ISIS Should Have Stopped at the Beheadings
The Islamic State group that controls parts of Syria and Iraq has already established its evilness by raping, stoning, and beheading anyone who resists its will. ISIS has now “upped the ante” by burning alive Jordanian pilot, Maaz al-Kassasbeh.
I stumbled onto the shocking details of a highly produced 22-minute video on a Fox News website. It was systematically laid out like a Shakespearean play. Only in this case, it ends with a guy screaming in agony as he is being engulfed by flames.
ISIS was so proud of its achievement, it set up giant screens in Raqqa, Syria to show the gory video to cheering crowds. As the execution footage ran in the background, ISIS supporters shouted, “Allahu Akbar.” I can only wonder how many times a Muslim asks himself, “Why do we always say ‘Praise Allah’ every time we murder someone?”
Jordan immediately executed two prisoners in retaliation for the death of the tortured pilot. The prisoners, Sajida al-Rishawi was a would-be suicide bomber and Ziad Karbouli was a member of al Qaeda who killed a Jordanian driver. Since both of them had blood on their hands, they should have already had a date with a hangman’s noose.
We seem to be at a dead end with our outrage. If we are already shocked by the “ultimate brutality” of previous acts by ISIS, we can only recycle our comments of anger when it comes them roasting people alive like marshmallows.
Our political leaders and news media have a profound lack of understanding about the wickedness that drives ISIS. While we think all this murder and carnage is disgusting, many young Muslims find it mesmerizing and are eager to join the ISIS cause. It is estimated that our bombing campaign has killing around 1,000 ISIS members each month. It is also estimated that during the same time period 1,500 new recruits join the group.
The appeal that ISIS has is what I would call the Marilyn Manson effect. He is the singer who came to fame in the 90s by specializing in songs with satanic themes. His 1996 album Antichrist Superstar sold seven million copies. Manson was a horrible singer, but his shocking stunts made him rich and famous.
A lot of preachers deserve credit for over sensationalizing Manson’s demonic antics, which helped sell his records and concert tickets to rebellious youth who would be drawn to go see the guy who said, “Hopefully, I’ll be remembered as the person who brought an end to Christianity”(Spin magazine, August 1996). Well, Mr. Manson, we’re still waiting. Now that his Satanism shtick is getting old, Manson’s album sales are slowing down. His last record only moved 130,000 units.
The key problem here is the lack of a moral foundation on our part. If we were truly disgusted by the actions of ISIS, blame would find its way back to the source—the Muslim faith. There is no way Christians could avoid collective guilt with these types of atrocities. Our own Islamic-friendly president proved this fact when he spoke at a prayer breakfast. Obama tried to deflect blame away from ISIS by calling out the deeds of the Crusaders; a perceived offense that dates back 800 years.
Winston Churchill once said, “Islam is as dangerous in a man as rabies in a dog.” Even if you use this quote to make sense of the actions of Islamists, you will be labeled a racist. Since rabies only causes a physical sickness, Churchill may have been too kind to Islam. I think the former prime minister had a better quote when he said, “[We] must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power among men.”
Anyone who can stand by and grin as someone is being burned alive has reached a level of evil equal to the Nazi guards that peered into the peepholes at Auschwitz with delight as the Jews clawed at the walls of the gas chambers. I think ISIS should have stopped at the beheadings. In their demonic madness, they don’t realize they are staring at their own future fate—damnation in eternal hell fire.
“And he cried and said, Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus, that he may dip the tip of his finger in water, and cool my tongue; for I am tormented in this flame” (Luke 16:24).
“And if thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee: for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell” (Matthew 5:29).
--Todd
Moral Relativism
By now most everyone has weighed in on President Obama's speech at the National Prayer Breakfast that stirred the already boiling polemical pot. Obama attempted --in his own cutting, revisionist way--to behead Christianity while using the eviscerated corpse to rub sophistry-laden salve on the somewhat wounded religion of Islam, without ever really mentioning it by name. It was the most amazing dance around bringing up the name of that religion or its founder, Mohammed, I can recall, even for this president.
His defense of the religion, whose holy book commands that infidels be murdered (yes, especially by burning in some cases), came on the heels of the fiery execution of the Jordanian Air Force pilot who had been held prisoner for months by ISIS. Finally, it seems, the Arab world has been incited to the point of turning on its fellow Islamists. Jordanian King Abdullah saw the handwriting on the wall. His people were and continue to be agitated to the point of riot. They raged through the streets with the same degree of passion against the beasts of ISIS that much of Islamist populations of the Middle East demonstrated when they turned out to celebrate the destruction of the World Trade Towers when they fell on September 11, 2001.
