Sunday, 8 November 2009

The Significance of Allahu Akbar
by Gamaliel Isaac
 
 
Major Nidal Malik Hasan, a U.S. Army psychiatrist, while shouting Allahu Akbar  (Allah is great) murdered twelve people and wounded twenty-one inside Fort Hood in Texas on Thursday, November 5, 2009.  Fox News interviewed a “criminal profiler” who asserted definitively that this attack had nothing to do with religion. Some people suggested he had post traumatic stress syndrome, apparently they didn't know he had never served in combat. NPR and the Washington Post said his motive remains unclear.  
Muslims have a long history of committing atrocities to the cry of Allahu Akbar.  When the Muslim Turks took children away from their infidel parents to make them into soldiers for Allah, their mothers and sisters would desperately follow the horsemen who would drive them away with whips with loud cries of Allah.
 
    When the PLO occupied Lebanon they massacred the Christians there.  Bat Ye'or in her book Eurabia wrote about one of the massacres as follows:
An eyewitness gave an account of the massacre of 582 Christians in Damur by the PLO and its Muslim allies on January 22, 1976: "The attack took place from the mountain behind.  It was an apocalypse.  They were coming, thousands and thousands, shouting 'Allahu Akbar! God is great!  Let us attack them for the Arabs, let us offer a holocaust to Mohammad!'  And they were slaughtering everyone in their path, men, women and children."
    When EgyptAir co-pilot Gamil Al Batuti was alone in the cockpit in Oct 31, 1999 of FLIGHT 990 he shut off the autopilot and the engines and put the aircraft into a steep dive, all the while intoning:
  Allahu Akbar.
   The Boeing 767 broke up in midair and crashed into the ocean off Nantucket Island, killing all 217 souls aboard (Allah is the Greatest worldnetdaily 7/31/04).
    Israel National News reported on 11/8/02 how Soldiers near Kedumim, between Shechem and Raanana, prevented a major terror attack on the previous night.  They ordered a PA taxi to stop as it approached the Jit Junction checkpoint, and the two passengers to get out.  The soldiers, standing about 20 meters away, told the men to lift their shirts - a common measure used to check if suspected terrorists are wearing an explosives belt.  The two Arabs did so, uncovering exactly that type of explosive apparel on one of them.  The terrorist then yelled, "Allahu Akbar" and started running towards the soldiers.  The latter fired at him, he fell to the ground - and exploded.  The second Arab, his apparent accomplice, was also killed in the blast.  A search of the taxi turned up another bomb in the trunk.   Ironically the cry of Allahu Akbar saved an Israeli border policeman from being stabbed by a knife wielding 16 year old girl.  He heard her cries of Allahu Akbar and turned around in time to avoid her knife (Israel National News May 29, 01).
   At around 7  Israel time on March 2, 2002, a Moslem walked onto packed Beit Israel Street in the quarter of the same name and detonated a device - packed with explosives and metal - leveling a community that was celebrating the end of the sabbath.
 
   "I saw children and babies wounded," said an Israeli student who identified himself as Efraim. "I saw a friend of mine with his hand blasted off."
   Hearing the news, Palestinian demonstrators in the West Bank town of Ramallah, where Palestinian Authority leader Yasser Arafat has been holed up for three months, rejoiced, pumping their fists in the air and shouting, "Allahu Akbar!" (New York Post Mar 3, 02).
   On January 5, 2002 A Moslem man attempted to kill Rabbi Gabriel Farhi, 34, in a Paris synagogue on Shabbat (Arutz 7 news 1/5/03).  The would-be murderer entered the synagogue, yelled, "Allahu Akbar", and stabbed the rabbi in his stomach.  The victim is a member of a Jewish liberal movement in France, and active in efforts to bring about dialogue between Jews and members of other faiths, especially Moslems. 
   
 In 2004 Nick Berg, 26, a freelance telecommunications contractor from West Chester, Pa. was beheaded by Muslims to the cry of Allahu Akbar.
  According to The New York Times (9/5/04), when Muslim terrorists took over an elementary school in Belsan, Russia, they shouted "Allahu Akbar" ("Allah is the greatest").  The terrorists were killed but managed to kill 156 children first.  (Foxnews 9/7/04)
 
      In 2005, A 30-year-old Palestinian Muslim woman, was apparently murdered by members of her family for having had a romance with a Christian man from Taiba. When her family discovered that she had been involved in a forbidden relationship with a Christian, they apparently forced her to drink poison.  A Taiba resident recounted the revenge of the Muslims (keep in mind the Muslim killed her not the Christians)   (Khaled Abu Toameh, Muslims Ransack Christian Village, The Jerusalem Post, 9/5/05)
 

“More than 500 Muslim men, chanting Allahu Akbar [God is great], attacked us at night.  They poured kerosene on many buildings and set them on fire. Many of the attackers broke into houses and stole furniture, jewelry and electrical appliances."

