Mark Steyn on beheadings

It turns out that a wiser person than myself has isn't afraid to write about beheadings in the Islamic world.

From Mark Steyn:

Take the subject of, say, decapitation. There's a lot of it about in the Muslim world. These Somali Islamists, in the course of their seizure of Mogadishu, captured troops from the warlords' side and beheaded them. Zarqawi made beheading his signature act, cutting the throats of the American hostage Nick Berg and the British hostage Ken Bigley and then releasing the footage as boffo snuff videos over the Internet.

But it's not just guerrillas and insurgents who are hot for decapitation. The Saudis, who are famously "our friends," behead folks on a daily basis. Last year, the kingdom beheaded six Somalis for auto theft. They'd been convicted and served five-year sentences but at the end thereof the Saudi courts decided to upgrade their crime to a capital offense. Some two-thirds of those beheaded in Saudi Arabia are foreign nationals, which would be an unlikely criminal profile in any civilized state and suggests that the justice "system" is driven by the Saudis' contempt for non-Saudis as much as anything else.

Which brings us to Toronto. In court last week, it was alleged that the conspirators planned to storm the Canadian Parliament and behead the prime minister. On the face of it, that sounds ridiculous. As ridiculous as it must have seemed to Ken Bigley, a British contractor in Iraq with no illusions about the world: He'd spent most of his adult life grubbing around the seedier outposts of empire and thought he knew the way the native chappies did things. He never imagined the last sounds he'd ever hear were delirious cries of "Allahu Akhbar" and the man behind him reaching for his blade. And he never imagined that back in his native land his fellow British subjects -- young Muslim men -- would boast to the London Times about downloading the video of his execution and watching it on their cellphones.

Once again, I'm waiting for those "moderate" Muslim groups such as CAIR and the Muslim Council of Britain to denounce this evil trend in specific terms. And that includes nameing names.

Technorati tags: Zarqawi Terrorism Iraq beheadings al-Qaeda CAIR Muslim Council Islam saudi arabia السعودية