Boreal

CHILDREN AND THE KORAN

The End of Empathy

Getting Kids To Feel Nothing

How do you get kids to feel nothing? I remember my parents telling me, when I was old enough to appreciate the silliness, about the day I came home crying and vowing to kill the Romans. That was the day I first heard about the crucifixion of Jesus. Later I would learn that was not the message of the Gospels. Do children who grow up with the Koran experience the same transformation?

Christian children are told early on the story of the Crucifixion as an example of pain and suffering endured on their behalf to fire their imaginations and get them to listen to the rest of the story. This is done even when the initial impact is one of hatred for those who cruelly murdered their hero and would-be saviour.

Muhammad lived much of his adult life in comfort and luxury; first, courtesy of his first wife’s wealth, which he exhausted on the promotion of his new religion and which brought on a short interlude of poverty, then from the property taken from unbelievers killed in the war he started and pursued to get everyone to worship Allah and only Allah.

Narrated Abu Huraira:

Allah's Apostle said, "I have been ordered to fight with the people till they say, 'None has the right to be worshipped but Allah', and whoever says, 'None has the right to be worshipped but Allah,' his life and property will be saved by me except for Islamic law, and his accounts will be with Allah, (either to punish him or to forgive him.)"

Bukhari 52.196

So what do you tell Muslim children to get them to believe that Muhammad is special, even more special than Jesus, who died in spectacular fashion on his followers’ behalf? It is not enough to tell them that the Crucifixion was an illusion concocted by Allah.

4:157 And their saying: “We have killed the Messiah, Jesus, son of Mary and the Messenger of Allah.” They neither killed nor crucified him; but it was made to appear so unto them. Indeed, those who differ about him are in doubt about it. Their knowledge does not go beyond conjecture, and they did not kill him for certain;

4:158 Rather Allah raised him unto Him. Allah is Mighty and Wise.

Hooked on Sadism

The Koran has a ready-made solution to impressing kids. If you can’t wow them with the suffering of the man who brought Your Message to the masses, then gross them out and terrify them with the pain that others will endure for expressing doubts as to his credentials. It is what teachers do every day around the world, and Canada is no exception, to get kids hooked on Muhammad and perhaps inadvertently develop a love of seeing others suffer for their skepticism.

The throwing of a rock may have been added for effect. In the hadiths of the Sunni Canon, where many iterations of the story of Abu Lahab’s transgression can be found, there is no mention, as in the following, of a rock thrown in Muhammad’s direction:

Narrated Ibn Abbas:

When the Verse: 'And warn your tribe of near kindred.' (26.214) was revealed. Allah's Apostle went out, and when he had ascended As-Safa mountain, he shouted, "O Sabahah!"

The people said, "Who is that?"

Then they gathered around him, whereupon he said, "Do you see? If I inform you that cavalrymen are proceeding up the side of this mountain, will you believe me?"

They said, "We have never heard you telling a lie."

Then he said, "I am a plain warner to you of a coming severe punishment."

Abu Lahab said, "May you perish! You gathered us only for this reason?"

Then Abu Lahab went away. So the "Surat: ul-LAHAB" 'Perish the hands of Abu Lahab!' (111.1) was revealed.

Bukhari 60.495

What we know for sure is that the tethered-like-a-dog wife of Abu Lahab, who will have the abject duty of assisting God in roasting her husband by gathering the wood that the Compassionate will use to stoke the fire, at no time tried to physically harm God’s spokesman.

Allah has very much a sadist’s understanding of empathy, i.e., feeling someone else’s pain: that it can be used to add to the suffering you wish to inflict. This will be part of the lesson that children will take away—along with the denial of compassion for those who do not care for the doomsday prophet as a person or the message he communicated—whether it was their teachers’ intention or not.

In many ways, the wife’s suffering will be greater than that of her husband; not only will she have to watch her beloved roasted over and over like an animal on a spit, but God has compelled her to be His accomplice in torturing her spouse.

The children will know from their reading of the Koran that Abu Lahab’s agony will never end. That is how it is in Allah’s rotisserie.

4:56 Those who have disbelieved Our Signs, We shall surely cast them into the Fire; every time their skins are burnt, We will replace them by other skins, so that they might taste the punishment. Allah indeed is Mighty and Wise!

