The Judeo-Christian Origins of ‘Islamic' Terrorism

Terrorism via the Internet

A couple of years ago I was doing some random surfing on the net, the type of link clicking that can take a person off into the unknown, and I happened upon s site where a controversy was raging over a piece of video from Asia that showed the killing of a dog for food. Someone posted a link and stated that the contents of the link proved that the killing of the dog was not really such a bad thing. I clicked the link, a decision I really regretted later, and was exposed to a depraved murder video, which showed an obviously terrified victim bound and helpless as a knife was plunged into his throat. I was traumatized by both the suffering of the victim and the obvious depravity of the murderers who thought that this deed was something to film, convert to a format suitable for the Internet, and then post on the news groups for the world to see. It took me almost a year to recover, and so it goes without saying that when I heard this spring that terror videos showing beheaded hostages were now being posted on the Internet, I knew that there was no way that I was going to expose myself to that level of pain and trauma once again.

However as the months went by I heard that millions of people have downloaded these videos, and then I began to notice that the websites of the religious right were attempting to capitalize on this phenomena to both demonize Islam as a religion, and ultimately to justify the war against Iraq, while at the same agitating for further wars against Syria and Iran (this being an extension of their support of Israel, and their previous characterizations of the Palestinians as a terrorist people). The videos are being posted on pro-war right wing blogs all over the internet, and are being used as a tool to support both the re-election of Bush and the aggressive continuation of the war in Iraq, including such practices as collective punishment, on display in the bombing of Fallujah, which we are told, is underway as retribution against the citizens of that city for supporting the terrorist cell which is responsible for these beheading videos.

Out of a sense of duty I reluctantly watched some of these propaganda tapes and having done so I can understand how these backwards and sadistic individuals are playing right into the hands of the Bush Administration, the war party, and the American religious right. These video tapes are being used as justifications for massed attacks against civilian targets by the military, to whip up support for the war effort on right wing websites as well as a tool to whip up support for Bush in November, and they are also being used as recruiting tool by the religious right. It is typical of such tapes that a backwards individual will read a set a demands before the camera, sometimes after forcing the victim to beg for their lives, and this will be followed by an act of vicious sadism, the ritual display of the bloody severed head, the ritual placement of the head on the corpse, and on occasion this will be followed by a Muslim hymn consisting of the singing of verses from the Koran. As the torturous ritual is underway, and the victim is crying out or screaming, other backwards individuals gather about the scene chanting ‘God is Great', and at times, as the head is being severed, the chanting reaches what can almost be described as an orgasmic level of intensity which I found extremely bizarre.

It goes without saying that such backwardness and such ruthless sadism is no way to ‘win friends and influence people' and certainly no way to win support for your cause of your demands. When these people make demands on behalf of ‘the Palestinian people' they are certainly not doing much to help the Palestinians, just as they are not doing much good for the people of Iraq of for that matter for the people of Fallujah who are now under heavy bombardment, after being warned that ‘we will not be lenient'

The Bible, the source book for the Koran

Religious propaganda attempts to connect these sadistic killers with Islam and in particular the Koran (a task made easier when the killers chant ‘Allah Akbar - God is Great' while severing their victim's head) and when such videos include singing from the Koran, references to Allah and the Koran and ‘jihad'.

What Christian hypocrites conveniently forget is that there is little in the Koran that does not have as its original source the Bible of the Christians. So then if it is true that the Koran is a ‘book of terrorism' then it just logically follows that the Bible is a book of terrorism as well, since the Bible is the source and the inspiration for the Koran.

Bible stories are repeated in the Koran, and indeed in Sura 2:97 the claim is made that the Koran, while being a new revelation, merely confirms the previous revelations found previously in the Bible. Mohammed it is said is the last in the tradition of the prophets found in both the Older and Newer Testaments of the Bible. In Sura 26:192,195,196 we are told that the revelation of the Koran is also found in the earlier Hebrew and Greek texts of the Jewish people and the Christians.

