Philly Shooter: I Did It For Allah. Philly Mayor: No, You Didnât.
Philly Mayor Jim Kenney would be the funniest man in the City of Brotherly Love, if the stakes werenât so high.
January 11, 2016
Robert Spencer
Philadelphia comedian Jim Kenney has a flair for absurdist humor, and his talents were on abundant display Thursday, when a local jihadi, a convert to Islam named Edward Archer, shot and seriously wounded police officer Jesse Hartnett, and then
explained: âI follow Allah. I pledge my allegiance to the Islamic state. That is why I did what I did.â Kenneyâs response was as dazzling a sendup of the willful ignorance of todayâs public officials as youâll ever see.
Pretending to be the Mayor of Philadelphia, Kenney, one of the most daring and imaginative comedians on the scene today,
said this after showing a surveillance video of Archer garbed in Islamic dress and shooting at Hartnett: âIn no way shape or form does anyone in this room believe that Islam or the teaching of Islam has anything to do with what youâve seen on the screenâŚ.It is abhorrent. It is terrible and it does not represent the religion or any of its teachings. This is a criminal with a stolen gun who tried to kill one of our officers. It has nothing to do with being a Muslim or following the Islamic faith.â
Brilliant! Kenney had the audience laughing, clapping and howling for more with his poker-faced impersonation of an intentionally clueless contemporary public official. His performance recalled some of the career highlights of Barack Obama, John Kerry, and their British colleague in comedy, David Cameron, such as Obamaâs classifying the Fort Hood jihad massacre as âworkplace violenceâ and Kerryâs suggesting that all jihadis needed to discard their romantic dreams of being a modern-day warrior for Allah would be a chance to say âWould you like fries with that?â
Kenney, however, went them one better by issuing his risible claims even in the face of Archerâs own claims about why he shot Hartnett, as well as Police Commissioner Richard Rossâ statement about Archer: âAccording to him, police bend laws that are contrary to the teachings of the Qurâan.â
Contrary to the teachings of the Qurâan? How could that possibly have anything to do with Islam? Clearly Kenney has a bright future on the comedy circuit.
Thereâs just one catch: Jim Kenney really is the Mayor of Philadelphia. His statements represent the official position of his administration: that despite Edward Archerâs explicit avowals to have acted in the name of Allah and Islam, he wasnât really doing so. He just thought he was.
Poor Archer! What does he have to do to get taken seriously as a jihadi? If shooting a police officer multiple times and pledging allegiance to the Islamic State, which has called on Muslims in the U.S. to attack police officers, wonât do it, what will? Would it help if he had passed out Qurâans on the morning of his shooting, told a neighbor that he was going to do something great for God, and screamed âAllahu akbarâ as he was firing? No, Army psychiatrist Major Nidal Malik Hasan did that as he murdered thirteen Americans in Fort Hood on November 5, 2009, and that one, as we have seen, was âworkplace violence.â How about if he said, as Boston Marathon jihad murderer Dzokhar Tsarnaev did, that he and his brother cooked up the entire jihad mass murder plot to âdefend Islamâ? No, everyone knows that one happened because Americans werenât friendly enough to the immigrant brothers. How about if he had been
reading literature by jihad mastermind Anwar al-Awlaki and spoke about Islamic martyrdom, like Chattanooga jihad murderer Mohammed Abdulazeez? No, that one has proved a real head-scratcher, with authorities puzzled as to the motives for months.
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Philly Shooter: I Did It For Allah. Philly Mayor: No, You Didnât.