What is wrong with these people? Have they lost all moral compass, all human compassion, all sense of decency? If this were a sane world, the Washington Post would close its doors in shame for publishing this, and Greg Miller and Souad Mekhennet would be looking for work at the local 7-Eleven (no offense intended to 7-Eleven).
Miller and Mekhennet would have you believe that these murders violated the tenets of Islam, and invoke as evidence the fact that while the murderers professed allegiance to the Islamic State, the Islamic State never circulated the murder video or claimed credit for the murders. The salient passage from the article is this:
But it was the targeting of unarmed women that appears to have been the greatest affront. European officials who have pored over the terror group’s propaganda archives have documented the deaths of 2,070 people in filmed executions between 2015 and 2017, mostly in Syria and Iraq. Only three of those killed were women — either stoned or shot for alleged offenses, their faces hidden in accordance with Islamic strictures.
The Moroccans violated those religious tenets. Ueland and Jespersen were killed in their underwear, their faces, necks and shoulders often in the camera’s view.
Inside Islamic State chat rooms, followers catalogued these failures, though without sympathy for the women killed. “This operation was an individual one by the brothers who are supporters,” one post said. But “they had been warned about disseminating a video without covering the naked bodies of the female prostitute tourists.”
Miller and Mekhennet go on to quote Nico Prucha, “a terrorism expert based in Madrid,” saying: “The Moroccan attack was botched from the rhetorical side to the operation side to the theological side.”
But no evidence has been produced, or can be produced, that these murders were actually botched from “the theological side.” As you can see above, the Islamic State objected to the video because the “female prostitute tourists” were not fully covered, not because it was wrong to kill them. The Qur’an still says “When you meet the unbelievers, strike the necks” (47:4), and the killers of these hikers know that very well. Miller and Mekhennet are here doing what the establishment media apparently feels duty bound to do on all possible occasions: make sure that no one thinks ill of Islam, whitewashing the crimes done in its name and in accord with its teachings.
Not only that. For Miller and Mekhennet, the worst aspect of these murders is not the ruined lives of the victims and their loved ones, but the fact that the “far-right” has “exploited” them. They spend a great deal of time smearing and defaming those who pointed out that these murders were in accord with Islamic texts and teachings. Note the quote below, which supposedly comes from an unnamed “far-right figure in Norway”: “It’s God awakening us Germanic men to action. It’s enough now. It’s enough.”
“Germanic men.” That’s right: foes of jihad terror, and those who speak honestly about how Islamic texts incite some believers to violence, are really just Nazis, and decent people should shun them.
The Washington Post has been a shameless propaganda rag and apologist for jihad terror for quite some time, but this is a new low. Close your doors, WaPo: more forthright jihad terror promoters such as Al Jazeera are doing your job better than you are.
“Murder in the Atlas Mountains,” by Greg Miller and Souad Mekhennet, Washington Post, June 21, 2019 (thanks to Vikram):
In a crime apparently intended to impress the Islamic State, two Scandinavian women were brutally slain in Morocco. The killings were seized on by the far right to attack Islam.
MARRAKESH, Morocco — Their screams must have carried for miles in the thin air of the Atlas Mountains, anguished sounds of a terrorist attack that no one was there to hear, see or stop.
Maren Ueland, 28, and Louisa Jespersen, 24, Scandinavian students who revered the outdoors, were descending North Africa’s highest peak in December when they encountered four men searching for Westerners to kill.
The men waited until after nightfall, then approached the women’s tent with knives and misplaced hopes of becoming Islamist heroes. They attacked Ueland, a Norwegian, and her Danish friend, Jespersen, in their sleeping bags, stabbed them until their bodies went limp and severed their heads in a ghastly sequence recorded on a cellphone.
The December 2018 attack, like so many in this age of mass killings and social media, was an act of senseless and performative violence. The killers, poor and uneducated, became absorbed in a violent Islamist universe they saw on the screens of their cellphones, then sought their own place in it. Their overriding aim was to impress the Islamic State, earn the status of soldiers in its apocalyptic struggle and see their own recording distributed across the group’s propaganda platforms.
Reality didn’t follow that script. The targeting of defenseless women and the abysmal quality of the recording managed to violate the standards of a terrorist group not known for having any. The Islamic State did not distribute the video, refused to acknowledge the attack and to this day has ignored the Moroccans’ pledges of loyalty.
The video went viral nonetheless. An attack that had gone unheard and unseen ended up being viewed millions of times by Islamic State supporters who didn’t share the group’s selectivity, by dark-Web bottom dwellers devoted to gore and by the morbidly curious.
The most alarming audience, however, was one that the attackers had not envisioned. Within days, the one-minute, 16-second recording spread rapidly across networks associated with the far-right and white-nationalist movements. Extremists posted gruesome scenes of the women’s deaths on Facebook, Twitter and other platforms alongside condemnations of Islam and calls for a civilizational clash.
“Look at this video of the one girl being decapitated alive,” wrote a far-right figure in Norway as he posted a link to his Twitter account. “It’s God awakening us Germanic men to action. It’s enough now. It’s enough.”
When officials in Norway and Denmark pleaded with the public to stop sharing the video, that effort was denounced by far-right groups as a betrayal of religion and race — censorship of content that revealed the true nature of Islam….