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FAREWELL POSTINGS

What Facial Hair Can Tell You About a Man's Radicalism

December 10, 2024

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I used to shave every day. Now I may not shave for two, three or even four days. I’m either making a fashion statement or it is because I am not as concerned about my appearance since being told about the state of my aneurism. It’s the latter.

Facial hair on a committed believer is definitely not a fashion statement but an indication of his radicalism in observing the example of Muhammad down to what he decreed about beards and mustaches. 

Narrated Nafi:

Ibn Umar said, The Prophet said, "Do the opposite of what the pagans do. Keep the beards (as it is) and cut the moustaches short."

Bukhari 72.780

Muhammad was brutal in the pursuit of the mission he was ostensibly giving by the god for whom he claimed to speak.

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.'"

Bukhari 52.196

A woman's radicalism is there for all to appreciate in what she voluntarily wears in public in the West such as the niqab (face covering veil) or the burqa. She will cut the throat of unbelievers, if not behead them, with as much conviction as her bearded coreligionists should the opportunity present itself, as it did for many young Muslim men during ISIS’s rampage through the Middle East:

… in the year 2015, horrific footage of infidels and apostates being decapitated has become a popular form of pornography throughout the Muslim World. All these practices, including this ghastly method of murder, find explicit support in scriptures.

Sam Harris and Maajid Nawaz, Islam and the Future of Tolerance, Harvard University Press, 2015

REMEMBERING NICHOLAS BERG, JAMES FOLEY, JOHN RIDSDEL AND ROBERT HALL

Young men getting ready to decapitate 15 Syrian military personnel.

Notice the composure of those who are about to kill with their bare hands and a knife a human being they are holding like a sheep ready to cut its throat. They are totally unperturbed, they know how it's done.

Many will have learned how during the celebration of the Feast of Sacrifice that marks the end of the Hajj pilgrimage during which, all over the Muslim worlds and in countries that allow it, millions of animals are ritually slaughtered, i.e., the animal is bled to death while fully conscious.

It is also a good time to show children how to decapitate an animal with just a knife, a large one preferably, without flinching and perhaps even enjoy it.

When Muhammad championed the beheading of his enemies, holy warriors used swords. Today, it’s a combat knife or something similar that keeps that tradition alive. Unlike an expertly wielded sword, it is totally inadequate to the task.

What it’s like for a human being to be killed the Islamic way. The Ottawa Citizen’s description of the execution of Nicholas Berg by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi (al-Qaeda’s top man in Iraq at the time) on May 7, 2004:

Zarqawi literally hacked and sawed with his knife the neck of the young twenty-six year-old idealist from Pennsylvania while he screamed in agony. In the words of Dan Garner writing in the Ottawa Citizen, Zarqawi “sawed back and forth as if he were cutting a thick rope. Berg screamed and screamed and screamed. Zarqawi kept sawing back and forth, back and forth, cutting on this side, cutting on that. Finally, Nicholas Berg’s head left his body. Zarqawi clutched it by the hair and raised it to the camera as he and his men shouted “Allahu Akbar! God is Great, God is Great.”

A holy warrior in the service of the Islamic State, with the power granted to him by the Koran, about to behead journalist James Foley with the same type of knife used to decapitate Nicholas Berg and the Syrian military personnel in the AFP photo.

We are facing an increasingly bloody and violent future made even bloodier by Islamic rituals and scriptures that condition believers, from childhood onward, not only to accept that killing unbelievers is a good thing, but to enjoy and celebrate their slaughter.

Militants rejoiced as Canadians were beheaded.

Abu Sayyaf extremists rejoiced as they watched two Canadians being beheaded in the jungles of the southern Philippines, said a still-shocked Filipino hostage who was freed Friday.

Marites Flor tearfully recalled to reporters the moments when Canadians John Ridsdel and Robert Hall were handcuffed and led away to a nearby jungle clearing to be separately decapitated.

“They were watching it and they were happy,” she said of the militants.

Philippines — The Associated Press, June 24, 2016