The Whited Sepulchre, Part 1

The Jihad Cognomen Flip-Flop

Islam is a charnel house. It was born in fire and blood and slaughter in the 7th century and has maintained the same modus operandi for the past fourteen hundred years.

When it is strong it wages aggressive jihad. It slaughters victims who refuse to convert. It takes slaves and distributes concubines to its warriors. It rapes and loots and destroys the wealth of civilized societies to feed its insatiable lust for booty and plunder, battening on the flesh of the prosperous. It reaps what it does not sow and harvests where it does not plant.

When it is weak, it goes into dormant mode. It turns its aggressive energies in upon itself, ferreting out blasphemy and unbelief and punishing the malefactors. Deprived of plunder, its cities fall into decay and desuetude. Poverty and degradation become the norm. The soldiers of Allah bide their time and await the moment when they may resume their rapacity.

With the emergence of the Islamic State in the Middle East, we are now moving out of a three-century hiatus of Islamic weakness into an era of renewed Islamic strength. What seems an unprecedented horror of bestial behavior is actually just a return to the Islamic norm as practiced before 1683 throughout the lands conquered by Islam.

All of the above is easily discoverable by any non-Muslim who cares to look into the matter. None of it is hidden. Yet the average Westerner is wearing a blindfold and earplugs when it comes to Islam. The arrant nonsense that is peddled by our media and our political leaders is swallowed by millions of people who should know better. And who could know better, if only they would raise a corner of the blindfold and take a little peek.

The political leaders and financial wizards who squat atop the pyramid of Western power know full well the reality of Islam. They have access to complete intelligence information on what the Great Jihad is doing, and what its long-term plans are. Cynical self-interest requires that they obscure the truth and lie to the populace.

The same cannot be said for all the millions of gutmenschen who go along with the feel-good multiculti program. These are decent, well-meaning people — I know quite a few of them personally — who believe the official lies and accept the unexamined premise that Islam is essentially a good, peaceful religion similar to Christianity and Judaism. They may be subliminally aware of mounting evidence to the contrary, but manage to screen it out to maintain the structure of a deluded worldview that becomes more and more untenable every day.

How did this come about? How did Islam become the whited sepulchre that it is today in Western popular culture? What keeps filling the buckets and dipping the brushes to maintain the paint job?

There are no simple answers to these questions. This is the first of an occasional series of posts that will highlight our capacity for mass self-delusion by examining some of its manifestations.

What’s in a name?

Many Canadians are familiar with the name Marc Lépine. It was chosen by a man who went on a killing spree at the École Polytechnique de Montréal on December 6, 1989. Mr. Lépine murdered fourteen students and wounded another fourteen before killing himself.

Most people, however, have never heard of Gamil Rodrigue Liass Gharbi, which was the name given to Marc Lépine when he was born. His father was an Algerian, but the murderer’s Muslim background was rarely mentioned at the time of the massacre, and is still generally unknown.

The case of Marc Lépine serves as the prototype for media coverage of vile acts committed by Muslims or people of Islamic background. If a violent criminal has two names, one Muslim and one non-Muslim, only the non-Muslim name will be used in media reports about the perpetrator’s evil deeds. John Allen Muhammad, the elder of the Beltway Snipers, is a case in point. After he was apprehended back in the fall of 2002, the media avoided mentioning his conversion to Islam and used his birth name, John Allen Williams, for as long as they could get away with it.

This phenomenon is especially noticeable when the perpetrator is a convert to Islam. Media reports will use the birth name of a killer and eschew his jihad cognomen whenever possible, even when his name has been legally changed. If the Islamic name is ever mentioned, it is relegated to back pages of the newspaper and the bottom of news articles, and is scrupulously omitted from the headlines.

The practice has become so noticeable and ubiquitous that it deserves its own name: Vlad’s Rule, after Vlad Tepes, who first pointed it out to me:

A Muslim convert who commits violent crimes will be identified by his non-Muslim name in all news stories.

