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Robert Spencer in FrontPage: Jihad – and the Usual Excuse — in Toronto

Jul 24, 2018 8:30 am By Robert Spencer

Just more of the global outbreak of mental illness. Move along. My latest in FrontPage:

On Sunday night, a Muslim named Faisal Hussain strolled calmly down Danforth Avenue in Toronto’s Greektown, a popular area known for its restaurants and cafes. Hussain pulled out a weapon and started firing into some of those restaurants, murdering two people and injuring another 13.

The most obvious explanation for this is that Hussain was answering the call of the Islamic State (ISIS) and al-Qaeda for individual Muslims to murder civilians in Western countries. The Islamic State issued this call in September 2014:

So O muwahhid, do not let this battle pass you by wherever you may be. You must strike the soldiers, patrons, and troops of the tawaghit. Strike their police, security, and intelligence members, as well as their treacherous agents. Destroy their beds. Embitter their lives for them and busy them with themselves. If you can kill a disbelieving American or European — especially the spiteful and filthy French — or an Australian, or a Canadian, or any other disbeliever from the disbelievers waging war, including the citizens of the countries that entered into a coalition against the Islamic State, then rely upon Allah, and kill him in any manner or way however it may be….If you are not able to find an IED or a bullet, then single out the disbelieving American, Frenchman, or any of their allies. Smash his head with a rock, or slaughter him with a knife, or run him over with your car, or throw him down from a high place, or choke him, or poison him….

Hussain’s family, on the other hand, was ready with a different explanation. His parents issued a statement saying: “Our son had severe mental health challenges, struggling with psychosis and depression his entire life….While we did our best to seek help for him throughout his life of struggle and pain, we could never imagine that this would be his devastating and destructive end.”

This might be more convincing had we not heard it so many, many times before. Just a few of many available examples:

Last week in Paris, a Muslim hit a 69-year-old Jewish man, knocking him to the ground, and then dragged him by the hair, all the while screaming “Allahu akbar, long live Hitler, death to the Jews.” The attacker was sent for a psychiatric evaluation; French authorities are apparently not even considering the possibility that he is a jihad terrorist with Islam’s special hatred for Jews.

Likewise in June 2017, a Muslim who stalked through a Jewish area of London screaming “Allah, Allah” and “I’m going to kill you all” was not a jihadi. A police spokesman explained: “He was detained by officers under the Mental Heath Act. No one was injured. This is not being treated as terror-related.”

Also in June 2017, a Muslim in a Metro station in Lausanne, Switzerland began screaming “Allahu akbar,” causing commuters to run away in terror. But there was nothing to be concerned about: the prosecutor explained that “this is a person who was afraid his life was in danger. At the height of his crisis, he began to face paranoia. Then he called to God for help. This is what he did last Friday in the subway shouting Allahu akbar.”

In March 2017, a Muslim in Germany attacked a 59-year-old man riding his bicycle, bashing his skull with a hammer. Police announced: “The suspect may have a mental illness” and stressed that this was not a jihad attack, as the attacker was simply  “mentally ill.” Another Muslim in Germany who wounded nine people with an axe in a train station was also not a jihadi; he had “mental health problems.”

In May 2016, a Muslim screaming “Allahu akbar” and “Infidel, you must die” stabbed four people, killing one, at a train station near Munich. Nonetheless, Bavarian security officials immediately denied that he “had an Islamic extremist motive.” Then what caused the attack? Bavaria’s state interior minister Joachim Herrmann said that the attacker had “mental disorders.”

A Muslim was arrested in June 2016 for a jihad plot to attack tourists and police. He was found with a knife and a machete. According to the Telegraph, “the suspect has a history of psychiatric problems and has been diagnosed as schizophrenic, but is considered nonetheless ‘truly radicalised’ with a ‘serious profile.’”

In August 2016, a Muslim stabbed six people in London, murdering one of them. The BBC reported that “the Met Police’s assistant commissioner for specialist operations, Mark Rowley, said the investigation was increasingly pointing to the attack being ‘triggered by mental health issues.’”