These statements from the Koran could be considered partly true and partly false, in that while the Koran is replete with references to the earlier Bible books, oftentimes the stories appear in altered forms. The apologetic of the Muslims who hold that the ‘Koran is infallible and without error' is to state that the reasons for these deviations from the earlier Bible stories is that the Jewish and Christian texts contained errors which were then corrected in the Koran. However, like the Bible before it, the Koran is often inconsistent and contradictory, and we find that sometimes the same story is told in more than one contradictory fashion, which is typical of the Bible as well.

Some examples of the influence of the Bible on the Koran follow...

In Sura 7:54 we are told that Allah created the world in six days, a clear reference to the Genesis creation myth.

The story of Moses and Pharaoh is related in the Koran, although the story is told in inconsistent ways. In Sura 40:23-25, we are told that Pharaoh ordered the murder of the infant boys after being preached to by the adult Moses, while Sura 20:38-39 agrees with the Biblical story in describing this as having taken place when Moses was an infant. According to Sura 10:90-92, when confronted with the prospect of death Pharaoh repented at the very end and was saved, while the variant version of the story has it that Pharaoh did not repent, and drowned in the Red Sea (Suras 28:40, 17:103, 43:55). The same pattern emerges in the versions of the story of the Golden Calf, with Sura 7:149 insisting that the Israelites repented of the Golden Calf before Moses came back down off of the Mountain, while Sura 20:91 agrees with the earlier Biblical account in that they were still worshiping the Calf God when Moses returned from the mountain.

The story of Sodom and the escape of the Lot's family appears in the Koran ( Sura 26:170-171, Sura 7:83, Suras 27:56 and 29:29). Sura 21:76 and Sura 37:77 tell the story of the flood and escape of Noah and all his family, while a divergent version is found in Sura 11:42-43 where we are told that Noah's son drowned in the flood, and there are also contradictory versions of the story found in Sura 54:9 where Noah is driven out of his country by an angry mob, and Sura 11:38 where Noah remains in the country working on his ark while being mocked for years by those passing by.

Christian Backwardness, the root cause of ‘Islamic Backwardness'

There are also variant and garbled versions of Christian stories found in the Koran (the reason for this being not the Koran is infallible, and thus a correction of previous stories with errors, but rather that Mohammed was illiterate, and dwelt among people who were also illiterate and thus these variant stories evolved as part of an oral tradition. As well, the Koran is composed of many fragments dictated over a period of many years, and apparently the author forgot reciting variant versions of tales years before, and thus in the second or third rendition the story changes once again, which is an interesting illustration of how variants can emerge through the process of oral transmission, in particular when the story teller is taking creative licence).

The real debt that the Koran and thus Islam owes to Christianity is not in the form of stories but rather in the area of doctrine, since Islam is heavily influenced by Christian doctrines, as a comparison of the source documents reveals.

The practice of veiling women did not come from the earlier Jewish tradition, but rather from the Christians, who, despite claiming that their documents are ‘infallible' and their spokesmen were speaking the very ‘Word of God' just hypocritically ignore the Bible writings when it suits them (while attempting to force the Bible upon society, and into the legal code of the nation, once again, whenever it suits them).

In the following passage we find the apostle Paul threatening to shave bald the head of any woman he finds not wearing the veil, and he justifies this with the argument of a true misogynist by insisting that males are the glory of God, and he then cites the notorious ‘pregnant man' argument (women come from men). Therefore women must cover themselves with veils as a sign of the authority of men over women. It is typical for people to assume that the chador is peculiarly Islamic and that the veiling of women is evidence for the primitive backwardness of Islam, when actually the practice is Christian in origin, but people come to this mistaken conclusion simply because Christians are hypocrites and ignore the Bible and thus discard the veil, while hypocritically carrying on about ‘God's infallible Word', while Muslims actually continue to follow the letter of the law on this matter (so, while the practice may be backwards, at least it can be said in their favor that Muslims are less hypocritical than Christians in that they at least practice what they preach and follow to the letter what they read).

