• Happy New Year Everyone…Except Citizens of Volgograd, Russia

    boy
    The boy next door…

    You have heard this story so many times, it is now almost boring:

    Once upon a time there was a young, amiable, (raised or converted) Muslim, who everyone thought was the typical kid on the block. At one point in his life, he got more deeply involved in his faith, spending time reading religious texts. As his obsession with Islamic doctrines (including Jihad, of course) grew further, he communicated with, and ultimately joined, a group of like-minded people, known to the public as “Islamist Militants”. And the next thing his family learned, to their disbelief, was that the pleasant young man they knew had given humanity another lesson in Allah’s boundless love and forgiveness, in the form of charred metal and minced human flesh on the streets.

    (But the story doesn’t end here. Read on.)

    ...suddenly looking a lot scarier.
    …suddenly looking a lot scarier.

    And what better way to usher in the new year than by giving the “kafirs” (the pejorative Arabic word for infidels) just such a lesson?

    On Sunday, a man authorities have identified as Pavel Pechyonkin, a 32-year-old paramedic, detonated the equivalent of 10 kilograms of explosives in the main hall of the Volgograd train station filled with New Year’s travelers. The attack killed 17 people and injured 45 others.

    The very next morning, at rush hour, a tram carrying Volgograd commuters was blown up in front of a busy market, killing 15 people and injuring 23 others.

    Wonderful. So what do we know about this Pavel guy?

    The suspect, identified as Pavel Pechyonkin, worked as a paramedic with an ambulance service but left home in 2011 and joined Dagestani militants after converting to Islam and changing his name to Ansar Ar-rusi.

    In a plea by his parents recorded in March, his father, Nikolai, admonished his son to “drop those weapons” before he would become a “terrorist.”  “Do all Muslims go around with weapons?” the father said in the video. “You are the only one so stubborn. What harm have people done you? […] You are going to kill children.”  His mother, Fanaziya, said that she was also a Muslim, and pleaded with her son that he should abstain from using violence. “What kind of the Koran…” she said, apparently too pained to finish the sentence, before finding the strength to continue: “I don’t believe that Allah has ever said that one must kill people.”

    In response to his parents’ video appeals for him to come home, Pechyonkin posted his own video online this spring, saying he was following God’s will and would not turn back. “I have come here only to make Allah pleased with me, to earn heaven,” he said in the video. “Why should we follow those Christian commandments, when Allah, may he be glorified, urges us to fight those kafirs [unbelievers],” he said. “Why shouldn’t we leave their children orphaned?” He also brushed off his mother words that the Koran does not instruct believers to kill. “I am not inventing anything from the Koran, I am reading,” he said. “You say that a man has no right to kill,” he said. “Those kafirs have occupied radio and television, and they are making the kind of religion that they need for the Muslims. They are trying to convince you that a man can’t do this.”

    Fits the described scenario to a T, doesn’t it?

    Of course, we left the story unfinished. In the final chapter, we have the Islam’s defenders (some of them atheists) lecturing us on why we shouldn’t blame religion too much, since this is a response to harsh treatment of civilians by villains like Russia or the US-but failing to tell us why similar grievances by non-Muslims never lead to such responses. Not too far from Muslim Dagestan, where this guy met up with the militants, is the Republic of Georgia, locked in a land dispute with Russia for years (and actually causing a diplomatic flap with the US in 2008), but there has never been a train bombing linked to that; is it just a coincidence that Georgia is not majority Muslim? Furthermore, there are no examples of Muslims feeling the need to avenge their Muslims brethren in this particular way, who didn’t go through the profound religious devotion (or “radicalization”, according to the rules of political correctness) phase first. That is also a coincidence, isn’t it?

    It is unbelievable to what length our culture is willing to go to protect religion from criticism.

     

    Category: Secularism

    Article by: No Such Thing As Blasphemy

    I was raised in the Islamic world. By accident of history, the plague that is entanglement of religion and government affects most Muslim majority nations a lot worse the many Christian majority (or post-Christian majority) nations. Hence, I am quite familiar with this plague. I started doubting the faith I was raised in during my teen years. After becoming familiar with the works of enlightenment philosophers, I identified myself as a deist. But it was not until a long time later, after I learned about evolutionary science, that I came to identify myself as an atheist. And only then, I came to know the religious right in the US. No need to say, that made me much more passionate about what I believe in and what I stand for. Read more...