Winning Heads and Minds by Mark Steyn
http://www.steynonline.com/6578/winning-heads-and-minds
Moore is a municipality that lies between Norman, where a dear friend of mine lives, and Oklahoma City, which I know reasonably well. I can’t claim to know Moore other than to drive through, but I do remember the water tower emblazoned with “Moore – Home of Toby Keith”. Can’t get more American than that, can you?
Colleen Hufford was born in 1960. Life is full of grim twists and cruel vicissitudes, but in mid-20th century America it would not have occurred to anyone that one needed to worry about going to work and being beheaded by a colleague. Yet that’s what happened to Ms Hufford on Thursday: She turned up for her job at at the Vaughan Foods food processing plant in Moore, and Alton Alexander Nolen decapitated her.
Why would he do that? Well, as the initial reports were at pains to assure us, it’s nothing to do with terrorism. That’s true, in the sense that Mr Nolen is not a card-carrying member of an officially credentialed state-recognized terrorism-provider such as ISIS or al-Qaeda. It’s true in the sense that he’s not on any official US Department of Homeland Security terror watch list, because, under the geniuses running American national security, that honor is reserved for my fellow Hillsdale cruiser Steve Hayes. And, of course, it’s also true in the sense that Mr Nolen is a recent convert to Islam and, as David Cameron and Barack Obama and many others are ever more eager to emphasize, terrorism is nothing to do with Islam. Mr Nolen had the Muslim greeting “As-salamu Alaikum” – “Peace be upon you” – tattooed upon his abdomen. And he’d tried, without success, to persuade his co-workers at Vaughan Foods to convert to Islam. So he wasn’t just mildly Islamic in the nothing-to-do-with-terrorism sense, he was super-Islamic in the really-totally-no-terrorism-to-see-here sense.
So Colleen Hufford’s death was, as Jim Hoft put it, just “a random workplace beheading”. Indeed, many commenters at KOCO-TV seem more outraged by the mentioning of Mr Nolen’s religion than by the beheading:
Truth is, Islam has nothing to do with it. And Christians are far from innocent.
What does his religion have to do with this tragedy???
What does his religious faith have to do with this story?
Why would you even through in anything about terrorism in this story? The writer of this story is a true DUMBASS!
I can cite plenty of instances where religion was used to justify the bombing of abortion clinics and the murder of abortion doctors.
I’ve read plenty of Christians calling for the indiscriminate murder of Muslims.
Here’s some other examples of Christian terrorists, since you can’t find it on Youtube.
The Centennial Olympic Park bombing, July 27, 1996 Planned Parenthood bombing, Brookline, Massachusetts, 1994 Suicide attack on IRS building in Austin, Texas, Feb. 18, 2010 Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City bombing, April 19, 1995
Seems Christians prefer to bomb more then beheading, since that’s so archaic
Inquisition anyone?
Perhaps we wouldn’t have these issues if the United States and Great Britain hadn’t supported a coup in Iran in 1953 against a secular, democratically-elected leader who did not kiss our nation’s rear and then reinstalled the Shah,
If he was converting to Christianity would you say that??
It seems many western heads have too little up there to be worth chopping off. Whether or not Ms Hufford’s beheading is anything to do with Islam, the frantic insistence that Islam is no more prone to beheading than Buddhists or Episcopalians starts to sound like a psychosis. Asked “Who ya gonna believe – the multiculti pap or your lyin’ eyes?”, many Americans cheerily answer, “Mossadeq and Planned Parenthood.”
More from the voluminous nothing-to-do-with-Islam files courtesy of Mr Nolen’s Facebook page, where he appears to be known as Jah’Keem Yisrael.
~Colleen Hufford was not the first western woman beheaded this month. In Edmonton, north London, 82-year-old Palmira Silva, an Italian immigrant, was beheaded by Nicholas Salvadore, also a convert to Islam. Miss Silva’s executioner was reported to have been “inspired” by recent Isis beheadings of westerners. As we know from President Obama, that’s nothing to do with Islam, too. “Nothing to do with Islam” is not yet the leading cause of death in developed nations, but it’s making impressive strides.
~In a much mocked column, grizzled leftie Rick Salutin considers the fate of Mohamud Mohamed Mohamud, amusingly known as Mo3, a “Canadian” who died fighting for ISIS in Syria. You’ll be relieved to hear from Rick that Mo3 was just a typical Canuck going through adolescence:
He was 20. He’d been a bright kid, on student council, got involved in religion, then politics. Sounds familiar. Oh wait, that would be me in high school and the years after. These young people aren’t monsters and haven’t had their brains or bodies snatched. They’re going through adolescence. It’s dicey.
Or in the ISIS lads’ case it’s slice’n’dicey. As I say, Salutin’s column was met with near universal derision, but he’s stumbling around in the vicinity of a kind of point. As I wrote all those years ago in America Alone (personally autographed copies of which are exclusively available, etc, etc), Islam is “the ultimate global gang”. In Oklahoma, Mr Nolen had a rap sheet as long as his knife. In London, Mr Salvatore was a not dissimilar type. All that’s happened in the years since I first made that observation is that ISIS has supplanted al-Qaeda as the brand leader of the sharp end of Islam, and made the gang aesthetic even more explicit. As for Mo3’s comrades, if you’re a Canuck or Aussie or Frenchman or American having fun chopping heads off in Syria and Iraq, how much more fun it would be to go “home” and chop heads off in Toronto or Sydney,Toulouse or Minneapolis. Western leaders may insist that that’s nothing to do with Islam, but, as the “reversions” of Messrs Nolen and Salvadore suggest, not all potential Muslims are willing to defer to Obama and Cameron’s doubtless extensive Islamic scholarship. In the years to come, there will be more beheading, by more “reverts”.
~Judging from the various comments sections, many westerners are willing to live with a certain amount of decapitation rather than abandon the multiculti pieties. It is not a pleasant way to die, in part because it requires more expertise than you might think. A decade ago, a young lady in my employ emailed a backgrounder on the subject to me in my room at the Grand Hyatt in Amman the night before I set off on my motoring tour of Iraq. If you’re lucky, your killer will insert the knife from the side, the sharp edge pointing to your front. One skilled thrust forward will cut the jugular, the carotid artery, the esophagus – and it will all be over in seconds. On the evidence of their social media videos, the ISIS boys are not that good: They go in from the front, blade facing backward, sawing back and forth for minutes on end. As I said in America Alone:
Writing about the collapse of nations such as Somalia, The Atlantic Monthly’s Robert D Kaplan referred to the “citizens” of such “states” as “re-primitivized man”. When lifelong Torontonians are hot for decapitation, when Yorkshiremen born and bred and into fish’n’chips and cricket and lousy English pop music self-detonate on the London Tube, it would seem that the phenomenon of “re-primitivized man” is being successfully exported around the planet.
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