In those lazy, hazy days before the planes hit the towers, I used to enjoy an article-and-essay aggregation site,
Aldaily. It’s still around,
and would still be interesting in another, parallel, and better world; but reality is too much with us,
and for years now -- and at present especially -- I have been obliged to concentrate on unfolding events,
more closely related to my day-job.
Anyhow -- Simply glancing at a few of the stories that have
surfaced -- or rather, broken beneath
the surface, since most people won’t have heard of them -- it strikes me that
one could actually run a “Decapitation Aggregation Site”, with something fresh
almost every day.
This we shall certainly not do; but the subject deserves a one-time alert from this site,
that there is a pattern here -- there are dots that connect-up -- which won’t
be apparent to most consumers of the minimizing, gaze-averting media.
(1) One story that did get some airplay
was the Oklahoma City atrocity in
September;
we examine some aspects
of it towards the end of the essay
here.
At the time, some observers objected to the
played-down, one-off way the story was being reported, maintaining that the
incident was more properly seen in the perspective of terrorism.
The irony is reflected in this
typical reader’s comment:
Nothing to see here people,
just your regular, run-of-the-mill workplace beheading.
http://legalinsurrection.com/2014/09/from-going-postal-to-going-isis/#comments
The story has pretty much died down. The latest is, um, this:
http://kfor.com/2014/10/04/oklahoma-muslims-receive-special-praise-from-white-house-officials/
What you probably have not heard is that there was, in the
same month, a similar attack in London. For a link, there is little beyond this right-wing
site,
http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/allah-made-me-do-it-2/
since the MSM tiptoes around it. Thus, the original story in the Telegraph (UK) made no
mention of the perpetrator’s name, or race, or national origin, and mentioned
the suggestion that he was “Muslim” only to immediately cast doubt upon the
idea (“could not be verified”; meaning, they would not look into it).
However, the bienpensant
newspaper reassured us, any connection to terrorism had been “ruled out” (i.e.,
in advance, as a matter of principle, since the incident had not yet been
investigated).
(2) You perhaps
have heard of the assassination and decapitation of the seven Trappist monks in
Tibhirine (variant spelling Tibéhirine), Algeria, in 1996.
http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassinat_des_moines_de_Tibhirine
The incident was never cleared up, owing to stonewalling by
the Algerian government. Now at
last, a forensic team from France has been allowed into the country, to examine
the severed heads, this being all
that is left of the monks. (In
French this operation is called, oddly, “une expertise de têtes”.)
(3) Again in
Algeria, the newspaper El Watan has announced the identity of the beheader of
the French hiking guide Hervé Gourdel:
Kerza Bashir (French spelling Bachir).
(4)
In Nigeria,
Boko Haram continues its depredations.
When these involve schoolgirls, and a suggestion of sex, the media gives
these very great play indeed.
That Boko also relish beheadings
is less widely publicised.
Most recently, they decapitated a
pilot, and made an exultant video of the event.
This
kind of meme cannot be tracked by the traditional methods of
counter-terrorism. It is more like the ebola virus, that can travel
thousands of miles unseen. No appeals, no reason can oppose it, for it
lies far beneath the slender outcroppings of the conscious mind. It
is like a green and glittering serpent, coiled deep within the
unconscious: across the vast abyss, Id calls out to Id...
[Update 20 October 2014] I probably ought to really not probably do this, lest this
site start attracting the … wrong sort of traffic; but could not resist this bit for connoisseurs.
A couple of months ago, we commented on the Sunni-on-Sunni
violence of ISIL against a Syrian tribe, the Chaïtat. Today, the Washington
Post finally got around to mentioning it too:
The cost of turning against the
Islamic State was made brutally apparent in the streets of a dusty backwater
town in eastern Syria in early August. Over a three-day period, vengeful
fighters shelled, beheaded, crucified and shot hundreds of members of the
Shaitat tribe after they dared to rise up against the extremists.
By the time the killing stopped,
700 people were dead.
Just as powerful a message for
those living under the militants’ iron fist was the almost complete
international silence on the bloodbath.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/syria-tribal-revolt-against-islamic-state-ignored-fueling-resentment/2014/10/20/25401beb-8de8-49f2-8e64-c1cfbee45232_story.html
But the Post adds a chilling yet (in line with ISIL
generally) flamboyant and theatrical detail:
A photo essay on an Islamic State
blog boasted of the different ways tribesmen were killed, including beheadings,
mass shootings and a crucifixion. A video shows how the militants lined up scores
of captives on a road, their hands bound, then set about clumsily decapitating
them, one by one. The executioners,
speaking in Tunisian, Egyptian and Saudi accents, taunted those not yet dead by swinging severed heads in front of their
faces and telling them, “It’s your turn next.”
[Update June 2015]
Cover-term:
During a recorded phone
conversation around May 26, Mr. Rahim called David Wright, whom acquaintances
identified as his nephew, and told him he had bought a knife that was “good for
carving.” Later in the conversation, Mr. Wright referred to “thinking with your head on your chest,”
a phrase the F.B.I. said was “a reference to the practice of some foreign
terrorist organizations to behead targets and place their heads on their chests
in propaganda videos.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/04/us/usaama-rahim-boston-terrorism-suspect-planned-beheading-authorities-say.html
