The Secular West Can’t Understand the Religious Roots of Islamic Violence

The Materialistic West Increasingly Only Understands Motives Prompted by Material Needs or Desires

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How does one understand violent crimes that are presented as being “without motive”? Or better yet, how does one understand violent crimes if one cannot begin to comprehend their openly stated motive?

For example, the secular and materialistic West increasingly only understands motives prompted by material needs or desires. Thus theft and rape make perfect sense as they are both materially “gratifying.” The West also still understands generic human “passions,” such as violence and even murder for personal revenge and so forth.

How does one understand violent crimes if one cannot begin to comprehend their openly stated motive?

But what to make of a man who suddenly decides to stab a random group of people or children? What could his motive possibly be? Or what about a woman who randomly enters a church during a service and starts shrieking unintelligibly?

Because the West cannot understand what would prompt such ostensibly inexplicable behavior or categorize them according to its own paradigms, all too often those who commit these “bizarre” crimes are dismissed as “crazy.” They seem to have no motive, and therefore need medical and/or psychiatric care.

Enter Muslim criminality in the West. I cannot begin to tell you how many hundreds of reports I’ve read over the last two decades concerning Muslim acts of violence and intolerance that end with the authorities concluding that the culprits acted without any motive and must therefore be suffering from a mental disorder and in need of treatment.

Standard Practice

Here are just a few recent examples, mostly from those two European bastions of Muslim migration, France and Germany:

  • France, Oct. 18: A woman who had “dedicated her life to” Islam decapitated her daughter. Official diagnosis: “mental health problems.”
  • France, Sept 26: After noting that an unknown man hurled excrement at two churches — an old Islamic tactic — the report concludes that the “man could be suffering from mental health problems.”
  • U.S., Sept. 23: Although a jury found a Muslim man who murdered 10 people in a Colorado supermarket guilty, the Associated Press describes him in its opening sentence as “a mentally ill man.”
  • Germany, Sept 16: A Muslim migrant from Syria with a history of criminal behavior stretching back to his arrival in 2017, spotted a 79-year-old German man wearing a cross. He tore it off, then punched the septuagenarian in the face. News reports at the time stated that “the Syrian is now in a psychiatric facility.”
  • Germany, Aug. 16: Mursal Mohamed Seid, a Somalian Muslim migrant, savagely murdered a German man. According to news reports, “He stabbed his victim 111 times with a knife before beheading him … The attack was so violent that the victim’s intestines spilled out while he was still alive … Seid is said to have committed the crime in a schizophrenic delusion and was therefore placed in the high-security ward of the district hospital in Mainkofen, Bavaria.”
  • France, July 24: “An individual” entered a church, “threw water on the candles, then on the sacristan who was coming towards him, performed prayers in Arabic, recited verses from the Koran and shouted ‘Allah will judge.’” The report concludes that the individual is “suffering from psychiatric disorders.”

Why were all these Muslim criminals — who again represent only a drop in the bucket of similar examples I’ve encountered over the last two decades — deemed to be insane?

Because the West cannot understand Muslim — specifically jihadist — motives. And it can’t understand them because it is prevented from understanding them by the powers-that-be, which have done everything possible to suppress and censor the truth about Islam from reaching the average person in the West.

Unrestricted Warfare

The truth is that Islam engenders hatred for non-Muslims. It calls for intolerance, violence, and even the outright slaughter of non-Muslims simply because they are non-Muslims. As such, past and present, Muslims have done what may seem unintelligible — and therefore “crazy” — from a secular Western perspective, from desecrating Christian cemeteries and beheading Christian statues to randomly stabbing and slaughtering non-Muslims (a regular feature of Western European cities with large Muslim populations).

Indeed, one need only consider two interrelated facts to make sense of it all. First, global jihadist groups regularly issue statements calling on Muslims to assault and kill non-Muslims, especially in the West. Earlier this year, for example, ISIS, in keeping with Koran 9:5, called on Muslims to kill non-Muslims everywhere, including

on the streets and roads of America, Europe, and the world. Break into their homes, kill them and steal their peace of mind by any means you can lay hands on. … detonate explosives, burn them with grenades and fiery agents, shoot them with bullets, cut their throats with sharp knives, and run them over with vehicles. … Come at them from every door, kill them by the worst of means, turn their gatherings and celebrations into bloody massacres, do not distinguish between a civilian kaffir [infidel], and a military one, for they are all kuffar and the ruling against them is one…. Intentionally seek easy targets before hard ones, civilian targets before military ones, religious targets like synagogues and churches before others, for … our battle with them is a religious one and we kill them wherever we come upon them in response to Allah Almighty’s command.

And now for the really disturbing part of this equation: A Pew poll revealed that, in 11 countries alone, at least 63 million and as many as 287 million Muslims support ISIS. Similarly, 81% of respondents to a recent Al Jazeera poll said they support the Islamic State.

Does that mean that, in the authorities’ minds, randomly killing three innocent children can have no motive, and must therefore be … wait for it … crazy?

So let us add up all the facts: 1) Islamic groups like ISIS regularly call for the outright slaughter of non-Muslims; 2) a significant percentage of the world’s 1.8 billion Muslims are sympathetic to these sentiments because — and here is the grand point — ISIS is not the source of these sentiments, the Koran and Hadith are; 3) Muslims go on to engage in murderous attacks and other savage behavior; but 4) because the second point has been devotedly hidden from the people of the West, such behavior becomes inexplicable, and must therefore be allotted to “mental disorders.”

Incidentally, it appears that we are being primed for another Muslim murderer to be sheltered behind the “psychiatric disorder” shield. According to a recent report, Axel Rudakubana, the African son of migrants who randomly stabbed three small girls to death in England this summer, is apparently not being charged under the Terrorism Act. “For a matter to be declared a terrorist incident, motivation would need to be established,” said Serena Kennedy, the chief constable of Merseyside police.

Does that mean that, in the authorities’ minds, randomly killing three innocent children can have no motive, and must therefore be … wait for it… crazy?

Published originally under the title “The West’s Glaring Blind Spot Regarding Muslim Madness and Islamic Insanity.”

Raymond Ibrahim, a specialist in Islamic history and doctrine, is the author of Defenders of the West: The Christian Heroes Who Stood Against Islam (2022); Sword and Scimitar: Fourteen Centuries of War between Islam and the West (2018); Crucified Again: Exposing Islam’s New War on Christians (2013); and The Al Qaeda Reader (2007). He has appeared on C-SPAN, Al-Jazeera, CNN, NPR, and PBS and has been published by the New York Times Syndicate, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, the Financial Times, the Weekly Standard, the Chronicle of Higher Education, and Jane’s Islamic Affairs Analyst. Formerly an Arabic linguist at the Library of Congress, Ibrahim guest lectures at universities, briefs governmental agencies, and testifies before Congress. He has been a visiting fellow/scholar at a variety of Institutes—from the Hoover Institution to the National Intelligence University—and is the Judith Friedman Rosen Fellow at the Middle East Forum and the Distinguished Senior Shillman Fellow at the Gatestone Institute.
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