In reality, it is nothing whatsoever like saying, “I’m Jesus Christ.” “Allahu akbar” is often mistranslated in the Western media as “God is great.” But the actual meaning is “Allah is greater,” meaning Allah Is Greater Than Your God or Government. It is the aggressive declaration that Allah and Islam are dominant over every other form of government, religion, law or ethic, which is why Islamic jihadists in the midst of killing infidels so often shout it. One primary purpose of shouting is to “strike terror in the hearts of the enemies of Allah” (Qur’an 8:60). See my article in Breitbart about it here.
The other murder victim’s mother wrote: “Much nonsense is being spoken in the press about her alleged killer,” who, she said, “is not an Islamic fundamentalist, he has never set foot in a mosque.” What’s more, “Queensland Police, the Australian Federal Police and the Joint Counter Terrorism Unit … investigated any links between Ayad and radical organisations, and they did not find any evidence of radicalisation.”
This is an example of the prevailing denial and political correctness that hamstrings our approach to jihad terror. Ayad wasn’t carrying an ISIS membership card, and wasn’t going to mosque, and so therefore there was no “evidence of radicalisation,” and President Trump is both stupid and evil to classify these murders as jihad terror. The problem here is that the paradigm that Ayliffe, Jackson, and even the Queensland Police, the Australian Federal Police and the Joint Counter Terrorism Unit are working from is false and erroneous. A Muslim who never goes to mosque and is not otherwise observant may be carrying around a rather large load of guilt. He may know that an easy way to offset all his evil deeds is to perform an act of jihad, as the Qur’an guarantees Paradise to those who “kill and are killed” for Allah (9:111). So in this case, Smail Ayad may indeed have been a bit unbalanced, and unhealthily fixated on Mia Ayliffe-Chung, and troubled by that or any number of other things, and conceived of an easy way to get back into Allah’s good graces: kill her and Tom Jackson. That he stabbed a dog would even be in keeping with this, as Muhammad ordered that dogs be killed: “It was narrated that Abdullah bin Umar said: ‘The Messenger of Allah used to order that dogs be killed, and I went throughout Al-Madinah, and we did not spare any dog but we killed it, to such an extent that we would even kill the dog of a woman belonging to the desert people.'” (Sahih Muslim 4018)
All this doesn’t make Ayad’s murders acts of terrorism akin to 9/11 or Fort Hood or San Bernardino. He probably didn’t think of himself as acting to advance the cause of the Muslim umma, or as an operative of al-Qaeda or the Islamic State. But authorities aren’t even aware of the possibility of killing as an act of personal expiation within Islam, and they should be.
“‘My daughter’s death will not be used’: Parents furious over Trump’s false terrorism claims,” by Avi Selk, Washington Post, February 7, 2017 (thanks to Darcy):
Her daughter had not yet been buried, nor had the newspapers finished turning up bloody details of her death, before Rosie Ayliffe began to write about her child’s murderer.
“Grief is a funny thing,” she wrote in the Independent last August — five days after a man chased her 21-year-old daughter through a hostel, stabbed her to death and killed another backpacker who tried to protect her. “I haven’t seen Mia for nearly a year, and so in my head she’s still alive, well and living in Australia.”
She was careful, even then, to write accurately about the accused killer. Smail Ayad had yelled “Allahu akbar” during the attack, the Guardian reported, but he had also rambled incoherently, stabbed a dog and “was apparently infatuated with” her daughter.
“Much nonsense is being spoken in the press about her alleged killer,” Ayliffe wrote. He “is not an Islamic fundamentalist, he has never set foot in a mosque.”
Likewise, police ruled out terrorism, and the Ayad murder case was transferred to a mental-health court.
The sensational stories eventually faded. The parents of Mia Ayliffe-Chung and Tom Jackson mourned and tried to move on.
Months went by.
Then, on Tuesday, both families saw their children’s murders on a White House list of terrorist attacks that hadn’t gotten enough attention, and Ayliffe said she felt she needed to set down words again.
“My daughter’s death will not be used to further this insane persecution of innocent people,” she wrote in an open letter to President Trump.
Her words were joined by the parents of the attack’s second victim, Jackson, who expressed their disbelief in an email to the White House and elsewhere.
“I’m pretty sure he and his advisors know full well — or could very easily verify — that Tom and Mia died not as the result of an act of terror but rather through the actions of a disturbed individual,” Les Jackson wrote on Facebook.
“Of course, that doesn’t suit his agenda.”
“The fact anyone would want to make something political out of Tom dying is just beyond me,” Jackson told The Washington Post. “We’re still struggling to come to terms with it and probably never will. This has just brought the whole experience of last summer crashing about us.”
The two travelers had barely known each other — or their accused killer — when they intersected last August in a remote Australian hostel where backpackers stopped to raise funds for their travels.
Mia had just started working on a farm — picking up loose rocks, calling her family in England often, “whether it was because she was bored or lonely,” Ayliffe wrote in the Independent.
“Skills achieved; the ability to tell the difference between a rock and a clump of mud and throwing stones really far,” her daughter wrote in one of her last Facebook posts, according to the Guardian.
She had only just met Jackson, another English traveler who had been in the hostel for a few months — determined to see Australia after visiting much of the rest of the world, his father said.
Ayad was staying in the same hostel, writing Facebook posts of a different sort:
“I am victim of an international economic conspiracy. I think that I am going to die,” Ayad once wrote, according to Yahoo News. “Those who love me, follow me.”
The 29-year-old French national was also telling people in the hostel that he planned to marry Mia, the Guardian reported.
Police said they had no romantic relationship before the night of Aug. 23, when others in the hostel said Ayad got a kitchen knife.
“He roused Ayliffe-Chung from her bed and hauled her on to a balcony,” the Guardian reported.
She broke away, wounded, and scrambled through the building, according to the news outlet. Witnesses heard Ayad yelling incoherently as he chased her — “Allahu akbar” among other exclamations — then saw him dive head first from a stairwell, killing a dog and finally cornering his victim in a bathroom.
Jackson tried to help her. They were both stabbed many times. She would die in the hostel, and he a few days later in a hospital.
Early news reports made much of two words spoken during that night’s horror.
“He said ‘Allahu akbar.’ It’s a bit like me saying I’m Jesus Christ,” Les Jackson said. “It was initially reported it could be a terrorist attack, but we never took that seriously and it was quickly disproved.”
Ayliffe said she felt the same. In her first days of grief, she wrote in the Independent about “the TV engineer who visited yesterday [and] said, ‘Well we know what that was about, it was that Moslemic terrorism!’ Thanks for clarifying.”
Investigators ruled out the possibility.
“Queensland Police, the Australian Federal Police and the Joint Counter Terrorism Unit … investigated any links between Ayad and radical organisations, and they did not find any evidence of radicalisation,” the Townsville Bulletin reported.
When she planned her daughter’s funeral, Ayliffe included an Islamic prayer in the schedule — to oppose what she called “the misrepresentation of Mia’s death in the media as an act of terrorism.”…