Threatening to send people to some unholy horrible place is what gods do to get their way, but Allah in His Koran does not stop there. In that holy book, the hell He created seems to be designed to also satisfy a deep-seated pathology evident in innumerable revelations where He displays all the symptoms of an unabashed sadist who revels in personally ensuring that the intense pain never ends.

With such horrific descriptions and a constant refrain of hatred for unbelievers, can children raised on such a book ever experience the transformation that I did after wanting to take revenge on the Romans who killed Jesus?

Sheema Khan’s Canadian teenagers obviously have not, and this lack of empathy can only increase as we make room in an ostensibly secular school system for kids to shout out sadistic, hate-filled verses during their daily devotion, i.e., prayers.

They may not grow up to be radicals, but when the radicals strike they will not feel your pain because they will have been taught to loathe you unconditionally and forever for not wholeheartedly worshipping an Arab's understanding of a Jewish concept. If enough believers don’t feel your pain then there is no hope for any of us.

A Real Life Example of the Appeal of Scriptural Sadism

What if you could recreate the sadism that is a hallmark of Allah's Hereafter in the here-and-now? Your run-of-the-mill holy warrior can only do so much. Doctors are another matter, and they are not immune to the seductive cruelty that saturates Islam’s Holy Book. Given the opportunity, trained medical personnel can do a very good approximation of the Almighty at his pitiless, cruelest best as revealed in Revelation 4:56, the one about replacing burnt skin.

Doctor reading his Kora Issam Abuanza, 37, is a doctor who left his family in the UK in 2014 to join Islamic State in Syria.

On social media, Dr Abuanza has said he wished that a Jordanian pilot burnt alive by IS had taken longer to die.

On his Facebook page he is pictured wearing doctors' scrubs and carrying a gun in a holster.

He smiles as he raises his finger in the air - a symbolic gesture to represent the oneness of God that is commonly seen in the iconography of Islamic extremism.

Another image shows him in combat fatigues, cradling an automatic rifle and reading the Koran.

He wrote about the killing by IS militants of the captured Jordanian pilot who was burnt alive, complaining that: "I would've liked for them to burn him extremely slowly and I could treat him so we could torch him once more."

BBC News May 24, 2016

Dr. Abuanza, a poster child for Arendt’s “banality of evil,” was trained to heal and relieve suffering, not to torture and murder, but he could not resist.

Imagine the Koran's impact on impressionable young minds, children who are expected to have read or mouthed the entire hateful, sadistic liturgy by the time they are seven years old then, over a period of a year or so and every year for the rest of their lives, repeat and remember it all as part of their daily devotion.

Al-Mughirah

Al-Mughirah, while not mentioned by name, is another disrespectful doubter that has Allah salivating at the prospect of getting His hands on him.

It is said that al-Mughirah insulted Muhammad by making a joke about God not favouring him with sons. Instead of providing His beloved mouthpiece with male descendants and making a fool of Mughirah, Allah again prefers boasting of a good roasting rather than do what should be child's play for a god.

The promised roasting is not only for giving Muhammad a hard time, but for Mughirah coming to the conclusion, after much reflection, that the Koran was nothing but a fabrication, and a very creepy one at that.

Al-Mughirah was asked by another so-called enemy of God’s spokesman, Abu Jahl, to eavesdrop on Muhammad sermonizing and report back about this Koran.

Mughirah listened to his allegedly illiterate tribesman recite verses from the 41st surah. After hearing about how Allah had destroyed ‘Ad and Thamud, he had heard enough, and returned to tell Abu Jahl what he thought. He told him that it wasn’t poetry, soothsaying, or sermonizing but that it made his skin crawl. He had to think about it some more.

The next day he told Abu Jahl that, as far as he was concerned, the Koran was sorcery. With that introduction, the following verses should make sense. .

74:18 He reflected and reckoned.

74:19 May he perish how he reckoned!

74:20 Again, may he perish how he reckoned!

74:21 Then he considered;

74:22 Then he frowned and turned pale.

74:23 Then he turned back and waxed proud,

74:24 Saying: “This is indeed nothing but sorcery recounted;

74:25 “This is only the discourse of mortals.”

74:26 I will roast him in Saqar (one of the names of Hell).

What may also be considered creepy and excessively sadistic is the Compassionate vowing to burn His brand on the poor man's lips.

68:15 If our verses are recited to him, he says: “Legends of the ancients.”

68:16 We shall brand him upon the muzzle.