Obama said while standing before the National Prayer Breakfast gathering in Washington, DC, that claims to be under the banner of Christ: "Unless we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ. In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ."
Cast aside the fact that the man who was acclaimed as like no other in intelligence and ability to be elected president of the United States demonstrated with the statement that he possesses almost no understanding of history involving either the Crusades or the Spanish Inquisition. The thing that staggers sensibility is his audacity that is an in-your-face embrace of Islam and its violence at the expense of Christianity's message of love. His insult to Christians everywhere has for the most part been unanswered, and is, to me, absolutely stunning.
There has been a degree of reaction to be sure, but nothing compared to what would be the reaction of Muslims if, say, the president of an Islamist state had spoken in that manner about the Mohammed-spawned religion. Turning the other cheek, maybe, applies here. But, it seems to me that it's time to show the man who would slap us in the face, or more like spit in our face, the proverbial door.
Mr. Obama didn't mind saying the name of Christ while pointing out that it was in that name the Crusaders went about murdering people--Muslims, he meant--as a movement to enslave while they went forth conquering with the cross before them. His tirade left out the truth that it was Mohammed's murderous armies that had raped and pillaged while establishing their caliphate on behalf of Allah, and that the Crusaders' intent was to liberate and destroy the beastly Muslim hordes. The president never used the name of Mohammed or the name of Islam in any of his castigating Christianity in the strongest terms--just short of calling Christ a devil rather than who He is.
I mean in no way to either defend the Crusaders, who often were as beastly as the Muslims they meant to vanquish. Neither do I mean to absolve the Catholic Church of all wrong. But, the Catholic Church's part in the Spanish Inquisition was most often secondary to the secular, political horrors perpetrated. Fact is, Mr. Obama either didn't know the truth about all of that long past history, or -I suspect--purposely intended to use that history in a totally misleading way in order to defend Islam--which again, he never mentioned by name.
All of this gets me to the point I hope to make. Having been alive during the early 1960s and at university, as they say--in college, that is--I recognize the insidious philosophy in which professor Obama's mind has been simmering all of his years in academia. I remember all of the ideological mumbo-jumbo going on in those years--long before even our current president first stepped through the doors of higher education. Let me tell you; it is satanic tripe of the first order. I'm referring to the philosophical sludge churned up from times even before Voltaire and the so-called Age of Enlightenment.
By the time my classmates and I landed in the middle of the ultimate outcome time-frame of the Age of Reason, the prime directive was, in the view of academia, to question everything. It was the time of no moral absolutes; values clarification, moral relativism, and situational ethics. Truth did not come just from the Bible. As a matter of fact, the Bible was, according to Voltaire and his ilk, a book of restrictive, draconian dogma that should be avoided. One should determine for one's self what is truth. As the term situational ethics implies, one should determine what is right for any given situation, based upon what seems most ethical or expedient at that particular moment.
Let me tell you that young people, with hormones and everything else raging, take to heart that kind of satanically-engendered philosophy of life. "If it feels good, do it, was the very well-accepted apothegm during those years, and the philosophy is embraced even more heartily today.
It is easy for one who was fed that luciferic philosophy--that would be me--to understand how a product of the academic world, like Mr. Obama, can now look at Christianity and militant Islam and see both as equally responsible for atrocity. However, what makes me know that he knows better in the deepest regions of his philosophizing is the fact that he refuses to include the name of Islam's prophet or even the name of the religion in trying to say he condemns the evil that burned the Jordanian pilot to a cinder while he was alive.
The president, without any doubt in my mind, embraces the philosophy of moral relativism. His philosophizing, however, is as phony--as specious--as the Marxist dogma he obviously believes--that ends justify means. He apparently believes it is okay to proclaim while in pre-election mode that he is a Christian, then having no voter to answer to as he enters his third year of his second term, he can equate Jesus Christ to being founder of a religion as vicious as the Islamist murderers he is determined to protect and defend.
The Bible upon which he placed his hand and took the oath to protect and defend not Allah, but the Constitution of the United States, has some very strong warning for those who come down on the side of moral relativism: "Woe unto them that call good evil, and evil good; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!" (Isaiah 5:20
--Terry
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