"But every woman praying or prophesying with her head unveiled dishonoreth her head; for it is one and the same thing as if she were shaven. For if a woman is not veiled, let her also be shorn (bald): but if it is a shame to a woman to be shorn or shaven (bald), let her be veiled. For a man indeed ought not to have his head veiled, forasmuch as he is the image and glory of God: but the woman is the glory of the man. For the man is not of the woman; but the woman of the man: for neither was the man created for the woman; but the woman for the man: for this cause ought the woman to have a sign of authority on her head, because of the angels." 1st Corinthians Chapter 11 verse 5

The practice of the Taliban, who refused to allow women to speak any man other than their husbands, and who tried to keep women locked up in the house, and out of schools, and so on, all these were also originally Christian practices which once again Christians have just hypocritically disowned.

"Let the women keep silence in the churches: for it is not permitted unto them to speak; but let them be in subjection, as also saith the law. And if they would learn anything, let them ask their own husbands at home: for it is shameful for a woman to speak in the church." 1 Corinthians Chapter 14 verse 34

"Let a woman learn in quietness with all subjection. But I permit not a woman to teach, nor to have dominion over a man, but to be in quietness. For Adam was first formed, then Eve; and Adam was not beguiled, but the woman being beguiled hath fallen into transgression: but she shall be saved through her child-bearing, if they continue in faith and love and sanctification with sobriety." 1 Timothy Chapter 2 verse 11

The Muslim faith also enforces a strict class structure and justifies social inequality, with this practice being softened by the call for the well off to donate alms to the poor (no challenge is given to the social order itself, and thus we find no criticism of the system which creates both rich and poor, but rather poverty is accepted together with a call to make donations to Islamic charities.) Once again this practice is Christian in origin, for Christianity also became a religion devoted to perpetuating class distinctions, and its ‘social conscience' consisting in the giving of donations to charity, the model still perpetuated by the American religious right to this very day. In this way the Christian religion differed from the earlier Jewish religion, where we find prophets calling out for land reform and redistribution of wealth (the same is true of the gospels of the Christians, where little good is said about being rich and social inequality is condemned, but all this was hurled into the ditch when the Christian religion was converted into an extreme right wing doctrine by the apostle Paul).

"Slaves, obey your masters with fear and trembling, in singleness of heart, as you obey Christ, not only while being watched."Ephesians 6:5

"At present, however, I am going to Jerusalem with aid for the saints. For Macedonia and Achaia have been pleased to make some contribution for the poor among the saints at Jerusalem." Romans 15:25

The political backwardness of Christianity is probably best epitomized by the warped and twisted development of Christian theology which developed concurrent with the backwards superstition that held that the Bible was ‘infallible' and ‘without error' being the very ‘Word of God'. At the center of the Christian faith is a symbol of imperial violence and state sponsored terrorism, in the form of a victim of that gruesome form of torture known as crucifixion. Roman citizens were not crucified (rather they were beheaded) and being nailed to a cross was a fate reserved for the lower classes in the Roman order. One might recall how 5000 rebellious slaves led by Spartacus were crucified on the roads to Rome as an act of state sponsored terrorism by the imperial Roman powers (contrary to legend, Spartacus himself was not crucified - Hollywood took some licence with the story and wound up spreading this particular myth). Crucifixion was a method of execution infused with political significance and the development of Christian theology represents a backward form of right wing reaction which in the end drained the meaning of the crucifixion symbol of its significance as a damnation of oppression and state sponsored terrorism (we can summarize the meaning of the cross symbol with the following humiliating statement - ‘Caesar crucifies slaves but God raises his victims from the dead.')

The Roman religious right eventually joined Caesar on this throne, and had their religion declared the official religion of the Roman state, but before this could take place the meaning of the Christian message had to be destroyed and it was this act of destruction which became the task of the theologian. It became ‘orthodox doctrine' to teach that ‘Jesus died to fulfill the animal sacrifices for sin in the Old Testament.' Hence Jesus went to the cross to be punished for our sins, paying the price for our sins, and thus by ‘accepting the Lord into your heart' you can be forgiven for your sins and avoid being sent to Christian hell. This doctrine successfully drained the meaning out of the cross symbol. Caesar was saved, and the Roman empire was saved, and the death penalty ideology was salvaged to put to good use in later centuries by murdering Christians, and the religious right, who to this very day support Caesar, war mongering, and the death penalty, while hypocritically ranting about saving people from their sins ‘in the name of Jesus.'

