Watch out for those in the West who, terminally confused, go off on a Spiritual Search. They try this, they try that. Then the bus stops at Islam, and if they get off, and some do, it’s very hard for them to get back on that bus.
For if you are confused and overwhelmed by life, the totalitarian temptation is extraordinarily strong – that is, the temptation to join a collective, which tells you what to do and what to think, and gives you a nice list of What Is Commanded and What Is Prohibited. And if you’ve forgotten or not yet learned a particular rule, you have only to Ask Mr. Fatwa on a thousand websites, and you will be told what to do.
And how it clears everything up, to have rules for everything. For those lost souls wandering in the universe, you get a complete guide and grid, you no longer have to think — why, you are positively encouraged not to think. What could be better? Yours, thank god, you think, is not to reason why.
There are people who love this sort of thing.
And in the case of Colleen Renee LaRose, she gets to fabricate a special Arab name, and even wear a hijab. She’s got a Cause. She’s got a Reason For Being. She’s someone special, and yet at the same time, she doesn’t have to be anyone at all, but can subsume herself in the collective and take the orders set down more than a millennium ago.
What could be better for the colleen-renee-laroses of this world? Look at how excited Adam Gadahn is to have become Azzam Al-Amriki, and to be the special someone he is today. And to have no doubts, and no need to think for oneself. What else, in this confusing world, do you need?
Once you become a Muslim, you have laid out for you the list of what is Prohibited and what is Commanded, of whom you will love and whom you will hate. You will love fellow Muslims, you will hate all non-Muslims. Simple, and clear, and don’t be confused if often those non-Muslims appear to be quite nice and generous towards you; remember, they remain non-Muslims. And if some Muslims behave in what might once have seemed to be a cruel and murderous fashion, remember they are Muslims, and acting according to the dictates of Islam, so they are not merely blameless, but admirable.
The New York Times has some piquant details, including the fact that no sooner did Colleen Renee LaRose become a Muslim — by simply reciting a line of verse (no tests and no waiting, just like getting married in South Carolina in the pre-war days) — than all of a sudden she had very firm views on Middle Eastern conflicts. All of a sudden, she who probably could not locate Israel on a map had become a fervent supporter of the Jihad against Israel: The “MySpace profile for a woman who refers to herself as JihadJane displays pictures of bloodshed and violence in the Middle East scrawled with messages like ‘Palestine We Are With You’ and ‘Sympathize With Gaza.'”
Become a Muslim, and all of a sudden you have a Very Strong Opinion about things you never knew, and still do not know, a thing about. It was perhaps obvious for Jihad Jane to start with an ostentatious taking of the side of “Palestine” (i.e., supporting — janishly — the Jihad against Israel), but if asked what she thought of this or that conflict involving Muslims, she would now have an answer too, which would be to always and everywhere take the Muslim side. If asked what she now thought about Kashmir, you can bet that she would insist that Kashmir belonged to Pakistan, and for that matter, India belonged to its rightful owners, the Muslims (whom those “colonialist” British had removed from power), that Abu Sayyaf terrorists in the Philippines should be backed to the hilt, that the Buddhists should get out of southern Thailand and leave it to the Muslims, that Khaddafy was right to declare Jihad against Switzerland for the minaret ban, that the Christians who were hacked to death in Nigeria had it coming to them, that the black Africans in the Sudan deserved, by the millions, to die because the Sudan belongs to Islam and to the Arabs, and so on and so bloody forth.
Join today. It’s the last important decision you’ll ever have to make. Tomorrow Belongs To You.