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Take a look at this excerpt of a sura from the Quran, Book of Muhammad, Verse 4 (47:4)…..

“…..Therefore, when ye meet the unbelievers in the battlefield, strike off their heads. Then when you have made wide slaughter among them, carefully tie up the remaining captives and render either generosity or demand ransom, until the war lays down its burdens…..”

Don’t challenge me on the accuracy of this translation. I have not read the Quran (and I don’t intend to). Like this one, there are reported to be numerous other places in the Quran where graphic exhortations of extreme violence against ‘non-believers’ are depicted.

It is said that a little knowledge about anything can be dangerous. Maybe so. I do have little knowledge of any organized religion, but the above excerpt does appear pretty graphic. It presents a picture of God urging men to kill in his name, exhorting the faithful to ‘strike off’ the heads of infidels on the battlefield.

The oft-repeated Islamic intonation, Bismillah ir rehman ir Rahim, means ‘In the name of God, the most beneficent, the most merciful’. Mercy is an act of forgiveness, shown to the wrong-doer.

I suppose that God likes to be picky about whom to shower his mercy on.

Then there is the ‘tie up the remaining captives’ bit, where you are left with a choice of either setting them free (‘render generosity’) or demanding a ransom for their release. In Islam’s eyes, both alternatives appear equally reasonable. Two very disparate choices – show mercy or cash in.

The practice of literally paying for a crime is Islamic law. If you are well-heeled and you kill a guy, you can get off the hook by simply paying his next-of-kin a court-mediated sum of money. It is considered as payment of damages.

On the other hand, if you happen to be an infidel who is broke and living inside a system that practices Islamic Shariah, you are history. You would be looking at parts of you being chopped off at best. Similarly, extracting a ransom for a captive infidel is also very legal.

Now let’s turn to the word ‘battlefield’. That could mean anything, not just those pre-arranged open grassy meadows ringed by tall trees, where battles were fought in ancient times. In ideological terms, an Islamist sees the whole world as a battlefield, where every human is involved, in a clear-cut for-us-or-against-us format, either a believer or an infidel.

And then there is the term ‘strike off their heads’. The tone implies doing something that will detach the head from the rest of the body. The human head being attached to the torso with bone, tissue and ligaments, the only way it can be struck off is by chopping it off at the neck, with an extremely sharp blade.

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Beheading is mandated by other religions – Christianity, for one. Take a look at this beauty from the pages of the ‘holy’ Bible, where God commands King Saul to slay the Amelekites –

“Now go, attack the Amalekites and destroy all that belongs to them. Do not spare them. Put to death their men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys….” – The Old Testament, Book of Samuel 15:3

Children and infants? Camels and donkeys? God sounds like an out-of-control Grand Knight of the KKK.

I did some digging and found that the Amalekites had attacked the Israelites in the wilderness where they had followed Moses right after he parted the Red Sea and escaped Egypt with his hordes. I did some more digging and found that the land Moses and his people were traversing had for centuries been the Amalekites’ land and quiet understandably they took the Israelites as invaders.

But they had to be annihilated all the same. We have all read right through primary school how the Israelites were God’s ‘chosen’ ones, remember? Though, chosen for what remains the question, given that Jews have had their shit kicked out of them all through history at some very exotic places, like Bergen Belsen.

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Sure, in both cases, in Islam as well as Christianity, those exhortations from God to slaughter must have been in context with specific situations or aggravating circumstances. But those passages set a precedent.

Indeed, holy scriptures are nothing but that – thousands of pages of set precedents to follow. Holy scriptures urge us (or at least imply) to do those exact same violent acts if we find ourselves in what we perceive to be similar circumstances. They show the way and the method.

There is however a subtle difference between the two religious practices. To Christians, the term ‘beheading’ is a metaphor. Christians organize themselves far better, having technology on their side. Christians are the Elon Musks of religion. To them, slitting a throat here and decapitating a head there, is not cost-effective. Everything has to happen in a grand scale. A thousand years back they did pretty much the same thing, sitting on a thousand galloping horses and calling it a Crusade. Today they stand on aircraft carrier decks and sing ‘God bless America’ and call it a liberation.

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Then we had this prick who got himself the nickname Jihadi John. JJ was blown apart by a Hellfire missile fired from an MQ9 Reaper drone, in 2015. His got moniker, Jihadi, since he was an ISIS looney and John, since he was originally British.

From the tone of Jihadi John’s voice in those beheading videos that the ISIS released, he appeared to be relishing what he was doing. He had pedigree. I read somewhere that his Dad had been chums with Bin Laden and had had an active hand in the 1998 American Embassy bombings in Kenya. Junior was a rap artist before he was ‘born again’ and joined the ISIS.

And that makes me dislike Jihadi John even more. I hate rap music.

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During the dark and middle ages, decapitation as a form of punishment was the rule rather than an exception. King Hank the 8th had particularly itchy fingers. He had two of his six wives beheaded, not because of any sense of jihad. He was sex addicted and wanted fresh p—sy all the time, that’s all.

If you are keen to learn more about King Henry VIII and his wives, just hit the link below:-

Just imagine you’re Hank the 8th

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Decapitation has been a favored method of killing even in Hinduism, which Hindus hasten to assure us, is a pacifist religion. It even goes a step further – unlike Christianity and Islam where God only exhorts and then stands back, Hindu Gods are hands-on.

The James Bond of Hinduism, Lord Krishna, the most revered of all Hindu Gods, has his own version of the Walther PPK. It is a sparkling, spinning disc with 108 sharp teeth on its periphery.

Lord Krishna has the disc spinning on his index finger, locating it through a hole in the middle. Being an engineer, I’m guessing that the hole has a 3/8 inch countersink so it won’t just slide down his finger and lop off his other four fingers.

Lord K calls the disc the Sudershan Chakra and in the epic, Mahabharata, he is very liberal when using it on Hinduism’s version of the Amalekite infidels – the non-Vaishnavites. All he has ta do is swing his arm at the ‘bad’ guy and the Chakra whirs off in a wide arc, connecting with the poor sod’s neck and slicing it clean off.

Through all the mayhem that he causes, Lord Krishna never ever drops that beatific smile of his. In the above likeness, he appears to be saying, “I may be slicing and slashing but I’m really a nice guy”.

I suspect that the Chakra behaves like a boomerang, slices the bad guy’s head off and zips back to his finger, that is unless he has a secretary who is ready with a pouch of refills. Also since I have never seen amputated fingers on Lord Krishna, I must assume that the Chakra has a docking radar, like the one that the SpaceX Dragon uses, to dock at the ISS.

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Beheading and letting the severed head fly off on a parabolic trajectory until gravity makes it hit the dirt and roll away ignominiously (and then picking it up and sticking it on top of a spike) is the ultimate symbol of triumph over an adversary.