Another resident said

"It was like a war, they arrived in groups, and many of them were holding clubs,  Some people saw them carrying weapons. They first attacked houses belonging to the Khoury family [looking for the man who had the affair with the women, not realizing he had already fled the village.] Then they went to their relatives. They entered the houses and destroyed everything there."

Oriana Fallaci, in her book The Rage and The Pride tells the story of twelve impure women:
(what was the impurity they had committed I never knew) whom in 1975 the sons of Allah executed at Dacca, Bangladesh.  They executed them in the stadium, with bayonet stabs in the thorax, and at the presence of twenty thousand believers who sitting in the tribunes prayed Allah Akbar, Allah Akbar. God is great, God is great...
Did they take off their burkahs, did they unveil their faces to drink a glass of water?  Did they challenge the prohibition to sing, did they hum a lullaby to some newborn child?  Or did they commit the crime of laughing? (Yessir: of laughing.  I wrote "laughing".  Didn't you know that Fundamentalist Moslems forbid women to laugh?)
     The book Thunder from the East tells of a frightening scene in which the cry of "Allahu Akbar" was heard.   An excerpt is given below:
He must have been a raffishly handsome young man, with his bushy eyebrows, large coal-black eyes, high-cheekboned face, and thick mop of black hair dangling over his ears. He looked pale but improbably serene, showing no sign of the torture he had endured, and those eyes were still wide open and frozen in a final instant of surprise. He had a strong, projecting chin, but his head ended a few inches below that chin in a jagged eruption of blood, tissue, and bone. His head had been hacked off with a machete and was impaled on a bamboo stake, and he seemed to be staring at me.
 
I stared back. That abrupt transition from human flesh to bamboo stake wrenched my gut and paralyzed my legs. I was scared stiff. The mob that had killed him was in front of me now, the killers waving machetes and screaming Allahu Akbar, God is great. There were about two dozen of them, mostly men in their twenties and thirties, all riding motorcycles slowly down the main street of the little farmtown of Turen, Indonesia.
       On March 31.2004, four Americans guards were driving their SUVs through the Iraqi city of Fallujah.  Iraqis ambushed them and dragged their burned and buthered bodies through the streets, and hung two of them from a bridge - while cheering, dancing and chanting anti-American slogans (New York Post 4/1/04).    Meanwhile, 12 miles from Fallujah, five GIs were killed when a bomb exploded under their armored personnel carrier.  A crowd of hundreds of men and boys quickly surrounded the SUVs, flashing victory signs and chanting, "Long live Islam," "Allahu Akbar (God is Great)" and "We sacrifice our blood and souls for Islam."

   According to the New York Post:

As plumes of inky smoke rose into the sky, the mob pulled an American who was still alive from one of the SUVs.

"He had gotten shot in his chest," truck driver Ahmed Obayid, 38, told the Washington Post.  "The people killed him by throwing bricks on him until they killed him.  They cut off his arm and his leg and his head and they were cheering and dancing."

   The riots and burnings in France are accompanied by chants of Allahu Akbar (Spencer, Jihad in Europe: Frontpagemag 11/8/05).  A video of the rioters chanting Allahu Akbar can be viewed by clicking here
      On March 20, 2008 an 18-year-old Arab man grabbed the yarmulke of a Rabbi at the 4th Ave. and 9th Street train station in the Park Slope section of Brooklyn, "while his friends kicked and punched the victim while screaming 'Allahu Akbar.'"  The perpetrator grabbed the rabbi's head covering, then fled the scene only to be hit by a vehicle on a nearby street. The report said police arrested him and requested an ambulance, but were trying "to brush off the crime as just teenagers who don't know what 'Allahu akbar' means."
 
When Islamic hijackers crashed flight 93 into the ground near Shanksville PA on Sept 11, 2001, the last words of the terrorists recorded by the flight recorder were:  Allahu AkbarWhen Sheik Omar Bakri Muhammad gave a sermon at a London Meeting hall where a giant screen behind him showed images of the World Trade Center falling some of the audience shouted, Allahu Akbar. (Militant Imams Under Scrutiny Across Europe, New York Times 1/25/05)
 
      What does this tell us about Allah and Islam? What does this tell us about the motives of Major Nidal Malik Hasan?  The Washington Post and NPR need wonder no more.
 
Written by Gamaliel Isaac
Email: gamalieli@hotmail.com or
isaacgam@uphs.upenn.edu