That Christian doctrine is a hypocritical perversion of what was once the core belief of that particular faith becomes obvious when we consider the hypocritical disregard for the Bible which is required if one is going to ignore the obvious and then promote a superstition about sacrificing animals for sin and then claim that this explains the political murder symbolized by the cross. That Christian theology is a fraudulent forgery is not surprising since it was founded upon the fraudulent forgeries of a previous generation of priests, who also concocted a system whereby they could inculcate a sense of guilt for sin which they would then graciously offer to cleanse through their religious rituals and practices. (The self serving nature of such a superstition should be obvious.)

As an example of this hypocrisy we can consider that the Jewish prophets condemned the animal sacrifice as a fraudulent forgery which was being concocted by the priests of their day.

"Thus says YAHWEH of hosts, the God of Israel: "Add your burnt offerings to your sacrifices, and eat the flesh yourselves. For in the day that I brought them out of the land of Egypt, I did not speak to your fathers or command them concerning burnt offerings and sacrifices." (Jeremiah 7:21)

"Hiow can you say, ‘We are wise, for we have the Torah', when actually, the lying pen of the scribes has made it into a lie." (Jeremiah 8:8)

If the above statement is true then it means that great swaths of the earlier books of the Bible are fraudulent (for example, Leviticus, the book of sacrificing animals, supposedly written by Moses, even though the book refers to ‘Moses' not ‘I' as it would if Moses had written such a thing). Therefore, it follows that the Bible is not ‘infallible' or the ‘inerrant Word of God' for even if Jeremiah was false, and the Torah was true, it will still be the case that the Bible was contradictory on this matter, and thus in error. If Jeremiah was true, and the Torah false, then this would indicate that Christian theology is also a fraudulent forgery, based as it is upon the sacrifice of animals for sin, which explains why you don't hear much from Jeremiah, although you never hear the end of Christian hypocrisy about ‘the infallibility of God's Word.' (And this is the best reason I can give anyone to not become ‘born again' or ‘get saved' since the end result is the production of a hypocrite, and that hardly qualifies as an improvement, since in my experience Christians sinners are even worse than they were before, not to mention even more annoying).

Criticism of the animal sacrifices for sin was not restricted to Jeremiah but appears again and again in the Jewish prophets.

"But he who kills an ox is like one who slays a man; He who sacrifices a lamb is like the one who breaks a dog's neck; He who offers a grain offering is like one who offers swine's blood; He who burns incense is like the one who blesses an idol. These people have chosen their own ways and their souls revel in their abominations." Isaiah Chapter 66 verse 3

"What to me is the multitude of your sacrifices? says YAHWEH; I have had enough of burnt offerings of rams and the fat of fed beasts; I do not delight in the blood of bulls, or of lambs, or of goats. When you come to appear before me, who asked this from your hand? Trample my courts no more; bringing offerings is futile; incense is an abomination to me." Isaiah Chapter 1 verse 11

"Did you bring to me sacrifices and offerings those forty years in the wilderness, O house of Israel? No! But now you shall take up Sakkuth your king, and Kaiwan your star-god, your images, which you made for yourselves and I will take you into exile beyond Damascus," says the YAHWEH, whose name is the God of hosts." Amos 5:25

"With what shall I come before YAHWEH, and bow myself before God on high? Shall I come before him with burnt offerings, with calves a year old? Will YAHWEH be pleased with thousands of rams, with ten thousands of rivers of oil? Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul? He has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does YAHWEH require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?" Micah Chapter 6 verse 6

The Psalms consist of a book of hymns, and it turns out that people also wrote songs condemning the animal sacrifice ritual. Some of the verses of these songs follow...According to the songs, God did not eat animals (as described in Leviticus, where it says ‘these are my food' and the priests are described feeding the god, not to mention getting the god drunk on barrels of beer and wine). The song writers also insisted that God did not require animal sacrifices as a ‘sin offering' to pay for sins, and if this was true it destroys the underlying ideology of two thousand years of Christian theology, which held that Jesus died like a slaughtered old testament barn yard animal as a ‘sin offering' to ‘pay for humanity's sins'.

