Good Muslims

Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik were good Muslims.

Murdering infidels is what some good Muslims do.

Syed and Tashfeen are in Muslim heaven now if what Muslims believe about allah is true.

That’s the key point that is always missed in the coverage.

Syed was not brainwashed by hate preachers who had warped and perverted his understanding of Islam. How could they do that when he had memorised the koran? If a hate preacher was responsible then his name is Mohammad, the prophet of Islam.

Theirs is not a warped or perverted form of Islam. It is Islam. No less than the most august authority on Sunni Islam, Egypt’s Al-Azhar University, has ruled that even ISIS are not heretical. That’s right, mass-murdering, torturing, enslaving, and raping all in the name of Islam is not heretical. The Al-Azhars scholars were put under enormous international pressure to issue a fatwa proclaiming the heresy of the head-hackers. But they couldn’t, because they would have lost all credibility in the Muslim world if they had announced something so patently false about Islam. If on the other hand the ISIS nutjobs were found to be drawing cartoons of Mohammad…

Now it is true that only about 15 - 20% of western Muslims admit in opinion surveys to support for or sympathy with the sort of direct action that Syed and Tashfeen took, but that is far from saying that the other 80% or so of non-murderous Muslims are moderate. Consider the following:

• The imposition of strict Sharia Law has the support of the majority (and often the overwhelming majority) of Muslims living in Muslim countries. For the implications of what that means here’s a cool scholarly take on the main provisions of the Sharia penal code from  britannica.com:
                 

For six specific crimes the punishment is fixed (ḥadd): death for apostasy and for highway robbery; amputation of the hand for theft; death by stoning for extramarital sex relations (zinā) where the offender is a married person and 100 lashes for unmarried offenders; 80 lashes for an unproved accusation of unchastity (qadhf) and for the drinking of any intoxicant.
                      

But then again, why wouldn’t they. They’re Muslim and good Muslims want apostates executed and cheating spouses stoned. And if a person views that sort of barbarity as justice how much of a stretch can it be from doing that to doing what Syed and Tashfeen did? What’s the moral degree of separation between approving of the killing of apostates and personally gunning down infidels?

• There is a vast pogrom of Christians going on across the Muslim world. It is most acute in the Middle East where  the Christian minority has fallen from around 20% of the population a century ago to about 5% today, but it’s happening just about everywhere Muslims are in a majority. This is what good Muslims do. I say “good” Muslims because as the highly respected Pew survey of Muslim attitudes of 2013 reveals, support for oppressing non-Muslim minorities is substantially higher among “devout” believers. And curiously enough “devout” is the most popular adjective chosen by Syed’s family and friends to describe him.

Syed Rizwan Farook and his wife Tashfeen Malik planned their atrocity and stockpiled weaponry. On the morning of their jihad they dumped their 6-month-old daughter with her grandmother. Then they brutally murdered 14 people in cold blood.

Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik were good Muslims. That’s what some good Muslims do.


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