Murdering While Muslim

Daniel Greenfield

Recently a nice Muslim fellow from Chicago by the name of Mohammad Alkaramla was convicted of sending bomb threats to a Jewish High School. Like most serial killers, his neighbors described him as peaceful and friendly. Just the sort of chap you want to invite to a barbecue or a bombing. His defense was that he wasn't threatening to kill Jewish students because he was the follower of a bigoted religion, but because he was upset over his ex-wife leaving to return home to Jordan. Mohammad Alkaramla joins a long list of Muslim terrorists who did what they did only because of "personal problems". There was that great guy with the Facebook profile who only tried to set off a car bomb in Times Square because of a home foreclosure. And a devoted army psychiatrist in Fort Hood who tried to kill a bunch of soldiers because he had contradicted PTSD from the drinking water in Texas. But the media was quick to assure us in every case, that these weren't Muslim terrorists. Just distraught homeowners and workplace shooters who happened to be "Murdering While Muslim".

But Mohammad didn't threaten violence against his ex-wife's lawyer or Royal Jordanian Airlines. Instead he threatened to blow up a Jewish High School which in all likelihood had nothing to do with his ex-wife leaving him. Instead his message read, "Will Give You until 01.15.2009 to back OFF from Gaza in Palestine or will set our explosive in your areas". This was not the message of an angry ex-husband, but of an angry Muslim.

In one of the more ridiculous defenses, his father claimed that Mo A. was worried about his wife and son living near Gaza. "He went crazy like with stress. ... He thinks Gaza is by Jordan. All he knows is what he sees on the TV." There's just one problem with this defense. Mohammad Alkaramla is actually from Jordan. So for this to be true, Mohammad would have to be clueless about the nearby geography of his own country. And since most Jordanians are actually Palestinian Arabs, and Jordan at one point annexed the West Bank, but not Gaza, this is one of the least plausible defenses ever.

But apparently we're expected to believe that Mohammad could take the time to research Jewish targets for his hate-- but not the area where his wife and son were going to be living.

Meanwhile Oregon saw another Mohammed, this one named Mohamed O. Mohamud, plot to blow up a Christmas tree lighting ceremony. Naturally the media suggested that he suffered from bullying and anger over his parent's divorce. And no matter how many times Mohamed O. Mohamud was quoted as saying that he wanted to kill Americans in the name of Islam, the media refused to accept it. Forget Islam, the boy was clearly upset over some completely unrelated things. Just like Mohammad Alkaramla and all the other Mohammad's and Mohammed's and Mohamud's out there. And by the time his trial rolls out, his lawyers may convince him that should be his defense. Even if he doesn't agree, they may present it anyway.

The best ally of such defense strategies is that "Murdering While Muslim" is also the official position of the authorities, who still pretend that being a Muslim is a somehow incidental factor to engaging in Muslim terrorism. Accordingly we don't profile Muslims at airports, because absolutely anyone could be a Muslim terrorist. Except an actual Muslim. And so we strip search Christian 6 year olds just to be on the safe side. The safe side being the side that doesn't offend Muslims, who are not by any means the people trying to blow up the planes.

Muslim terrorists are just people who happen to commit acts of Muslim terrorism for various personal reasons, while incidentally also being Muslim. Much like Communist agents spied for the Soviet Union, while incidentally also being Communists. When the evidence is undeniable and the terrorists themselves insist on quoting the Koran and telling us that we're all going to perish in the wrath of Allah's suicide bombing fires, then the media is forced to concede that maybe they might be Muslims after all. But troubled and confused Muslims who misunderstand their religion in response to personal stress.

Conversely, people who attack Muslims are never assumed to be anything other than rabid bigots seething with hate. Muslim cabbie slasher Michael Enright was an arts student with a drinking problem, and he was so drunk that after the attack he sat down in the middle of traffic. According to a police report, he was highly intoxicated and had an empty bottle of scotch on him. His friends said that he was not anti-Muslim in any way. But the media has never stopped framing the narrative in one way.