"I shall take no young bull out of your house Nor male goats out of your folds. For every beast of the forest is Mine, The cattle on a thousand hills. I know every bird of the mountains, And everything that moves in the field is Mine. If I were hungry I would not tell you, For the world is Mine, and all it contains. Shall I eat the flesh of bulls Or drink the blood of male goats?" Psalm Chapter 50 verse 9

"Sacrifice and meal offering You have not desired; My ears You have opened; Burnt offering and sin offering You have not required." Psalm Chapter 40 verse 6

"For You do not delight in sacrifice, otherwise I would give it; You are not pleased with burnt offering." Psalm Chapter 51 verse 16

This debunking of Christian theology and its notion of being ‘saved from sin by the sacrifice of Jesus' is relevant to this discussion in that the destruction of the political symbolism of the cross symbol and its replacement by this obfustication about ‘sin sacrifice' explains the slide of Christianity into backwardness and right wing reaction, in that the sin sacrifice theology, based as it was upon a superstitious forgery, served only to obscure the hidden message of the crucifixion symbol and in doing so it allowed the Christian religion to became the socially oppressive, pro- death penalty, right wing, imperialist, colonial, war mongering thing so familiar to generations of human beings going back thousands of years. And since Christian backwardness is the root cause of Muslim backwardness, this also explains the Taliban and Muslim fundamentalism and Muslim extremism, since the Muslim faith is truly Christianity's child.

Muslim practices of state sponsored murder and terrorism, as for example the Sharia laws concerning stoning and beheading (such beheadings taking place all the time in Saudi Arabia) were born of the corruption of Christian doctrine, when Christianity itself became a right wing pro-death penalty religion (this taking place after the meaning of the cross symbol was obscured and destroyed by a bunch of hypocritical mumbo jumbo about ‘saving people from their sins'). Now stoning and burning at the stake and even beheadings were Jewish practices described in the Old Testament, and Christians might want to argue that based upon the words of Jesus these practices can be considered to be unchristian. However, what they forget is that Paul, the champion of the religious right and the instigator of the collapse of Christianity into backwardness, was for the death penalty.

In the following passage Paul justifies both the death penalty and the social reaction of the Roman elite, in that anyone who protests or resists Caesar gets chopped by Caesar's sword (or they could get crucified if they were not Roman citizens, something Paul does not explicitly spell out leaving the reader to fill in the blanks).

"Let every person be obedient to the governing authorities; for there is no authority except from God, and those authorities that exist have been instituted by God. Therefore whoever resists the authorities resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgment. ... the authority does not bear the sword in vain! It is the servant of God to execute wrath on the wrongdoer. Therefore one must be obedient ... for the authorities are God's servants, busy with this very thing." Romans 13:1

The authorities were not just busy chopping people with the sword, they were also crucifying people, keeping busy with that very thing as well, but you won't find Paul criticizing the authorities on that account, since Paul is a right wing hawk.

Paul also upholds the principle of executing people for religious offenses, a practice which was then picked up and carried on by Muslim fundamentalists. In the following passage Paul speaks of a young man who was caught having sex and in keeping with his pro-death penalty ideology, and sounding much like a Muslim Mullah today, he states that,

"I have already pronounced judgment in the name of the Lord Jesus on the man who has done such a thing."

And he then spells out his judgment against ‘sexual sinners', his judgment being identical to a Muslim Mullah following Sharia law, in that he calls for,

"the destruction of his flesh, that his spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus." 1 Corinthians 5:5

Paul, like all religious fanatics throughout history, also knew how to deal with ‘heretics' and those who ‘dissent' and thus ‘blaspheme'.

