muslims, radicalized by the inspiration they find in his urging toward jihad. He is claimed to be the guiding light of numerous terrorists who have gained high profiles, from Cherif Kouachi of Charlie Hebdo magazine infamy, to the Boston bombing Tsarnaev brothers and Major Nidal Hasan the U.S. army psychiatrist who killed 13 military personnel in a Fort Hood Texas shooting rampage.
The Toronto 18 terror cell found inspiration in his messages, the Islamic State recruit from Nova Scotia, Damian Clairmont found it a "life-changing event" to hear al-Awlaki preach. And John Maguire of Ottawa named himself in honour of his hero, as Abu Anwar al-Canadi. The fascinating thing about those who become willing recruits to jihad is that the message is always that the West, in particular the United States, preys upon Muslims.
Yet it is the Islamist fundamentalists with their cruel totalitarian agendas who prey on other Muslims, slaughtering them along with non-Muslims, because their brand of Islam is offensive to the jihadists, as much so as Christians and Jews offend their sense of Islamist superiority and exceptionalism to the extent that to deprive Muslims of life, who don't subscribe to the Salafist version of Islam, is seen as a victory for Islam.
In that sense the passion and emotional fundamentalism of the fanatical Islamists override all elements of reality in the evidence that sits right before them, in favour of the pathology of the righteousness of killing in service to Islam. There is no reasoning with that kind of spiritual dementia since the jihadists understand quite well that their grisly methods of death-deliverance offend humanity to its deepest core -- but their religion permits it, since it is prescribed as just in the Koran.
Islam, in other words, as a mass psychosis.
Labels: Atrocities, Islamism, Psychopathy
posted by Pieface @ Sunday, February 08, 2015
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