A Burning Dilemma Among America’s Dhimma

His relatives are refusing to give the Boston Marathon bomber a Muslim burial, so—what do you know?—Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s dhimmi victims are obliging. It would appear that interring the dead is another one of those inviolable American values. And not only that, but according the detritus of humanity a burial that comports with his faith is an American obligation as well. Or so intimated an undertaker by the name of Peter Stefan.This is what Stefan, proprietor of Graham Putnam and Mahoney Funeral Parlor, told Fox News:

“They [Bostonians] can protest, but what do you do? In this country, we bury the dead. … everybody deserves a dignified burial service no matter the circumstances of their death …

Who knows what lucre the administration of Deval Patrick dangled before our all-American undertaker for solving the problem of Tsarnaev’s putrefying corpse. The government, state and federal, had, after all, diligently provided both the Tsarnaevs with the accoutrements of a comfortable living. Winding up the terrorists’ affairs is sure to keep that gravy train chugging along. In anticipation, we presume, of spoils divvied by the traitor class, Stefan went on to wax fat about the arrangements with which he was busying his principled self, stressing that “finding a final resting plot for the body” had to take into account that Islamic law enjoins against cremation.

The great Roman statesman Cicero observed that, “Not to know what happened before one was born is to be always a child.” In our ignorance of the values that form part of our history and heritage, we Americans have become perpetual children.

Not quite the child, but definitely unevolved, The Shrub suggested last month that American values must include a commitment to “strive to expand the reach of freedom.” President George W. Bush was speaking at the dedication ceremony of his library, at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. Those were the values “Dubya” claimed for what he termed “The administration.” Conservatives (led by beaming ditto-head Dana Perino) applauded wildly, and kept it up for days.

The dome of drones with which Barack Obama has blanketed the world, and this president’s more modest forays abroad—these have only convinced conservatives of the righteousness of Genghis Bush’s faith-based initiative to Iraq and beyond.True, an honest (or even dishonest) gravedigger such as Peter Stefan is far more likely to know a thing or two about American “values” than the country’s 43rd and 44th presidents. Still, that’s not saying much.

While dhimmis contemplate what to do with the decaying corpse of a Muslim mass murderer, consider what General Sir Charles James Napier counseled about the valiant defense of Western values. The general (on an admittedly imperial mission to India) was confronted with the local Hindu practice of Sati, “the custom of burning a widow alive on the funeral pyre of her husband.”

When “Hindu priests complained to him,” as Wikipedia tells it, “about the prohibition of Sati by British authorities,” Napier replied: “Be it so. This burning of widows is your custom; prepare the funeral pile. But my nation has also a custom. When men burn women alive we hang them, and confiscate all their property. My carpenters shall therefore erect gibbets on which to hang all concerned when the widow is consumed. Let us all act according to national customs.”

In the West, we do not dispose of the dead on open-air funeral pyres, as is still done in India, Bali, south of Indonesia, and Nepal. But we do cremate. Cremating Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s remains is commensurate with what ought to be American values: It conserves resources and leaves (almost) nothing behind.

Incinerate Tsarnaev’s corpse. It’s the moral thing to do. It matters not that “Islam strictly forbids cremation.” True Christians and Jews forbid the murder of innocents. Those are the values that trump Islam.

Besides, Islam is a highly derivative (and distorted) belief system. Tamerlan believed that “the Bible was a cheap copy of the Koran.” However confused Muslims like him are about historical chronology, they do claim to accept the Ten Commandments, bequeathed in the Hebrew Bible’s Exodus and Deuteronomy, centuries before Muhammad. If so, the Sixth Commandment is unequivocally clear: “Thou shalt not kill.”

He who kills innocents has forfeited his right to religious burial rites—especially if these are to be administered by the killer’s victims.

©2013 By ILANA MERCER
WND &  American Daily Herald
May 10