"Hymenaeus and Alexander I have delivered to Satan that they may learn not to blaspheme." 1 Timothy 1:20

Christian Terrorism the source of "Islamic Terrorism"

As Christianity was gutted, its core message obscured by superstitious mumbo jumbo, and as it was converted from an anti-death penalty, anti-state ideology to a pro-Caesar, pro death penalty doctrine, it was a logically following consequence that Christianity should also evolve not into a ‘peaceful loving religion' (as falsely portrayed of late by the religious right) but rather it evolved into the terrorist religion everyone has become so intimately acquainted with over the last couple of thousand years.

To state that Christianity is a terrorist religion is merely to state the obvious, since who is there in any land where a preacher has ever climbed into a pulpit who has not been exposed to the virulent violent terrorism of the Christian extremist? One need only to gaze upon the frescoes painted onto the walls of those elaborate tombs built as mausoleums for Jesus to see the full terrorism of the Christian message painted in vivid fiery reds in frescoes upon the cathedral walls. And given how Islam is the daughter of Christianity, it is not surprising then if it should turn out to be the case that Islam also became one of those terrorist religions, as the religious right insists is the case, for if this is true it just naturally follows given the principle ‘like mother, like daughter.'

Now in order to justify state sponsored terrorism and those murders and tortures of Caesar, as a first principle it was required that the crucifixion cross be drained of all its meaning, and this was accomplished as I pointed out above, by blending Christianity with the forgeries and frauds of the past. The way was then clear to make a victim of torture into the torturer, Jesus Christ, the god like being of the church, a cruel, sadistic despot and like Caesar, a torturer of helpless creatures who were powerless to resist in the face of his overwhelming force.

Now it would be more than enough to shoot someone in the head if you wanted to get rid of them, but Jesus Christ, the new Caesar would have to take torture to new extremes, and use excessive force against those who dissent or resist if he was to inspire the kind of stark terror that would be required to prop up the Right Wing Authoritarian State. For those who refuse to ‘accept the Lord' and find ‘forgiveness of their sins' through ‘the animal sacrifice of Jesus' there would be nothing but

"a fearful prospect of judgment, and a fury of fire which will consume the adversaries. A man who has violated the law of Moses dies without mercy at the testimony of two or three witnesses. How much worse punishment do you think will be deserved by the man who has spurned the Son of God, and profaned the blood of the covenant by which he was sanctified, and outraged the Spirit of grace? For we know him who said, "Vengeance is mine, I will repay." And again, "The Lord will judge his people." It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.Serve God acceptably with reverence and godly fear: For our God is an all consuming fire." Hebrews 12:28

"But the day of the Lord will come like a thief, and then the heavens will pass away with a loud noise, and the elements will be dissolved with fire, and the earth and the works that are upon it will be burned up. Since all these things are thus to be dissolved, what sort of persons ought you to be in lives of holiness and godliness, waiting for and hastening the coming of the day of God, because of which the heavens will be kindled and dissolved, and the elements will melt with fire!" 2 Peter 3:10

And the angels that did not keep their own position but left their proper dwelling have been kept by him in eternal chains in the nether gloom until the judgment of the great day; just as Sodom and Gomorrah and the surrounding cities, which likewise acted immorally and indulged in unnatural lust, serve as an example by undergoing a punishment of eternal fire.

Beheading in the Bible

Now it has been suggested that somehow Islam is a terrorist religion, while that forgery known as ‘Christiantiy' is the religion of ‘peace and love', and therefore beheading your enemies is somehow a natural product of Islamic religion. However Islamic terrorism has its roots in Christian terrorism, and it turns out to be the case that beheading people in the name of God, or in the name of Allah, is actually something else that the Muslim religion inherited from the Bible.

Above I mentioned how they sang songs condemning the animal sacrifice ritual. They also sang songs about other subjects, and it turns out that they sang songs about beheading people in the name of God (Allah Akbar). This is worth noting in case anyone is wondering where Muslims ever got the idea to behead people as an act of religion, since this practice did not originate with the Muslim tradition. The following song celebrates God drawing a sword and preparing to behead an enemy (although in actual practice it was never God who actually beheaded anyone, but rather right wing extremists who did the actual deed, on God's behalf, so they claimed.)