That was also the verdict in the case of Gyulchehra Bobokulova, the Muslim woman who in May 2016 beheaded a four-year-old girl and then paraded her severed head through the streets of Moscow. She screamed “Allahu akbar” while brandishing the girl’s head and said that Allah had ordered her to behead the girl. She seems to have had an Islamic State boyfriend. She had become religious not long before the beheading, and started wearing hijab. She says the beheading was revenge for Russian airstrikes on Muslims in Syria. She told her son to pray five times a day and live in accord with Sharia. Despite all that, however, she was declared insane and not brought to trial.

In Uruguay, a Muslim screaming “Allahu akbar” stabbed a Jewish man to death, and later explained that in committing this murder, he had “followed Allah’s order.” But a judge ruled that he was “suffering from chronic psychosis of schizophrenic type” and “was not able to appreciate the wrongfulness of his actions.”

In the same way, a Muslim who was shouting “Allahu akbar” outside a Brooklyn synagogue in July 2016 and had two knives in his car was, according to the New York Daily News, nothing to be concerned about: “investigations by the NYPD and FBI showed Joudeh, 32, was emotionally disturbed and not a terrorist threat.”

Mental illness is also the cause of anti-Americanism among Muslims. Military Times reported that in November 2015, “a Jordanian police captain opened fire in an international police training facility, killing two Americans and three others. The government subsequently portrayed the police captain as troubled.”

Of course. What else could he be?

What those who dismiss jihad activity as mental illness never consider is that it could be both. If Faisal Hussain really struggled with mental health issues throughout his life, as his family claims, he may have considered himself to be under a curse from Allah, and decided to do something great in order to get into the deity’s good graces. And Islam teaches that there is no deed greater than jihad: a hadith has a man asking Muhammad, “Instruct me as to such a deed as equals Jihad (in reward).” Muhammad replied, “I do not find such a deed.” (Bukhari 56.4.2785)

If Faisal Hussain was tormented by the idea that he had sinned, he also might have been trying to make sure the scale holding his good deeds outweighed the scale holding his evil deeds (cf. Qur’an 21:47) by performing what is, in Muhammad’s view, the greatest deed of all.

There is, in sum, no reason why an act of jihad terror cannot be performed by someone who is on the psychically marginal edge, and plenty of reasons why someone who is psychically marginal might opt for jihad.

But we are certain to hear even more the same old excuses in the coming days, along with admonitions that only by rejecting “Islamophobia” can we prevent future Faisal Hussains. The mental health of would-be Islamic jihadis will be, like everything else, made the responsibility of non-Muslims, just as it is the responsibility of non-Muslims to bend over backward to accommodate Muslim demand so as to prevent “radicalization.”

The jihad imperative in the Qur’an and Sunnah, however, is open-ended. Jihad is to be waged against all infidels, not just to those who are “Islamophobic” and not appeasement-minded. And so all the claims after this latest jihad attack that Muslims are the real victims of jihad and require special accommodation may well result in that accommodation in Justin Trudeau’s Canada, ostensibly to prevent more Faisal Hussains from going round the bend, but it will do nothing to blunt the force of the advancing jihad.

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Filed Under: Canada, Featured, Robert Spencer, willful ignorance Tagged With: Faisal Hussain, Toronto


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Comments

  1. Gart says

    Jul 24, 2018 at 8:40 am

    It reveals a desperation, a certain pulling of the wool over the eyes. Not a satisfactory answer, also one that disparage those with mental health needs.

  2. SK says

    Jul 24, 2018 at 8:49 am

    Wait, so they had him institutionalized before?

    It’s disappointing how the constant dishonest attempts to pretend that people who legitimately believe that Islam commands violence and act on it, one and all, actually are not acting on beliefs, but rather something that cannot be rationally parsed dilutes and muddies the concept of “mentally ill violence”. If so many of these “mentally ill” Muslims are all making the same argument, that must mean that the viewpoint exists outside of them, and should not be deemed to stem entirely from internal stimuli. If “mental illness” means that some people commit violence based on the same arguments using internal stimuli, avoiding “Islamophobia” isn’t enough to stop “mentally ill” jihadists, and maybe we should look into Muslim mental health on a broad scale, rather than spend time fretting about Islamophobia as a cause.

