An Israeli airliner’s narrowly-averted destruction over Mombasa, Kenya on November 28 proves that al Qaeda possesses surface-to-air missiles and will use them against passenger jets. In news accounts late last month, a Pakistani nuclear scientist’s son said that before 9/11, Osama bin Laden asked his father to build him an atomic weapon. That’s “not child’s play,” the scientist reportedly replied. Let’s hope bin Laden’s luck has not improved.
There is a low-tech answer to such high-tech threats: Pork. America should declare that the remains of terrorists who commit suicide attacks or are executed here will be wrapped in pigskins and lard and buried in unmarked graves.
According to the Moskovsky Komsomolets newspaper, that is how Russian authorities handled the bodies of 50 Chechen terrorists who commandeered a Moscow theater on October 23. This hard-ball tactic toward mass murderers dovetails with their unbending faith in their twisted interpretation of Islam. They believe that contact with hogs slams the Pearly Gates shut. Hello, Miss Piggy. Goodbye, 72 virgins.
Plagued by Islamic terrorists in the southern Philippines, U.S. Army General John “Blackjack” Pershing’s troops captured six Muslim guerrillas in 1911. “You’ll never see Paradise,” one officer told the militants before five of them were shot with bullets dipped in pig fat and later shrouded in pigskins and buried among pork entrails. The surviving terrorist was allowed to escape, whereupon he told his comrades what he witnessed. The jihad stopped immediately, and peace prevailed for years.
Compare this to the treatment of Mir Aimal Kasi. He was executed November 14 in a Virginia prison for fatally shooting CIA employees Frank Darling and Lansing Bennett and wounding three others near the agency’s headquarters in 1993. “There is no God but Allah,” Kasi repeated until a lethal injection hushed him for good.
Officials returned Kasi’s body to his family in Quetta, Pakistan. A crowd of 10,000 turned his outdoor funeral into a giant rally. “Aimal, martyr of Islam,” one banner read. “Down with America,” mourners shouted.
Terrorists who die on U.S. territory never should go home. This policy is tailor-made for nine of the September 11 hijackers whose remains were pulled from the Pentagon and a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. What’s left of them is being held as evidence by the FBI. As CBS News described them, these eight Saudis and one Lebanese are considered heroes by many in the Muslim world and would be applauded if delivered to their families. Instead, they should be the first to experience America’s new, get-tough interments for Islamic killers.
The message is simple: “Mess with us, and your moms and dads never will see you again. We will wrap you in bacon and stick you in secret graves on a pig farm deep inside the Great Satan. If not for eternity, at least for decades, swine will frolic in the mud above your ham-soaked bones. Any questions?”
If this approach keeps pirated jets out of our skyscrapers, the terrorists will have lost.
Is this a perfect solution? No. Muslim fanatics still could attack us. But rather than simply perish here, each would have to survive and flee, lest he jeopardize his posthumous access to six dozen chaste sex slaves. It will be far harder to unleash fresh carnage if the perpetrators must arrange get-away cars and escape routes rather than simply commit suicide among their victims.
Also, Islamist mullahs could issue fatwas allowing “martyrs” to mix with pig flesh. Let them. Their followers will wonder how their spiritual leaders could permit something so clearly prohibited. Let the heads of would-be Islamic butchers clang with cognitive dissonance.
Finally, Muslims worldwide might denounce porcine burials. But if this practice slows or stops terrorists, it will justify the denunciations. As America defends itself in a war we did not start, what we must do need not be pretty.
Is this all rather macabre? Yes, but so is the fact that medical examiners used DNA analysis on a crushed helmet’s sweat-stained lining to identify FDNY captain Brian Hickey as one of the 2,795 innocents murdered at the World Trade Center.
America did not ask for this war. Unfortunately, we may have to go medieval to defeat an unenlightened enemy eager to repeal the Renaissance.