"God is a righteous judge, and a God who has indignation every day. If a man does not repent, God will whet his sword Behold, the wicked man conceives evil, and is pregnant with mischief, and brings forth lies. He makes a pit, digging it out, and falls into the hole which he has made. His mischief returns upon his own head, and on his own head his violence descends." Psalm 7:11

There are multiple versions of the story of David and Goliath, and while it is a common belief that David killed Goliath by hitting him in the head with a stone, according to the story quoted below, David actually killed Goliath by beheading. Also note that displaying the head of an enemy after beheading is a Biblical tradition, and did not originate with ‘Islamic Terrorists'.

"This day the LORD will deliver you into my hand, and I will strike you down, and cut off your head; and I will give the dead bodies of the host of the Philistines this day to the birds of the air and to the wild beasts of the earth; that all the earth may know that there is a God in Israel, Then David ran and stood over the Philistine, and took his sword and drew it out of its sheath, and killed him, and cut off his head with it.... And David took the head of the Philistine and brought it to Jerusalem; but he put his armor in his tent.And as David returned from the slaughter of the Philistine, Abner took him, and brought him before Saul with the head of the Philistine in his hand." 1 Samuel 17:46

It is typical when the story of David and Goliath is reproduced in children's books to leave out the gory beheading, and you seldom see David carrying that bloody severed head all over the countryside, since the truth about the Bible often needs to be sanitized before being presented to the public. For some reason people would find these Islamic beheading videos to be extremely offensive, very perverse, as well they should, but the Bible, the source for all this cruelty, somehow is exempt and traditionally has been considered ‘holy and sacred'.

This is not the last time that David beheaded an enemy.

"Then Abishai the son of Zeruiah said to the king, "Why should this dead dog curse my lord the king? Let me go over and take off his head."... And there is also with you Shimei the son of Gera, the Benjaminite from Bahurim, who cursed me with a grievous curse on the day when I went to Mahanaim; but when he came down to meet me at the Jordan, I swore to him by the LORD, saying, ‘I will not put you to death with the sword.' Now therefore hold him not guiltless, for you are a wise man; you will know what you ought to do to him, and you shall bring his gray head down with blood to Sheol." 2 Samuel 16:9, 1 Kings 2:8

It was a common practice in Biblical times to behead an enemy and then put their heads on display, which explains where Islamic fundamentalists first got the idea to do such a thing in the first place.

"And they stripped him and took his head and his armor, and sent messengers throughout the land of the Philistines, to carry the good news to their idols and to the people. And they put his armor in the temple of their gods, and fastened his head in the temple of Dagon." 1 Chronicles 10:9

And he said, "May God do so to me, and more also, if the head of Elisha the son of Shaphat remains on his shoulders today." Elisha was sitting in his house, and the elders were sitting with him. Now the king had dispatched a man from his presence; but before the messenger arrived Elisha said to the elders, "Do you see how this murderer has sent to take off my head?" 2 Kings 6:31

They did not always behead. Sometimes they pounded a stake through the head.

"She put her hand to the tent peg and her right hand to the workmen's mallet; she struck Sisera a blow, she crushed his head, she shattered and pierced his temple." Judges 5:26

Or they dropped a heavy object to crush the head.

"And a certain woman threw an upper millstone upon Abimelech's head, and crushed his skull." Judges 9:53

However, it was more typical that they behead their victims in the Bible.