Below is a list of converts to Islam whose names have figured prominently in recent news reports:*

  • Alton Nolen, the Oklahoma Beheader, took the name Jah’Keem Yisrael after he became a Muslim. He allegedly beheaded a former co-worker on September 25, 2014. He has been charged with her murder.
  • Martin Couture-Rouleau adopted the name Ahmad Rouleau when he converted. He ran over two Canadian soldiers near Montreal on October 20, 2014, killing one of them. He was shot to death by police.
  • Michael Zehaf-Bibeau was a Quebec man who was born Michael Joseph Hall or Joseph Paul Michael Bibeau and changed his name to Joseph Paul Michael Abdallah Bulgasem Zehaf-Bibeau to recognize his Libyan heritage and his return to his father’s religion. He went on a shooting rampage on Parliament Hill in Ottawa on October 22, 2014, killing a Canadian soldier before being shot to death by the Sergeant-at-Arms in the parliament building.
  • A New York Man named Zale Thompson used the name Zaim Farouq Abdul-Malik after his conversion to Islam. He attacked four policemen with a hatchet in Jamaica, Queens on October 23, 2014. He injured two of his intended victims before being shot dead by the others.
  • Peter Kassig was an American aid worker who was captured by the mujahideen of the Islamic State in 2013. He converted to Islam in captivity and took the name Abdul-Rahman. On November 16, 2014 ISIS posted a video showing “Jihadi John” standing over the severed head of Mr. Kassig.
  • Maxime Hauchard is a Frenchman who converted to Islam and adopted the name Abdallah Al-Faransi. On November 17, 2014 French authorities identified him as one of the executioners who took part in the mass beheading that was featured in an ISIS propaganda video along with the severed head of Peter Kassig.
  • On November 19, 2014 a second French convert named Michael Dos Santos was identified as a participant in the ISIS beheading video. Mr. Dos Santos changed his name to Abu Othman when he converted to Islam.

All of the above converts are commonly identified in the media by their birth names, rather than their Islamic names — with one exception.

Can you guess what the exception is?

Yes, you’re right: Peter Kassig is generally identified as “Abdul-Rahman” in news stories. Secretary of State John Kerry and President Barack Hussein Obama established the trend by referring to “Abdul-Rahman” the day his beheading was first made known. For a few hours after the news broke, media outlets tended to use the name “Peter”, but most eventually fell into line.

The reversal of the usual procedure is explained by the fact that Peter Kassig is an identified victim. This makes the use of his Islamic name all but mandatory. In ludicrous contrast, Mr. Kassig’s murderer is commonly known as “Jihadi John”, as if to distance Islam from the executioner’s function as a serial beheader.

This has prompted a Corollary to Vlad’s Rule:

A Muslim convert who is the victim of violent crime will be identified by his Muslim name in all news stories.

This insane practice reached its absurd apogee in a flip-flop report for the BBC, where the victim was identified by his Muslim name, while the perpetrators were listed under their Christian names, in a single news article:

France has named a second Frenchman in a video showing the killing of Syrian prisoners by Islamic State (IS) militants as Mickael [sic] Dos Santos, 22.

The Muslim convert comes from an eastern Paris suburb. The other French militant was named as Maxime Hauchard, a convert from Normandy.

In the same video, the severed head of US hostage Abdul-Rahman Kassig was displayed for the camera.

This is the intricately knotted pretzel into which the Western media have contorted themselves in order to maintain the pristine purity of the whited Islamic sepulchre.

Once again, we are prompted to ask: What maintains the snowy scrim that has been so skillfully placed between the Western public and Islam? How are so many people so easily fooled?

As I mentioned at the beginning of this post, we may assume that many of those at the pinnacle of our cultural elite are cynical and evil in their deliberate effort to mislead the populace. But thousands upon thousands of the lower ranks — call them the middle managers of the culture — believe all this claptrap themselves. How is that possible?

