Pass/Fail in Bangladesh

by Hugh Fitzgerald

“The gunmen were doing a background check on religion by asking everyone to recite from the Quran. Those who could recite a verse or two were spared. The others were tortured.” This from the jihad attack at the Holey Artisan Bakery, in Dhaka.

In the middle of the nineteenth century, the English naturalist Henry Bates, a contemporary of Darwin, was studying butterflies in the Brazilian rainforest. He noticed that certain edible species mimicked the warning signals sent out by other, noxious and foul-tasting butterflies, often, but not always, involving coloration of the wings, and fooled predators would avoid the edible mimic as they did its foul-tasting model.

This form of mimicry entered the scientific literature as “Batesian mimicry.” And today, reading the accounts of the latest butchery in Bangladesh, I was put in mind of Henry Bates and his Brazilian butterflies. At the restaurant in Dhaka, where ISIS-prompted murderers held a few dozen hostages, they  gave a little exam, as a way to separate the Muslims (to be spared) from the non-Muslims (to be tortured and then killed). This sort of macabre test has been given many times before by Muslim terrorists, in attacks on buses, in malls, at hotels, in India, Kenya, Mali.

Boko Haram, in West Africa, in 2013 offered an echo of the first notorious modern occurrence of this phenomenon, the Al-Shebaab jihad massacre at the Westgate Mall in East Africa. Boko Haram killed fifty students at an agricultural college. But the former were out to stop all learning outside “the Islamic sciences,” and so were willing to kill fellow Muslims who, in their view, are willing to read other texts when “Book Is Haram.” The latter, on the other hand, tried hard to identify fellow Muslims so as to spare them torture and death — the fate of non-Muslims — and to let them go unharmed, for there was no similar issue about what they were reading outside of the good old Qur’an.

Read about it, as you can, for on the Internet no boko is haram, here.

In the Holey Artisan Bakery in Dhaka, the test was the same as at the Westgate Mall: those who could recite Qur’an were spared; those who could not, were not. In strict Batesian mimicry,  there are three parties: the tasty mimic, the rebarbative model, and the predator who may or may not be fooled into thinking the former is the latter. The latest variant in Dhaka consists, in essence, only of the mimic (the non-Muslim who can recite a Muslim verse), and the model (a Muslim whose knowledge of the Qur’an the mimic, to save himself, must learn to the extent necessary). For the model, you see, also happens to be the predator, ready to destroy any unsuccessful — Qur’an-less — mimics.

“The gunmen were doing a background check on religion by asking everyone to recite from the Quran. Those who could recite a verse or two were spared. The others were tortured.” The testimony of surviving non-Muslim witnesses of what Muslims feel fully entitled to do — and are taught to enjoy doing, and celebrate doing — to non-Muslims, whether those in a non-Muslim land being assailed by jihad, or of a population eking out its existence as dhimmis, does not surprise me in the least bit.

No one who remembers Beslan should be surprised by what happened at the Holey Artisan Bakery. No one who paid any attention at all to the testimony of non-Muslims emerging from the 50-year jihad against Christians and animists in South Sudan should be surprised. No one who has read anything at all about the jihad genocide of the Armenian Christians in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, or the Muslim atrocities committed against the Greek and Bulgarian Christians, or the Muslim mob assaults upon the Jews in Safed and Hebron in the 19th and early 20th centuries, should be surprised.

Islam is what Churchill called it: the religion of blood and war. It is also a cult that engages in what can only be called human sacrifice: with deemed-insufficiently-subordinate females, and “uppity” dhimmis and non-Muslims of all kinds, as the preferred and Allah-ordained prey animals/sacrificial victims. And wherever it goes, it seems to unloose all the darkest and basest elements of the human psyche; the part that enjoys dominating, that revels in the dying screams and the pain of the absolutely helpless. So much so that I would not hesitate to call it not merely the Religion of War, but the Religion of Cruelty, or of Sadism.

How many of us will now prudently prepare for our next trip by stocking our minds with a Qur’anic don’t-leave-home-without-it verse or two?  You thought, we all thought, that we were done with those quizzes and tests long ago, only to discover that a fatidic Pass/Fail is possible, in this scarcely believable new world we are forced to endure, anywhere and at any minute.

First published in Jihad Watch.