" When they came into the house, as he lay on his bed in his bedchamber, they smote him, and slew him, and beheaded him. They took his head, and went by the way of the Arabah all night, and brought the head of Ishbosheth to David at Hebron. And they said to the king, "Here is the head of Ishbosheth, the son of Saul, your enemy, who sought your life; the LORD has avenged my lord the king this day on Saul and on his offspring." 2 Samuel 4:7

"That is not true. But a man of the hill country of Ephraim, called Sheba the son of Bichri, has lifted up his hand against King David; give up him alone, and I will withdraw from the city." And the woman said to Joab, "Behold, his head shall be thrown to you over the wall." Then the woman went to all the people in her wisdom. And they cut off the head of Sheba the son of Bichri, and threw it out to Joab." 2 Samuel 20:21

Those who beheaded their victims are celebrated as great heroes of God on the pages of the Bible. One example of this is the supposed ‘great reformer' Jehu, whose ‘reforms' consisted of launching ‘jihad' (holy war) and using the sword to enforce religion, forcing people to practice the primitive law codes found in the Bible. Like ‘Islamic terrorists, Jehu also displayed the severed heads of his enemies who had been beheaded. The entire book of Joshua is devoted to homicidal ‘jihad', to genocide, and ethinic cleansing, and so when the religious right criticizes Islam for ‘jihad' (as though the idea originated with Mohammed) they are being exceptionally hypocritical, since the Bible is much more explicit on the subject of Holy War and the slaughter of even women and children, and spends much more time on the subject of forced conversion at the end of a sword than the Koran (but then there was no need for the Koran to be explicit and graphic on this subject since it was already so extensively covered in the Bible, and repetition would therefore have been redudant).

Now it turns out that when Jehu was King, there were still seventy sons of Ahab left in Samaria. (2 Kings Chapter 10 verse 1) Jehu ordered the Samaritans to wage civil war against the house of Ahab and to bring him the heads of Ahab's sons

"at Jezreel by this time tommorrow...And when the letter came to them, they took the king's sons, and slew them, seventy persons, and put their heads in baskets, and sent them to him at Jezreel. When the messenger came and told him, "They have brought the heads of the king's sons," he said, "Lay them in two heaps at the entrance of the gate until the morning.". (2 Kings Chapter 10 verse 6) "God has now fulfilled the prophecy of the prophet Elijah. So Jehu put to death all who were left of the house of Ahab in Jezreel, as well as all of his close friends and priests, until he had left not one single survivor." (2 Kings Chapter 10 verse 10) "He put to death all of Ahab's house, who were left there and so blotted it out, in fulfillment of the word which YAHWEH had spoken to Elijah." (2 Kings Chapter 10 verse 7)

After this Jehu proclaimed a feast for Baal, saying,

"Ahab worshiped Baal a little, Jehu will worship him a lot." (2 Kings Chapter 10 verse 8) "In this way Jehu outwitted the ministers of Baal, in order to destroy them." (2 Kings Chapter 10 verse 19) "Then they went in to offer sacrifices and whole offerings." (2 Kings Chapter 10 verse 24) "He ordered the guards and officers to slaughter them all, and to let not a single one escape." (2 Kings Chapter 10 verse 25) "God said to Jehu, 'you have done well in carrying out what is right and have completed what I wanted done to the house of Ahab. Therefore your sons will be kings over Israel to the fourth generation." (2 Kings Chapter 10 verse 30)

It is interesting to note here that Jehu, the beheader, is celebrated as a great man of religion (‘Allah Akbar'), but only in the book of Kings. According to the prophet Hosea, who was outraged with Jehu's conduct,

"In a little while I am going to punish the dynasty of Jehu for the massacre in the valley of Jezreel and bring the kingdom of Israel to an end." Hosea Chapter 1 verse 4

Here we find that we have a choice in that once again we are confronted with one of those ‘Bible contradictions', and once again we are confronted with Christian hypocrisy, for not only is beheading people and putting their heads on display something Muslims fundamentalist and religious fanatics inherited from that ‘religion of peace and love', but we also find that the same conduct is damned by the Bible (just as the animal sacrifice and Christian ‘theology' and Christian ‘salvation' were damned by the Bible). It is obvious that much like their hypocritical Christian counterparts, Muslim fundamentalists have been reading a little to much Bible, while at the same time reading not enough Bible.

Related Page : The Bible - a commentary in pictures ... WARNING! Extremely violent images are needed to graphically illustrate the doctrines of the Bible! If you are disturbed by images of extreme violence, then please do not view this page. Do not view the images and do not read the Bible verses that accompany these images!

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