Mass insanity is one potential explanation. But we’ll be looking at other aspects of the same syndrome in later installments.

*   The would-be Oklahoma beheader Jacob Mugambi Muriithi has been left off the list. He is an acknowledged Muslim, and “Jacob” is not considered a Muslim name, but I have been unable to discover his other name, if indeed he has one.
 

25 thoughts on “The Whited Sepulchre, Part 1

  1. Here’s a guess: Many people gain an unwarranted sense of intellectual and moral superiority and purpose by insisting that what is manifestly true to a person of average intelligence must be a fiction hiding a deeper truth, which only a superior intellect can ferret out. Why would we need intellectuals anyway if regular people could put 2 and 2 together?

    It’s the same with good and bad: A person who presumes to possess a superior moral sensibility tells us that something with the glaring appearance of evil must in actuality be misunderstood; it might even be a victim of what has the appearance of good. If the difference between good and evil were straightforward, we wouldn’t need our betters to instruct us on the matter, would we?

    When Islam came into public view as an inspiration for great evil, it seemed so clear. Thus an easy way for someone to claim intellectual and moral superiority was to say, “That is too simplistic! Sophisticated people know that good and evil cannot be what you think they are!” There’s also the cheap satisfaction of pasting the “bigot” label on other people whenever possible.

  2. Another factor: Many people aren’t really aware of the extent to which Islam was forced on people or the way that people are still pinned into the Islamic fold. They just see “a billion-plus Muslims” in the world and think they cannot all be bad people, and non-bad people wouldn’t adhere to a bad religion, would they?

    For mush-headed ecumenical-minded Christian clerics, the question is “How can people who pray five times a day be bad people?”

    • A large proportion of our mid-level cultural managers are atheists or agnostics, and hold at least some level of antipathy to religion, especially Christianity. Islam has managed to worm its way past those sentiments somehow.

      It may be because it’s a “brown people’s” religion, and therefore inherently virtuous. Or they may be acting out of subliminal fear, knowing deep in their hearts what Islam does to people who resist it. Or some combination of these.

      • Marxists tell us that once the fight is won and true history has begun, the new problems that may arise will generate their own solutions, which can be peacefully realised by the united powers of harmonious, classless society. This seems to me a piece of metaphysical optimism for which there is no evidence in historical experience. In a society in which the same goals are universally accepted, problems can be only of means, all soluble by technological methods. That is a society in which the inner life of man , the moral and spiritual and aesthetic imagination, no longer speaks at all. Is it for this that men and women should be destroyed or societies enslaved? Utopias have their value – nothing so wonderfully expands the imaginative horizons of human potentialities – but as guides to conduct they can prove literally fatal.

        Berlin, Isaiah (2012-12-31). The Proper Study Of Mankind: An Anthology of Essays (p. 12). Random House. Kindle Edition.

        So I conclude that the very notion of a final solution is not only impracticable but , if I am right, and some values cannot but clash, incoherent also. The possibility of a final solution – even if we forget the terrible sense that these words acquired in Hitler’s day – turns out to be an illusion; and a very dangerous one. For if one really believes that such a solution is possible, then surely no cost would be too high to obtain it: to make mankind just and happy and creative and harmonious for ever – what could be too high a price to pay for that? To make such an omelette, there is surely no limit to the number of eggs that should be broken – that was the faith of Lenin, of Trotsky, of Mao, for all I know of Pol Pot. Since I know the only true path to the ultimate solution of the problem of society, I know which way to drive the human caravan; and since you are ignorant of what I know, you cannot be allowed to have liberty of choice even within the narrowest limits, if the goal is to be reached. You declare that a given policy will make you happier, or freer, or give you room to breathe; but I know that you are mistaken, I know what you need, what all men need; and if there is resistance based on ignorance or malevolence, then it must be broken and hundreds of thousands may have to perish to make millions happy for all time. What choice have we, who have the knowledge, but to be willing to sacrifice them all? Some armed prophets seek to save mankind, and some only their own race because of its superior attributes, but whichever the motive, the millions slaughtered in wars or revolutions – gas chambers, gulag, genocide, all the monstrosities for which our century will be remembered – are the price men must pay for the felicity of future generations. If your desire to save mankind is serious, you must harden your heart, and not reckon the cost.

