Incidents of Muslims slaughtering, or trying to slaughter, their own parents are on the rise.

Most recently, a 30-year-old Muslim man stabbed his own mother in the throat with a knife in France.  After characterizing the incident as an  “attempted murder,” local authorities said that the “accused has admitted to the crime,” which he “committed for personal and religious reasons.”  Further underscoring the latter reason—“religion”—the Muslim would-be matricide was heard crying “Allahu Akbar.”

Two month earlier, and also in France, a Muslim man, 25, beheaded his own father, 60, with a knife.  When police arrived on the scene, the Muslim patricide was also heard crying “Allahu Akbar” while fleeing the scene.

That the Muslim men in both of these examples from France deemed it fit to cry Islam’s ancient, jihadist war-cry—which literally means “my god is greater than your x, y, z”—indicates that, whatever their quarrel, these Muslim men at least believed that, in slaughtering their parents, they were acting on behalf of or vindicating Islam.

This was certainly the case of another, well-documented case of Muslim parricide.  In September, 2022, a Muslim man bludgeoned his mother and father to death in Nigeria.

The reason?  “My parents don’t like the prophet Muhammad because I adore him, [and] they called me a mad [crazy] person,” Munkaila Ahmadu, 37, explained in a video recorded by police.  “[So] I killed them, because they refuse[d] to accept the truth concerning the prophet Muhammad. I killed them because they abused the prophet and their punishment is death—there is no repentance for any person who abused the Prophet.”

He is certainly not alone in such logic.  After a Muslim mob stoned and burned to death a Christian college student, Deborah Emmanuel, accused of blaspheming Muhammad, a Muslim cleric justified the atrocity by saying, “When you touch the prophet we become mad [crazy] people…. Anyone who touches the prophet, no punishment — just kill!”

Showing no remorse whatsoever for murdering his father (70) and mother (60), Ahmadu instead boasted of how “I will [soon] be free because Allah is with the righteous person; that is why I am not worrying over my action….  I am now in police custody because, by human thinking, I did a wrong thing but in the sight of Allah and the Prophet what I did is the right thing” (emphasis added).

Is this true?  Unfortunately, yes.  “Executing” those who “blaspheme” against the prophet of Islam is as old as Islam itself and traces straight back to Muhammad, who was first to call for the slaughter of those who mocked or called him “mad.”

But even beyond the issue of blasphemy, another of Muhammad’s doctrines—that of al-wala’ w’al-bara’ (which can be simply translated as “love and hate”)—requires Muslims to hate anyone perceived to be in opposition to Islam.

Koran 60:4 is the cornerstone verse of this doctrine.  As Osama bin Laden once concluded, after quoting that verse:

Such, then, is the basis and foundation of the relationship between the infidel and the Muslim. Battle, animosity, and hatred — directed from the Muslim to the infidel — is the foundation of our religion (The Al Qaeda Reader, p. 43).

Similarly, after citing Koran 60:4, the Islamic State confessed to the West that “we hate you, first and foremost, because you are disbelievers.”  As for any and all political “grievances,” these are “secondary” reasons for the jihad, ISIS said:

The fact is, even if you were to stop bombing us, imprisoning us, torturing us, vilifying us, and usurping our lands, we would continue to hate you because our primary reason for hating you will not cease to exist until you embrace Islam. Even if you were to pay jizya and live under the authority of Islam in humiliation, we would continue to hate you (emphasis added).

Even so, surely this hate has nothing to do with slaughtering fellow Muslims—especially one’s own mother and father?

Actually, the doctrine of al-wala’ w’al-bara’ encompasses even these killings.  Consider Koran 58:22, another key verse that calls for hating non-Muslims:

You shall find none who believe in Allah and the Last Day on friendly terms with those who oppose Allah and his Messenger — even if they be their fathers, their sons, their brothers, or their nearest kindred.

According to Ibn Kathir’s mainstream commentary on the Koran (The Al Qaeda Reader, pp. 75-76), this verse refers to a number of Muhammad’s Companions who slaughtered their own kin during the battle of Badr: one slew his father, another his brother, a third—Abu Bakr, the first revered caliph of Islamic history—tried to slay his son, and Omar, the second righteous caliph, slaughtered several of his relatives.

As Ibn Kathir explains, Allah was immensely pleased by their unwavering zeal for his cause and rewarded them with the highest level of paradise, as captured by the latter part of Koran 58:22:

Allah has inscribed the faith in their very hearts, and strengthened them [against their kin] with a spirit from himself. He will admit them to gardens watered by running streams, where they shall dwell forever.

In short, no one—not even fathers and mothers—are safe from the jihad.

There is a final and highly relevant lesson from all this: If Muslims are called on to hate and even murder their own flesh and blood—including fathers, sons, brothers, and wives—whenever they are perceived as mocking Muhammad or merely opposing Islam, is it any surprise that so many Muslims hate the “natural” enemies of Islam—foreign “infidels,” such as those who live all throughout the West?

While officialdom vehemently denies this reality, others in the West are apparently learning that, in Donald Trump’s words, speaking after a series of Islamic terror strikes in late 2015: “I think Islam hates us.  There’s something there that — there’s a tremendous hatred there.  There’s a tremendous hatred.  We have to get to the bottom of it.”

For those paying attention, we’ve gotten to the bottom of it a long time ago.