By: Phyllis Chesler
What does a be-heading mean? It is an act meant to terrorize, paralyze, and silence onlookers and a signature form of Islamic murder
We all know that truth has died and hate speech has triumphed in the West—and both in the name of free speech; that writers, the media, publishers, the academy, governments, “progressives,” and most international bodies will not write, teach, or publish anything that accurately portrays Islamic gender and religious apartheid, the existence of black slaves today, the ongoing and literal crucifixion of Christians, and the honor killing of women in Muslim lands.
If you do focus on such subjects, you may get sued, fined, exiled, publicly shamed, shunned, or forced to live in hiding with police protection (if you’re lucky); otherwise, it’s at your own expense.
However, you may also be beheaded.
French schoolteacher, Samuel Paty, has just been beheaded by a Muslim refugee from Chechnya, in a suburb of Paris. His crime? With delicacy and sensitivity, he presumably told any Muslim students who may be there to avert their eyes or even leave the classroom for a moment—and then he showed two of the Charlie Hebdo caricatures of the prophet Mohammed. He was trying to teach his class about secular French values which do not include any law or custom in which “blasphemy” or criticism of any religion is forbidden.
Muslim parents and Imams escalated indignation on the internet and on the street outside the school. The 18 year old Chechen brought the knife, yelling “Allahu Akhbar” as he savagely sliced away at Paty’s head.
What does a be-heading mean? It is an act meant to terrorize, paralyze, and silence onlookers. It is certainly meant to silence the victim, to literally cut off his identity, separate his consciousness from his body. It is a way of protesting what he may be thinking, or punishing him for “insulting Islam” or for being different in any way, for being an infidel, a Jew, a dissident, a secularist, an apostate, a homosexual, a feminist.
Like acid attacks, which also disfigure one’s identity and which are so common in south east and central Asia, be-headings are also a signature forms of Islamic murder.
Look up beheading online and you will first find many Christian examples e.g. the decapitation of St. John the Baptist, the use of the guillotine in France during their bloody Revolution. Many pages into your search, you will begin to see 21st century Muslim videos of Islamists beheading Western journalists, humanitarian activists, journalists, free thinkers, secularists, Christians, and Jews.
According to history professor, Timothy R. Furnish, in Middle East Quarterly, there is a basis for beheading in the Qu’ran.
“Sura (chapter) 47 contains the ayah (verse): “When you encounter the unbelievers on the battlefield, strike off their heads until you have crushed them completely; then bind the prisoners tightly.” The Qur’anic Arabic terms are generally straightforward: kafaru means “those who blaspheme/are irreligious,” although Darb ar-riqab is less clear. Darb can mean “striking or hitting” while ar-riqab translates “necks, slaves, persons.” With little variation, scholars have translated the verse as, “When you meet the unbelievers, smite their necks.”
Who can forget Daniel Pearl’s savage and sickening be-heading which his killers video-ed? His crime? He was a Jew, and was therefore considered a Zionist, the crime of all crimes.
What else might I say about Islamic terrorism in France?
Jean Raspail said it all in the 1970s in his brilliant, raw, dystopian novel In the Camp of the Saints, for which he was demonized as a racist. (My early writing about this work led to my being defamed as a racist).
Bat-Yeor’s work warned us about the coming of Eurabia. She, too was demonized as an Islamophobe.
Oriana Fallaci weighed in with biting passion and was also defamed as a racist, silenced via lawsuit in both France and Italy, and forced to live in exile in America.
Islamists in France have blown up Parisians who are out for an innocent evening of entertainment (the Bataclan mass murders); they’ve shot the most creative of cartoonists at Charlie Hebdo; they’ve stabbed and shot Jews on the street and in kosher supermarkets.
Vicariously, we have all lived through the agonizing Muslim torture-murders of Jews Ilan Halimi and Sarah Halimi (no relation) in Paris; the (fake) ice cream truck rampage on Bastille Day in Nice, the day that Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel drove his truck into six hundred living human beings, killing 86 and injuring 485 others.
And then there are all the Muslim car rammings, stabbings, street beatings, and harassment of Jews all over France.
The handwriting is off the wall. And yet, despite the public and government outrage and announcements of getting it to stop, will France actually have the courage to deport many millions of jihadists and potential jihadists who may not be refugees, who may be French citizens?
Notice: I’ve written “jihadists” not “Muslims.”
Will France have the wisdom, the will, and the resources to separate out “jihadists” from those Muslim citizens who themselves are in flight from Jihad and who want to lead modern French lives, both secular and religious?
Ah, La Belle France.
I wrote my college dissertation on Henri Beyle, aka Stendhal. I was also reading novelists Balzac, Flaubert, Zola, Collette, Celine, and Camus, as well as poets Baudelaire, Proust, Rimbaud, Verlaine, in college. I have visited France many times. My last time there, I stayed in Nice. I stood on the Corniche, where the Muslim Jihadist ice cream truck driver perpetrated his rampage.
When I was there, the Mediterranean still sparkled, the yachts and cruise ships preened on by, the sun shone, the beach was fully occupied—as if there had been no screams, no sound of bones snapping, no anguish, no blood, as if nothing like this had ever happened.
When I discovered, through copious research, that the hotel I was in had a Vichy Nazi past that they had smoothly covered up—I vowed never to return to France.
This month is the 20th anniversary of the October 12th lynching of two Israeli reservists, Vadim Norzhich (z”l) and Yosef Avrahami (z”l) in Ramallah.
As in Gaza, so in Paris. I dedicate this column to their memory. (INN)
Prof. Phyllis Chesler is a Ginsburg-Ingerman Fellow at the Middle East Forum, received the 2013 National Jewish Book Award, authored 20 books, including Women and Madness and The New Anti-Semitism, and 4 studies about honor killing, Her latest books are An American Bride in Kabul, A Family Conspiracy: Honor Killing and A Politically Incorrect Feminist.
