Oregon Caroler Attempts 'O Tannenbomb,' or, Paradise or Bust!

The president of the Muslim Students Association at Oregon State University, Omar Mohamed, is making the obligatory remarks intended to drive a wedge between Mohamed Mohamud’s hoped-for act of mass murder at an Oregon tree-lighting ceremony, and the religion that inspired him to undertake it. The MSA, as has been documented about four ways from Sunday by now, is the front organization for the Muslim Brotherhood on American college campuses. And the Brotherhood’s motto, if you aren’t familiar with it, includes this:

Jihad is our way/Dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope.

Mohamed, (the MSA president), told the media that “It doesn't take much thought from a reasonable person to see that his actions and behavior in this instance are not very reflective of Islam.” The MSA president also says Mohamud wasn’t known for being pious. “From what I understand, he wasn't the most religious person. He didn't regularly go to mosque.” That’s as may be. But then it’s not really mosque attendance that the really popular firebrand preachers are pushing as the express route to a hot tub in Paradise splashing with 72 virgins, is it? That’s what jihad is for.

Meanwhile, the Salman Alfarisi Islamic Center in Carvallis, Oregon, the mosque where Mohamud attended and, possibly, was radicalized, released its own statement. In it, the Islamic Center declares that the murderous explosion Mohamud was hoping to set off “does not in any way represent Islam or Muslims, rather it goes against it. In Islam, one finds no justification whatsoever for any form of a violent act against civilians even during wars,” and so on and so on.

The statement concludes with the mandatory statement that “Islam is a religion of peace and these acts are not the legitimate acts of Muslims.”

We can expect over the next few days that the anti-anti-jihadists will surface across the media reinforcing their suggestion that Mohamud was acting all alone, that he represents only a tiny fringe of Muslims, and actually wasn’t representing Muslims at all, because, as the statements from the MSA and the Islamic Center should place beyond all doubt, Islam is a religion of peace, and blah, blah, blah.

When all that gets going, talking heads will point at how the FBI made helpful suggestions to Mohamud through their undercover contacts, even at one point offering Mohamud the opportunity to become “operational,” trying to get folks thinking this plot wasn’t even Mohamud’s idea.

That’s why it’s good to keep this in mind, too. Before the FBI ever became aware of Mohamud he was already deeply devoted to the idea of becoming a jihadist martyr. In statements he freely offered, (which the FBI recorded), he recalled that during Ramadan when he was fifteen “someone told him about the martyrs and the virtues, and MOHAMUD ‘didn’t even have to hear anything else.’” Mohamud now knew what he wanted to do with his life: end it killing his fellow Americans or other suitable infidels in violent jihad.

It’s reasonable to assume that the “someone” who told him “about the martyrs and the virtues,” (or perhaps he was told about “the virgins”) was someone in his mosque, or certainly within his Islamic community. Mohamud repeatedly said that he had been thinking about becoming a jihadist since before he was fifteen. And why? To go to Paradise, he says. Last January, before the FBI ever tried to contact him, Mohamud sent an email to a friend who’d gone to Sauda Arabia to visit Mecca:

“oh, nice, makes lots of prayers for me, make [prayer] that I will be the one to open up Al Quds and make [prayer] that I will be a martyr in the highest chambers of paradise”.

Later on he dismissed all worries about blowing himself up in a suicide attack: “Because if you were going to [Paradise] you wouldn’t have to worry, right?”

In an email Mohamud believed he was sending to a contact in northwest Pakistan, he wrote: “i will contact you when i am able to travel. pray for me that allah will free my passage from the lands of the ploytheists [sic] . . . .”

Before the FBI began their operation against him, Mohamud had already been submitting articles to “Jihad Recollections” magazine, and had submitted one to al Qaeda’s “Inspire” magazine, the online publication the Wall Street Journal says “wants to make news, by inspiring young American Muslims to kill their neighbors.”

Mohamud appears to believe that “residing amongst the [infidels]. . . is a sin,” as he said in what he believed was his farewell video. Living amongst the infidels was looked upon dimly by the Prophet, and this may explain why Mohamud was so determined to get out of America to go to Yemen or Pakistan to do jihad. But, he wants to know from his fellow Muslims, as long as they are are living here, “What has stopped you from fighting in the cause of Allah [and the raising of the banner of ‘no god but Allah’?].”

The lawyers and the legal experts and the media guys will soon be hashing out how good a job the government did in catching Mohamud, or how bad a job they did violating his constitutional rights. At this point I see all that as less important in the big picture than what it was that motivated Mohamud. It’s quite clear that his motivations were purely religious. He was challenged by Islamic teachers to aspire to martyrdom as a good Muslim, and promised Paradise the instant he killed himself attempting “to damage the enemies of Allah as much as possible.”

All this badly contradicts the incessant statements from Islamic leaders, and their useful mouthpieces in the media, that these actions are not motivated by the teachings of Islam, and that we’re not struggling against radical Islamists.

Let them say this is not Islam.