        Berlin, Isaiah (2012-12-31). The Proper Study Of Mankind: An Anthology of Essays (pp. 12-13). Random House. Kindle Edition.

      • In fact a British journalist, from the Guardian as I recall, has explicitly argued that being anti-Islam is
        “racist” because most Muslims are … “brown” people.

        Future characterizations of this kind will indeed be interesting, as the number of practising Christians in China hits the 100,000 million mark; then, combined with the scores of millions of Nigerians (and Ghanaians and Kenyans) who take their Christian faith seriously and attend church weekly, “most” practising Christians will be “yellow” or “black”. Christians may then finally attain recognised victim status in the MC/PC paradigm. I’m sure that the historical “whiteness” of Christianity will however then be invoked to deprive Christians of any consideration.

  3. These are his words: If progress is the goal, for whom are we working? Who is this Moloch who, as the toilers approach him, instead of rewarding them, draws back; and as a consolation to the exhausted and doomed multitudes, shouting ‘morituri te salutant’, can only give the … mocking answer that after their death all will be beautiful on earth. Do you truly wish to condemn the human beings alive today to the sad role … of wretched galley-slaves who, up to their knees in mud, drag a barge … with … ‘progress in the future’ upon its flag? … a goal which is infinitely remote is no goal, only … a deception; a goal must be closer – at the very least the labourer’s wage, or pleasure in work performed. 2

    The one thing that we may be sure of is the reality of the sacrifice, the dying and the dead. But the ideal for the sake of which they die remains unrealised. The eggs are broken, and the habit of breaking them grows, but the omelette remains invisible. Sacrifices for short-term goals, coercion, if men’s plight is desperate enough and truly requires such measures, may be justified. But holocausts for the sake of distant goals, that is a cruel mockery of all that men hold dear, now and at all times.

    Berlin, Isaiah (2012-12-31). The Proper Study Of Mankind: An Anthology of Essays (pp. 13-14). Random House. Kindle Edition.

  4. It seems to me that Berlin nailed it, all those years ago. This multi-cultist fantasy that all people and cultures will all get along one fine day, right here on this planet of ours, is doomed not just to failure, but to become an orgy of self-righteous destruction. This notion of true believers thinking they know best and using coercion to make everyone else agree, well that certainly sounds familiar nowadays too.

  5. This process should be thought of as at least doubly insulting to those who likely converted to islam under severe duress and yet are sold to the public as examples of muslim victims of ‘violent extremism’.

    Peter Kassig’s family must be livid if that is the case.

  6. Psychologically, it is very difficult for Western, well-meaning Gutmenschen to recognize and admit that many people in other cultures do NOT want exactly what they, themselves, want.

    Westerners are now taught that people all over the world want essentially the same things, e.g., peace, prosperity, and health for themselves and their families and the chance to give their children a better life. The Judeo-Christian ideal of the brotherhood of man feeds into this belief. The incoherent doctrines of multiculturalism support this belief.

    The idea that over a billion Muslims are taught to kill or enslave non-Muslims whenever possible and that the majority of them would do this or support such acts –that idea is too horrible to contemplate. I remember telling one well-meaning person about the life of Mohamed and what the Koran, the Hadiths and Shariah mandated about the treatment of non-Muslims. She was astonished and said, “But that’s horrible be horrible!” And I’m sure that she promptly forgot what I said. Because it was too horrible for her to contemplate.

    Denial is not a river in Egypt. This is a part of what we are up against.