    • Linda says

      Jul 24, 2018 at 9:06 am

      We’re doomed whether the cause is jihad or mental illness. Jihadis will kill us outright, but Muslim mental illness will overload the healthcare system and bankrupt us. Either way, we only need to pick our poison.

    • simpleton1 says

      Jul 24, 2018 at 9:29 am

      I doubt the “mentally ill” concept is true.

      Subpoena and produce the Doctor’s, psychologist’s, institutions, reports.
      Just to see what medications, therapies were prescribed.
      That way all these medical people will learn about whether there level of prescription needs to be increased. 🙂

      There should be 29 years of reports, from schools, work places, gun licensing, etc.

      Apologies in advance to any one who has had mental issues.

      • dumbledoresarmy says

        Jul 24, 2018 at 9:47 am

        You wrote – “Subpoena and produce the Doctor’s, psychologist’s, institutions, reports…”.

        Yes.

        We need a few good old-fashioned investigative reporters, too, who will ask questions about this sort of thing.. or do a bit of investigation of their own, using whatever is on the public record.

        It’s possible, of course, that the mohammedan was on a disability pension, having been diagnosed as being in need of it, by… a mohammedan doctor. Lots of mohammedan mobsters in Australia are on ‘disability pensions’… many of them fraudulently so (which, of course, sops up resources that *ought* to be going to persons who are *genuinely* disabled; the more mohammedans pretend to be disabled and milk the welfare system, the less there is for those – non-Muslims – genuinely in need).

        • SK says

          Jul 24, 2018 at 10:05 am

          The claim being made by the family is that they’ve been actually treating him, not simply putting him on a pension, so they are saying that they are actually using resources for the need.

          I can’t prove that, but it would help to learn more about it.

    • Michael Copeland says

      Jul 24, 2018 at 12:51 pm

      Institutionalized?
      The parents said he was “struggling with psychosis and depression his entire life”.
      A neighbour who encountered him almost every day while walking her dog said “He always was smiling”.
      A close family friend said “He had a million-dollar smile. He was very upbeat and happy whenever I saw him,” and that Hussain “seemed fine.”
      https://www.jihadwatch.org/2018/07/toronto-jihad-murderers-neighbors-unaware-of-his-mental-illness

      The parents’ statement is greatly unconvincing.

  3. Logic&Reason says

    Jul 24, 2018 at 9:26 am

    • Linda says

      Jul 24, 2018 at 12:15 pm

      This man is speaking the truth.

  4. AnneCrockett says

    Jul 24, 2018 at 9:29 am

    I suspect that it is one of those nature/nurture debates. Some people will always be crazy or evil and kill for no reason. When you give them an ideology that can justify killing, it becomes more likely that they will.

  5. Logic&Reason says

    Jul 24, 2018 at 10:06 am

    When an ideology exalts, preaches, and incites jihad and martyrdom (among other nonsense), it’s not a “mental illness”. It’s supremacist, murderous indoctrination which, when manifested, has all the earmarks of “insanity” to those not infected.

    And so, the sales job works on the West’s soft underbelly: the ignorant/gullible/craven Leftist leaders and their complicit, propagandist mainstream media–who don’t want to end up like Charlie Hebdo.

    i.e. “you’d better say, print, and believe it was mental illness….or else…”

  6. CogitoErgoSum says

    Jul 24, 2018 at 10:48 am

    Based upon the reasoning being applied to explain the actions of these “mentally ill” Muslims who kill and murder due to the effects of inexplicable and unseen forces taking over their warped minds and compelling them to commit acts of aggression and violence, it is also reasonable to conclude that Muhammad, the greatest Jihadi who ever lived, was mentally ill and that his entire religion, Islam, is the result of the ravings of a madman. It should be obvious to everyone by now. Those who emulate Muhammad and those who believe his words to be the truth are following and placing their trust in a man who was nothing more than a lunatic.

  7. GreytigerTX says

    Jul 24, 2018 at 12:25 pm

    ALL Muslims are mentally ill, otherwise they wouldn’t be Muslims.

    • Indiana Tom says

      Jul 24, 2018 at 7:30 pm

      My thoughts exactly.

