#ThisIsNotIslam Kills Another American

I have to question the sanity of any American who goes to the Middle East to offer aid to Muslims caught up in the fight against the Syrian dictator Assad. Especially since the people they are trying to help may very possibly be selling Westerners to their own avowed enemy.

But Arizonan Kayla Mueller, 26, went anyway, and now she has apparently lost her life.

Daily Beast

ISIS says Kayla Mueller is dead, killed in a Jordanian air strike. But in not showing the world proof, it continues to torture the woman’s family.

When ISIS released that unspeakable video of the captured Jordanian pilot being burned alive, there seemed to be nothing more barbarous the monsters in black could do.

But by some measures it was crueler to release no images at all after ISIS announced that 26-year-old Kayla Mueller had been killed in one of the air strikes that Jordan unleashed in revenge.

Her family and friends were left with questions that are their own kind of torture…

“Kayla found this work heartbreaking but compelling; she is extremely devoted to the people of Syria,” her family said in a statement. “When asked what kept her going in her mission, she said, ‘I find God in the suffering eyes reflected in mine, if this is how you are revealed to me, this is how I will forever seek you.’”

I have never thought of God as being the reflection of sinful man, and He has always seemed to pursue an open-door policy toward me, although I have never considered myself deserving of it.

Regardless of how noble Kayla Mueller’s mission may have seemed, she and many of her generation seem to be afflicted with a kind of naivety that creates its own alternate reality, in the face of overwhelming contradictory fact.

They refuse to listen to the Churchillian-like warnings that the “Religion of Peace” is deeply flawed, and that it is next to impossible to know the difference between peaceful Muslims and their barbaric counterparts. How do you tell a radical Muslim from a peaceful Muslim? A peaceful Muslim doesn’t look good in black.

Of course we cannot trust Islamic State claims that Jordanian bombs killed Mueller, the word of people who murder teenagers for watching soccer, or behead, stone or burn their victims alive.

Also, however, the American Left and all too many on the right have been deluded with arguments of a peaceful Islam that does not and never has existed; and a mythical Christian moral equivalency to the barbarism we have witnessed in recent years. All religions have their flaws.

But as one Southern governor said yesterday, “Mr. President, the Medieval Christian threat is under control. Please deal with the radical Islamic threat today.”

So regardless of how Mueller died—and it is tragic under any circumstances—she did not have to meet this end at such a tender age. Somehow it would seem less wasteful to me had she been a journalist exposing the horrors of ISIS… or even Assad.

Maybe Kayla Mueller was willing to sacrifice her life for her beliefs, and that is very noble indeed. Unless those beliefs are misplaced. Then her death becomes stupidly tragic.

But there are millions of people around the world—people who present far less of a threat—who could have used Mueller’s help, and will now never receive it.

In any event an American, by all accounts a good American, has died at the hands of a bestial enemy.

But also, one has to believe, at the hands of progressive pols, pundits and academics who refuse to see the evil in this world for what it is.