BorealNo Pity for ChildrenJustifying Two MassacresOn December 16, 2014, six Taliban entered a school in the Pakistani city of Peshawar and massacred 141 people, including 132 children between eight and eighteen years of age. Following is how a Taliban supporter justified the killing of the children: Human life only has value among you worldly materialistic thinkers. For us, this human life is only a tiny, meaningless fragment of our existence. Our real destination is the Hereafter. We don’t just believe it exists, we know it does. Death is not the end of life. It is the beginning of existence in a world much more beautiful than this. As you know, the [Urdu] word for death is “intiqall.” It means transfer, not end. Paradise is for those of pure hearts. All children have pure hearts. They have not sinned yet … They have not yet been corrupted by [their kafir parents]. We did not end their lives. We gave them new ones in Paradise, where they will be loved more than you can imagine. They will be rewarded for their martyrdom. After all, we also martyr ourselves with them. The last words they heard were the slogan of Takbeer [Allah U Akbar]. Allah Almighty says himself in Surhah Al-Imran [3:169-170] that they are not dead. You will never understand this. If your faith is pure, you will not mourn them, but celebrate their birth into Paradise. Sam Harris, Islam and the Future of Tolerance, Harvard University Press, 2015, p. 86 This justification would not have been alien to Canadian schoolchildren raised on the Koran who, in an opinion piece by Globe and Mail contributor Sheema Khan, had their own reason for condoning the massacre of even more children. Khan is the Globe and Mail’s goto insider and blame deflector when a biased explanation supported by questionable evidence as to why Islamic terrorists do what they do is called for to allay the fear of an increasingly skeptical populace that the latest massacre of unwary citizens of a Western democracy has nothing to do with scriptures. On Sept. 3, 2004, I had just finished speaking about the life of Mary – regarded as one of the best women in history – to a group of Muslim teens. Hours before, though, news of a violent end to the Beslan hostage crisis in southern Russia had broken, in which 186 children were killed. Armed Islamist groups had stormed a local school a few days before, held teachers and students captive without food or water and wired the gym with explosives. Rather than continue further discussions about Mary, I wanted to ask the youth about the murder of innocent civilians – especially children – in Beslan. The males were unequivocal: The Russians got what they deserved, for their brutal war against the Chechens. It was revenge, pure and simple. Stunned, I asked: Did Prophet Mohammed ever kill children and unarmed adults? No, they answered. Did he condone such acts? No. Did he condemn such acts? Yes, they answered. I concluded: So, who will you follow? Mohammed, or the opposite? They acknowledged the former. I thought of this exchange following the terrorist attack in Manchester last week. Much has been written about the life of the assailant, Salman Abedi, a second-generation Libyan born and raised in Britain. His sister surmised that he had acted in revenge for the killing of Muslim children by coalition forces in the Middle East... How the Muslim community can tackle the scourge of extremism, Sheema Khan, Special to The Globe and Mail, Tuesday, May 30, 2017 We are compounding our failure to reach the children by literally making room for in them in the public school system, encouraging them to shout out in unison prayers which must inevitably, as they pray their way through the entire Koran, include verses which demand that the hated unbelievers be dealt with harshly and that includes children. Khan is technically correct that the Prophet, to my knowledge, did not personally participate in the murders committed on his behalf or at his insistence. But, he does condone such murders, her argument to the contrary notwithstanding! The Prophet orchestrated the slaughter of hundreds of unarmed men e.g. Massacre of the Banu Qurayzah, and encouraged others to assassinate men and women whose only crime was questioning in song and rhyme his claim to being an intimate of the Almighty and who no longer posed any threat: Dead Poets, Mecca Surrenders. His example, even as a bystander (his so-called silent approval), is meant as a guide for the believers and many dutifully follow its most wretched expression to this day e.g. the mass murders committed by Islamic State, the Charlie Hebdo murders... Khan’s portrayal of Mary as more than a pawn in Allah's plan to diminish the role of her Son so as to elevate that of the Prophet, is also disingenuous. By allowing a religion that does not even consider children worthy of compassion to be praised in a public school setting we are not only accomplices in our own deceit but in deceiving children into becoming the pitiless protagonists of Khan's article. Bernard Payeur Women Who Bite Children to Death
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