Does having a jihadi friend make Chris Harper Mercer a jihadi? Certainly not, and his dislike for “organized religion” and identification as “not religious” virtually ensures that he was not a Muslim. But his hatred for Christianity and friendship with Mahmoud Ali Ehsani, an open sympathizer with jihad killers, is telling: those who love and hate the same things tend to gravitate to one another, and in this case, what drew these two together may have been a shared hatred for Christianity and love for violence and murder, whether the motivation for that bloodlust be the jihadists’ oft-repeated love for death, or a love for death springing, as in Chris Harper Mercer’s case, from other motivations.
“Father of Umpqua college shooting victim: Gunman singled out Christians,” by Ed Payne, Sara Sidner and Kyung Lah, CNN, October 2, 2015:
Roseburg, Oregon (CNN)The gunman who opened fire at Oregon’s Umpqua Community College singled out Christians, according to the father of a wounded student.
Before going into spinal surgery, Anastasia Boylan told her father the gunman entered her classroom firing.
“I’ve been waiting to do this for years,” the gunman told the professor teaching the class. He shot him point blank, Boylan recounted.
Others were hit too, she told her family.
Everyone in the classroom dropped to the ground.
The gunman, while reloading his handgun, ordered the students to stand up and asked if they were Christians, Boylan told her family.
“And they would stand up and he said, ‘Good, because you’re a Christian, you’re going to see God in just about one second,'” Boylan’s father, Stacy, told CNN, relaying her account.
“And then he shot and killed them.”…
He identified himself as “not religious, but spiritual,” and said that he disliked “organized religion”: “Oregon Shooting: Umpqua Gunman Chris Harper Mercer — What We Know,” by Cassandra Vinograd, NBC News, October 2, 2015:
The gunman who shot Christians in the head at a Oregon college after asking for his victims’ faiths appeared to be sympathetic to the predominantly Catholic Irish Republican Army — but also posted online that he was “not religious.”…
The profile describes “not religious, but spiritual” beliefs and was linked to a group called “doesn’t like organized religion.”
Survivors of the Umpqua shooting told relatives that Harper Mercer asked people whether they were Christian or not. Anyone who responded “yes” was shot in the head and those who said “other” or didn’t answer were shot elsewhere in the body, said Autumn Vicari, whose brother was in the classroom.
Yet while mainstream media reports have played up the IRA angle, they have ignored the fact that Chris Harper Mercer had only two friends on MySpace, and one was an Islamic jihadist. From Pamela Geller:
On his myspace page, Chris Harper-Mercer, 26, posted a photograph of himself holding a rifle, alongside images of masked IRA gunmen and an IRA terrorist video. The IRA and Palestinian terrorism have a long history.
He has just two friends — a girl and a jihadi. Check out the terror sympathizer’s page — “kill the jews.”
The media has avoided mentioning this at all.
There is not much else — a profile from a “long dormant” dating site and a couple of random posts, thant frankly give little to no insight into motive.
Mahmoud Ali Ehsani’s Page looks like this:
“The Quran ….. holy book of muslims”
“THE SIGN OF ISLAM”
“The most beautiful mosque ever. Its in Brueni”
“The brave Mujahideen heroes”
“The Mujahideen freedom fighters of Palestine. My brothers and sisters keep on doing your thing. Allahu Akbar.”
“my brave soldiers keep on fighting for the liberation of Palestine against Israel. f*ck Israel. Kill the Jews. jews are the only infidels.”