Last week, 82-year-old Palmira Silva was found dead in her backyard garden in the UK. She had been beheaded.
Silva, a great grandmother, had come to Britain in the 1950s where she met her late husband, Domenic. The two ran successful restaurants and cafes and at the time of her death, Silva was the owner of Silva’s Café, a popular café in Edmonton. Until fairly recently, the 82-year-old had worked at the café full time.
Shortly after the horrific murder, police took 25-year-old Nicholas Salvador into custody. Known as “Fat Nick,” the Nigerian immigrant was a recent convert to Islam. He was unemployed and was staying with a group of people near the home of the late Ms. Silva.
There is evidence Salvador allegedly beheaded cats and attempted to attack other people before setting his sights on the elderly widow. The 25-year-old faces a murder charge as well as a charge of assaulting police after one of the pursuing officers suffered a broken wrist.
Besides the nature of the gruesome attack, it is troubling that before Ms. Silva likely bled out, police were saying the killing was not terrorist related. A police force more interested in appeasing its Muslim population than investigating what actually happened is troubling but hardly surprising in the United Kingdom, a country whose practices are now dictated by its jihadi-loving Muslims.
The beheading comes only a few days after the release of a report by Professor Alexis Jay about the sexual exploitation of about 1400 young, mainly white girls at the hands of organized gangs made up of mainly Pakistani Muslim men. The authorities knew what was going on but looked the other way, lest they be thought of as being “racist.”
Serious violent crimes are ignored out of a fear of offending Muslims or of being seen as racist
Most of the British media reporting on Jay’s report also refused to say these men were Pakistani Muslims, describing them simply as “Asian,” implying they could be Chinese or Japanese.
But the fact serious violent crimes are ignored out of a fear of offending Muslims or of being seen as racist, does not mean that acts such as the brutal murder of Silva are terrorist acts.
There are not enough known facts about the murder to determine whether it was an act of terror. But to label such an act as the murder of the 82-year-old as terrorism simply because it was a beheading, is to depreciate what terrorism represents and the threat it poses to the West.
As all the facts are not known, a killing five years ago demonstrates that merely because a practitioner of the Religion of Peace kills someone by beheading them is not sufficient to label an act as terrorism or terror-related.
In 2009, Muzzammil Hassan killed his wife by beheading her. Hassan, of Buffalo, N.Y., was the CEO of Bridges TV, the first English language Muslim television network in the United States. Two years later, Hassan was convicted of second-degree murder.
The couple was going through a difficult divorce and there was a history of domestic violence and death threats leading up to the murder. Police had been called to the couple’s home on several occasions.
No doubt had Hassan been a Christian born in Texas, he would have shot his wife to death. But being a Muslim born in Pakistan, he chose the cultural appropriate way of disposing of the unwanted spouse by beheading her. While it is early days in the investigation of Silva’s killing, her alleged killer chose to behead the 82-year-old rather than simply stab her to death. There is evidence that Salvador had been influenced by the recent beheadings of two freelance journalists, the news of the killing of Steven Sotloff being made public just the day before.
But neither these deaths appear to be terror-related. Rather they are the work of a husband determined to get rid of his wife permanently and a guy who appears to be off his rocker. While religion and culture played a part in the methods chosen to kill, that does not mean they were terrorist acts.
And in the recent U.K. case, the police bending over backwards denying it was a terrorist act before they could possibly determine the motive for the murder, does not in itself make the act one of terrorism.
Terrorism has a very specific meaning. It is the use of violence or threats of violence for the purpose of affecting the conduct of a government. There must be a political motivation such as was seen in the recent ISIS beheadings where the reason for the journalists’ deaths was to tell Obama to stop attacks in Iraq.
To indiscriminately characterize the beheading of Palmira Silva as a terrorist act is to render the definition of terrorism meaningless and in the long run, is counterproductive.