      • Andy says

        Jul 25, 2018 at 3:55 am

        Amen

  8. Rolf Wittwer says

    Jul 24, 2018 at 1:07 pm

    Most of our western medias are still anticlockwise orientated.
    To the left.
    Due to this fact, too many people are becoming more and more stupid, intolerant and naive.
    Who are those circles, dictating individuals opinions and expressions of freedom?
    Since many months now, it appears and is obvious, that all these meanings of “psychotic idividual personal problems etc.” of REAL TERRORISTS (like this one again) are orchestrated and successful covered by some small groups, who wants destroy our Western civilization and culture.
    It’s just another way to handle the massive indoctrination by Leftists by using the “Political Correctness”, to gain the upperhand over Europe and the US.

  9. DHazard says

    Jul 24, 2018 at 3:12 pm

    It’s called “final prophet’s syndrome” and affects over a billion people. Very common in the middle east especially among Arabs and Persians. But liberal researchers have, so far, found no cause. They are baffled by the wide range of people expressing this mental defect.

  10. Norger says

    Jul 24, 2018 at 4:06 pm

    This is becoming so routine that the MSM hardly needs to be concerned about criticism any more. I’m sure they already have a “canned” one year anniversary article ready: “One Year Later, Greektown Shooter’s Motive Still a Mystery”

  11. Kilfincelt says

    Jul 24, 2018 at 4:19 pm

    The Medina portions of the Koran are the demented ravings of their mentally ill prophet. Unfortunately, the believers are so propagandized that they are out of touch with the truth.

  12. gravenimage says

    Jul 24, 2018 at 5:29 pm

    Robert Spencer in FrontPage: Jihad – and the Usual Excuse — in Toronto
    ………………..

    Yes–the family claims he was “mentally ill” despite his known support for ISIS and his being known to the police.

    • Indiana Tom says

      Jul 24, 2018 at 7:35 pm

      Well, I suppose to support ISIS and Islam, one would have to be mentally ill.
      Send them all to Room 101.

  13. Dov Berrol says

    Jul 24, 2018 at 10:40 pm

    It would be illuminating at this sad time for JW readers to view David Wood’s 3-part series on the psychology of Islam. It is valuable to really explore the psychological foundation of dangerous narcissists like Mohammed (if indeed he existed) and Hitler. So wounded were these people during upbringings lacking in love and compassion – whether real or invented – they went on to vent their anger at the entire world:

    https://youtu.be/wikEctQIRSs

  14. Politicianophobia says

    Jul 25, 2018 at 8:38 am

    Saul Alinsky said: “TRUE revolutionaries do not flaunt their radicalism. They cut their hair, put on suits and infiltrate from within.

    Muruha- “flexibility” or temporary suspension of Shari’ah to make Muslim migrants appear “Moderate” and blend in until MUSLIMS are NUMERICALLY STRONG ENOUGH to ENFORCE SHARI’AH.

    It is that simple folks and it seems to be working. Don’t be a collaborator, be a PATROIT.

  15. Ric says

    Jul 25, 2018 at 6:01 pm

    There is a conspiracy in the Great White North, preaching Islam is the Religion of Peace. It has always been thus; live in denial and the problem will dissipate. Profess that it is we who offend Islam, not Islam offending Canada. It is non-Muslim Canadians who must assimilate to Islam, not the other way around. These are the tenets of the psycho weenie, Trudeau, his Liberal Party and those of a leftist bent. Not unlike a pathogen spreading among the population afflicting Toronto, a city that thrives on its deceit. Politiocs are proclaiming it is a world-class city, a safe city, flourishing under its multicultural veneer. Echoing the nauseating pretense and sanctimonious falsities of the Prime Minister are Toronto’s Mayor and Chief of Police. The Canadian/Toronto MSM, also, is an apologist, a propagandist for Trudeau and the tag-along sycophants, leftist progressives, aspirant totalitarians in want of the Islamic State, Canada.

    No one should be smug; the entirety Western Democracies are nearing servitude to Islam. With the treasonous like of Justin Trudeau, Theresa May, and others, there is no time for complacency; the Islamic and Liberal Progressive scourge is far-reaching. Canada is not flying solo.

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