F. Michael Maloof
WASHINGTON – “There is no god but Allah and Muhammad is his messenger.”
This is the statement that fighters in ISIS demand of captured Christians if they don’t want to be summarily executed, mostly by beheading.
But now Raymond Ibrahim, writing for the Gatestone Institute, says that if a Christian is captured by ISIS and makes such a profession, they more than likely will be beheaded anyway.
It is a trend that is on the rise among ISIS militants and groups that are swearing allegiance to the Islamic army despite outrage expressed even by al-Qaida leader Ayman al-Zawahiri and some Muslim clerics.
ISIS’ ruthlessness became apparent in a recent example Ibrahim detailed when ISIS fighters cut off the head of a Christian man after compelling him to say the shehada, the Islamic profession of faith to Allah and to Muhammad as his messenger.
Generally, he says, once the shehada is spoken before Muslim witnesses, the speaker becomes Muslim and “thus, in theory, safeguards his life and possessions from the jihad.”
In a very graphic video, the man’s renunciation of his Christian faith and profession to Islam wasn’t good enough for ISIS fighters, who followed his statement with his summary execution.
Before he was beheaded, however, a militant upon hearing the oath said that the man wouldn’t be shot.
“He will not be killed by shooting because it is merciful for him,” the militant is quoted in English subtitles in the video as saying.
“He will be beheaded because he is a Kaffir, non-Muslim, sided with the government and was not praying at all. Everyone like him will have the same end, beheading,” the militant said.
A militant then grabs a machete, grabs the young man by his hair from behind and begins to slice off his head as blood begins to gush out amid cries from the group around them of “Allahu Akbar.”
ISIS seeks to force everyone in territories under its control – it says it’s a caliphate – to convert to its Wahhabi doctrine or face death. According to Shariah and as outlined in the Quran, non-Muslims, particularly Christians, can either convert, leave, or enter into a dhimma, or a “protection” contract, in which they must pay a jizya, or tax.
Those who don’t comply are to be killed. Already, however, tens of thousands of Christians, Yazidis, Kurds, and Shiite Muslims have been summarily slaughtered without the choice of conversion or paying a jizya.
ISIS militants apparently are skipping that critical step of giving Christians and others that option.
A British female who did convert to Islam recently threatened to behead Christians “with a blunt knife,” according to the Daily Mail.
Umm Hussain al-Britani, formerly Sally Jones of Chatham and a member of an all-girl rock band, warned in apparent emails: “You Christians all need beheading with a nice blunt knife and stuck on the railings at Raqqa (Syria)…Come here. I’ll do it for you.”
The bloody violence is striking in light of comments by former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton at a recent event at Georgetown University.
She said that women should push America to “respect” and “empathize” with its enemies.
She was speaking of the benefits of “smart power,” which she said women were in a unique position to exercise. Considered to be a Democratic frontrunner for the 2016 presidential election, Clinton said that it meant “showing respect, even for one’s enemies, trying to understand and, insofar as psychologically possible, empathize with their perspective and point of view.”
“How do you empathize with people who cut off the heads of their captors, including children?” one observer told WND.
Boko Haram of Nigeria, which last July expressed support for ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, similarly has been involved in ruthless and grisly acts against Christians, including crucifixions, slashing, cutting off of hands and feet and beheadings.
Increasingly, Sunni jihadist groups are undertaking more beheadings of Christians and even their hostages to show support for, or swear allegiance to, ISIS. In one example, more than 100 Boko Haram militants descended on Attagara, a Christian-majority village, in Nigeria.
“One villager, Sawaltha Wandala, was arriving at church for the second service when he saw children being massacred,” according to a report in Christian Today. “One six-year-old boy had been slashed and thrown into a ditch, but he was alive. Wandala picked him up and was carrying him to a hospital in Cameroon, when he was stopped by five of the militants. The men reportedly took the child from Wandala’s arms and beheaded him, then began beating the 55-year-old with tree branches. After striking him in the head with a rock, they left him for dead.”
In another case, John Yakuba, a Christian, was confronted by a Boko Haram member and told to convert to Islam or face a “painful death.”
He refused. They then tied his arms and legs to a tree, hacked his hands with a knife.
“Can you become a Muslim now?” one of the militants asked.
“You can kill my body, but not my soul,” Yakuba cried out.
The militants continued to torture him by cutting his feet and back with a machete and knife, then slashed his head and plunged an axe into his knee to the bone.
Yakuba lost consciousness and was left tied to the tree for three days. He then was found, taken to a hospital in a coma.
The same is happening in Kenya where the Somali al-Shabaab Islamic group, which also is linked to ISIS, has been involved in beheading Christians.
The “infidel” Christian men were beheaded but the Christian women, including children, were raped and enslaved.
Similar atrocities have been reported by Christians in Bangladesh, Pakistan and Iraq.
“Atrocious accounts of abduction and detention of Yazidi, Christian, as well as Turkomen and Shabak women, girls and boys, and reports of savage rapes, are reaching us in an alarming manner,” according to the United Nations.
“Although beheadings and rape in the Islamic world may seem distant from the minds of most in the West,” Ibrahim said, “the exiled Chaldean Catholic archbishop of Mosul, Iraq, warned the West that its turn will come.”
In an interview with Ibrahim, Archbishop Amel Shimoun Nona said their sufferings now should be a “prelude of those you, Europe and Western Christians, will also suffer in the near future. I lost my diocese. The physical setting of my apostolate has been occupied by Islamic radicals who want us converted or dead. But my community is still alive.”
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