RE: virus: The Berg Execution

From: Dr Sebby (drsebby@hotmail.com)
Date: Fri May 14 2004 - 16:36:10 MDT

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    ....you have to admit, if you werent a soldier with orders to
    stay...head-choppers make a very big impression, such that many would prefer
    to flee. this of course gives rise to the suggestion that the darker side
    of humanity has an edge - unless those opposed to gruesome acts lacking
    empathy unite, which is much harder to do than cut off a few heads. and
    with the spread of islam as it is, one has to wonder.

    DrSebby.(against chopping off heads)
    "Courage...and shuffle the cards".

    ----Original Message Follows----
    From: "Joe Dees" <hidden@lucifer.com>
    Reply-To: virus@lucifer.com
    To: virus@lucifer.com
    Subject: RE: virus: The Berg Execution
    Date: Fri, 14 May 2004 09:05:04 -0600

    CHOPPING HEADS

    By AMIR TAHERI
    http://www.nypost.com/postopinion/opedcolumnists/20835.htm
    May 14, 2004 -- THE murder of Nick Berg, a 26-year-old American businessman,
    by a group of Islamist terrorists in Iraq continues to send shock waves
    through much of the West. What has impressed most people is the fact that
    the terrorists cut Mr. Berg's head in the way that sheep are beheaded at the
    annual Feast of the Sacrifice.
    Berg is, of course, not the first to be murdered in such a gruesome manner.
    Nor, alas, is he likely to be the last. For the cutting of heads (in Arabic,
    qata al-raas) has been the favorite form of Islamist execution for more than
    14 centuries.
    In the famous battles of early Islam, with the Prophet personally in command
    of the army of believers, the heads of enemy generals and soldiers were
    often cut off and put on sticks to be shown around villages and towns as a
    warning to potential adversaries.
    In 680, the Prophet's favorite grandson, Hussein bin Ali, had his head
    chopped off in Karbala, central Iraq, by the soldiers of the Caliph Yazid.
    The severed head was put on a silver platter and sent to Damascus, Yazid's
    capital, before being sent further to Cairo for inspection by the Governor
    of Egypt. The Caliph's soldiers also cut off the heads of all of Hussein's
    71 male companions, including the one-year-old baby boy Ali-Asghar.
    Islamic history is full of chopped heads being sent around by special
    delivery to reassure rulers, to terrorize foes and to impress the common
    folk. In 1821, the Qajar king of Persia ordered a week of celebrations when
    he received the severed head of a Russian general who had been captured in a
    battle near Baku. In 1842, the Afghans massacred the British garrison in
    Kabul, a total of 2,000 men and their wives and children, chopping off their
    heads and putting them on sticks to decorate the city. (They allowed one man
    to leave to report to the British.)
    In 1885, it was the turn of British Gen. Gordon to have his head chopped off
    and put on a stick in Khartoum after it had fallen to the forces of the
    Mahdi. Slightly later, Mullah Hassan, the Somali rebel known to the British
    as "the mad mullah" but to his fanatical supporters as "the Shah," made a
    habit of chopping Western heads in what is now Somalia. At one point he had
    a large collection of severed Italian and British heads.
    Iran's Khomeinist mullahs also love severed heads. In April 1980, Ayatollah
    Sadeq Khalkhali wanted to cut off the heads of eight American soldiers who
    had died in a failed hostage rescue mission in the Iranian desert. He was
    prevented from doing so thanks to a last minute intervention by the Swiss
    government. In 1986, the Khomeinist mullahs cut off the head of William
    Buckley, the CIA's Beirut station chief who had been kidnapped by the
    Hezbollah and sent to Tehran for interrogation.

    And in 1992, the mullahs sent a "specialist" to cut off the head of Shapour
    Bakhtiar, the shah's last prime minister, in a suburb of Paris. When the
    news broke, Hashemi Rafsanjani, then president of the Islamic Republic,
    publicly thanked Allah for having allowed "the severing of the head of the
    snake."
    In 1993, Fereidun Farrokhzad, one of Iran's most famous pop stars, had his
    head chopped off in Germany by a Khomeinist hit squad after the mullahs
    issued a fatwa for his murder.
    Chopping off heads was widely practiced throughout the Afghan wars of the
    1980s. An estimated 3,000 Soviet soldiers, many of them Muslims, had their
    heads cut off by the Mujahedeen, who at the time enjoyed U.S. and other
    Western support. (In other cases the Mujahedeen cut off the testicles of the
    Soviet soldiers and fed them to other Soviet prisoners.)
    Needless to say, rival Mujahedeen also chopped off each other's heads. The
    group led by one Haji Akbari was especially notorious in that respect. One
    of its members was Osama bin Laden.
    Throughout the 1990s, head-chopping was routinely carried out by the Army
    for Islamic Salvation (AIS), the Islamic Armed Group (GIA), the Salafi Group
    for Preaching and Armed Jihad (GSPAJ) and other Islamist terror outfits.
    One Algerian specialist in slitting throats and cutting off heads was known
    as Momo le Nain (Muhammad the Midget). He was a 20-plus-year-old butcher's
    apprentice recruited by the GIA for the purpose of cutting off people's
    heads. In 1996 in Ben-Talha, a suburb of the capital Algiers, Momo cut off a
    record 86 heads in one night, including the heads of more than a dozen
    children.
    In recognition of his exemplary act of piety, the GIA sent him to Mecca for
    pilgrimage. Last time we checked, Momo was still at large somewhere in
    Algeria.
    Four years ago, Iran was shocked by the murder of the well-known dissident
    leader Dariush Foruhar and his wife Parvaneh. The couple, in their 70s, had
    their heads chopped off and displayed on their mantelpiece. The regime
    blamed "rogue elements" within its Ministry for Intelligence and Security.
    But no one was punished.
    Cutting heads is frequently practiced against clerics from non-Islamic
    faiths or even rival Islamic sects. At least four Christian priests and nine
    Sunni Muslim muftis have been murdered in that way in Iran since 2001.
    In Pakistan, rival Sunni and Shiite groups have made a habit of sending
    cut-off heads of each other's activists by special delivery. By one
    estimate, over 400 heads have been chopped off and mailed since 1990.
    Chopping heads is also practiced by Muslim militants on the Indonesian
    island of Borneo as a means of driving the Christian majority out. It has
    been effective in forcing nearly half of the island's Christians packing.
    At one point in the 1980s, the Abu-Sayyaf Islamist group in Mindanao, The
    Philippines, used the tactic of severing heads as a means of terrorizing the
    security forces.
    Americans should also remember Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal
    reporter who was brutally murdered in the same way in Pakistan over two
    years ago.
    Although head-chopping is now seen as a mode of communication between
    Islamist militants and the Western world, the overwhelming victims have been
    Muslims.
    Mankind has a natural propensity to become used to the worst atrocities and
    factor in the cruelest facts of life. But the sight of a severed head will
    continue to shock even the most blasé of the cynics. This is why those who
    are defying the whole of humanity in this war on terrorism are certain to
    continue to employ people like Momo le Nain.

    ----
    This message was posted by Joe Dees to the Virus 2004 board on Church of 
    Virus BBS.
    <http://virus.lucifer.com/bbs/index.php?board=61;action=display;threadid=30291>
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