Around the same time a drunken Latino man urinated on some prayer rugs that had been left by a mosque. The media of course screamed, Hate Crime. And when the mosque witnesses who claimed that the man shouted slurs disappeared and the NYPD quietly said that it had been nothing more than the work of a drunken idiot looking to answer nature's call, the media never admitted that they had been lying all along. Instead they went on promoting donations to buy the mosque new prayer rugs, orchestrated by an associate of the left wing anti-Israel group, J Street. Even though the mosque was found hosting anti-semitic material on its website.

The liberal narrative is that Muslims kill because of personal problems, not bigotry, but anyone who gets in a drunken argument with his cabbie or urinates outside a mosque is a vicious hate criminal. This double standard gives every Muslim terrorist a built in defense. It's almost startling how few of them bother to use it. Much as the liberal establishment would like to claim that Islamic terrorism is the invention of Islamophobic bigots, Muslim terrorists insist on showing up in court and reciting verses from the Koran in justification of their actions.

When Faishal Shazhad, that nice guy with the Facebook profile who tried to kill hundreds of people in Times Square, appeared in court, he blew away the media narrative that he was a terrorist because he was angry at his home foreclosure. And so the judge in the case was reduced to debating the Koran with him, and telling a devout Muslim that she knows his religion, better than he does. That sad conclusion highlighted the extreme level of liberal denial of Islamic terror. A denial so pervasively repressive that rather than accept the truth of Islamic terror for what it is, they will actually argue with Muslims terrorists, trying to convince them that they don't know their own religion.

In Time Magazine, Joe Klein wrote to condemn, "odious attempts by Jewish extremists... to argue that the massacre perpetrated by Nidal Hasan was somehow a direct consequence of his Islamic beliefs as opposed to a direct consequence of his insanity." Klein is not a practicing psychiatrist, yet he had remotely and conclusively diagnosed the Fort Hood shooter as being crazy, rather than Muslim. Joe Klein then went further. "We should identify the notion that Hasan's act was somehow a consequence of his religious orthodoxy for what it is: anti-Islamic bigotry."

Klein had drawn a line. Any suggestion that Hasan might have been motivated by Islam, even of the so-called extreme variety, was bigotry. And a priori illegitimate. There was no logic or evidence behind Klein's assertions. Only the self-righteous moral authority of liberals to define anything they don't like as bigoted. When it suits their own interests.

Ten days later, Klein was forced to walk back a little, admitting that Islam might have been a factor, but that Hasan was clearly nuts from PTSD he had picked up somewhere and was "more terrified than terrorist". Those on the scene might think that Hasan's victims were the ones terrified and that he was the terrorist-- but clearly Joe Klein knew better. Hasan wasn't Muslim. He was crazy. He just happened to be "Murdering While Muslim."

If we assume that the Koran is a peaceful book and that Islam is a peaceful religion. Then surely Muslims who kill can't possibly be doing it for any Islamic reason. With that premise having been firmly established, it becomes a politically correct tenet of faith, that Muslim acts of violence are incidental to Islam. That there is no such thing as Muslim terrorists, only terrorists who happen to be Muslim. And no amount of Muslim terror can shake that faith. A faith not in anything spiritual, but in a liberal moral order in which the "downtrodden" are always right, and the people they kill are always wrong.

With no faith of their own, the idea that the terrorists are motivated by religion never seems credible to the politically correct. Instead social conditions, political outrage and anti-war sentiments always seem more credible motivators. Credible, because they reflect their own motivations and sentiments, leading them to empathize with Muslim terrorists for the reasons they think are behind the violence, rather than the reasons that actually are behind it.

Being the racist idiots that they are, they pigeonhole Muslims as the successors of the civil rights movement. The "extremists" are the Black Panthers who are impatient with the slow pace of social reforms. While the moderate Muslims are prepared to work hard to get the Democratic party into power on board the Hope and Change express. And no amount of bombs or terror can convince them that they have made a stupid and terrible mistake. A worldview is a difficult beast to shake. It is the window through which we look out at the world. And the window that liberals use to look at Islam has been blocked from the other side, so that it only serves as a mirror. Their image of Islam is a distorted romanticized image of themselves.