    We have all noticed that there is often an almost desperate quality to the denial about Muslim teachings and behavior. To recognize the facts would be “horrible.” Rather than admitting or investigating the facts, good people find that it is much easier to be soothed by the taqiyya flowing from Muslim organizations and countries.

    For example, many people found it very reassuring to hear that Saudi Arabia and other Muslims countries publicly condemned ISIS and proclaimed that ISIS is not Islamic.

    • “Westerners are now taught that people all over the world want essentially the same things …” and meanwhile we’re also taught that we need to accept and appreciate every manifestation of cultural “diversity.”

      Logically, the two propositions clash. For propaganda purposes they add up to the insistence that we must not mention the truly significant ways that other cultures differ from ours — because that’s bigoted and because we’re just imagining those differences.

      • Certainly no one is accusing the multiculturalists of intellectual coherence!

        The corollary to your statements is the multiculti dictum that all cultures are of equal value and equal worth except Western culture which is inherently racist, imperialistic and oppressive.

  7. The logical terminus of this intellectual mobius strip-pery:

    Islam has nothing to do with Islam.

  8. Behead to be respected. Do Christians behead non believers? No. That is why they are not respected in the West.

  9. And yet — ISIS really IS following Islamic “doctrine” — I have not read the Koran but I’ve seen enough quotes from it to know that Muhammad (sp) mandated his followers to kill the unbelievers.

    I am trying to figure out what happened that caused these people to start acting up with a vengeance. Back in the day and I’m not sure when that was, the middle East was just the Middle east. Whatever they were doing amongst themselves did not concern us, other than their wars on Israel.

    And now the world is burning but our ‘betters’ don’t seem to notice much at all. So the Baron’s remark that the rich, powerful elite is somehow — um, complicit? Or at least uncaring? I wish I knew.

    Baron, I hope you will continue these essays — I find them educational and I thank you.

  10. Thank you for this Baron.

    I can’t say that I am ‘looking forward’ to your intended occasional series, if that makes sense, but I do appreciate you and others collecting this sort of information.

    I don’t know if anyone else has drawn this to your attention but Australia’s earliest recorded terrorist attack occurred January 1 1915 in what has been called the Battle of Broken Hill.

    Wikipedia has a reasonable coverage of it at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Broken_Hill

  11. I too have found that whenever I provide a clear and succinct history of Mo and the 1400 year slaughter perpetrated by his followers, with the backing of Islamic belief and texts, that I have committed the gravest sin in that I “have a bias against Islam.”

    This “bias against Islam” charge shields them from accepting facts over feelings because yes, the history is just too horrible to comtemplate and that Islam be what Islam is too jarring for tea time. After all, the only “truth” they “know” is that the only one that makes them feel secure.

    • The Times of Malta ran a story a couple of years ago about a group of poor Muslims who had been told by the council that they couldn’t use a private dwelling as a mosque. They immediately moved their activities to the promenade at Sliema, and announced that there better not be an anti-Muslim “backlash”.

      When passers-by tried to walk their dogs along the seafront (an extremely busy walkway along the shore) they were accosted by the local police. Cannot “offend” the cultural enrichers, after all.

      I wrote in to the paper and said that these Muslims were facing St Elmo’s Fort, the site of one of the greatest sacrifices in the history of the world, where the Knights of Malta laid down their lives to prevent Malta being over-run by the forces of Islam. As such, allowing these Muslims to carry on their Islamic prayers was sacriligeous, and an insult to the Knights of Malta.

      They edited the comment.

      That’s what we’re up against.

  12. “When it is weak, it goes into dormant mode. It turns its aggressive energies in upon itself…”

    I’ve been frustrated by Counter-Jihad analyses that over-emphasize the Stealth Jihad to the exclusion of the Violent Jihad (or, closely related to that lacuna, disconnect the two as though Muslims aren’t deploying both in synergy); but the quote above seems to indicate that the author of this piece is erring on the opposite extreme.

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