Update October 14th: Greta Van Susteren calls out “moderate” Muslims in America and asks them to repudiate ISIS for being anti-Islam if they kill Kassig, here.
Update October 13th: More of Kassig’s family history in the peace and justice movement, refugee resettlement at USA Today.
Apparently ISIS has featured an Indiana refugee worker for its next possible beheading. Peter Kassig briefly served in the US Army, but came from a family “with a long history of doing humanitarian work.”
In fact, near the end of this AP story we learn that Peter had earlier helped with the resettlement of Burmese refugees in Indiana before making the jump to helping refugees in Syria. Longtime readers know that some cities in Indiana, especially Fort Wayne, have been completely overloaded with mostly Burmese refugees. It is one of the first overloaded cities we learned about back in 2007 and the situation there prompted former Senator Richard Lugar to ask for a GAO study of the refugee program which concluded that communities are completely unprepared for the numbers the US State Department and their contractors are bringing in. But I digress…
Will ISIS care that he was a good person helping refugees? Or, that he converted to Islam?
INDIANAPOLIS (AP) — The parents of an Indiana man threatened with beheading by the Islamic State group are pleading with his captors to free him, saying in a video statement Saturday that their son has devoted his life to humanitarian work and aiding Syria’s war refugees.
Ed and Paula Kassig’s video was released a day after the Islamic State group’s online video threatened to behead 26-year-old Peter Kassig next — following the beheading of British aid worker Alan Henning.
That video was a heartbreaking development for Kassig’s family and friends, who had stayed silent since his capture while working to secure his release.
In the family’s video, Ed Kassig says his son, who now goes by the first name Abdul-Rahman after converting to Islam during his captivity, was captured on Oct. 1, 2013, in Syria, where he was providing aid for refugees fleeing that country’s civil war.
He says his son has grown “to love and admire” the Syrian people, after growing up in an Indianapolis family with a long history of humanitarian work and teaching.
“Our son was living his life according to that same humanitarian call when he was taken captive,” says Ed Kassig, a teacher.
[….]
Kassig focused on humanitarian work after leaving the military. While attending Indianapolis’ Butler University, he worked to help refugees from Myanmar who had resettled in central Indiana, said family spokeswoman Jodi Perras.
In my opinion, that since Kassig converted to Islam it would be in the best PR interests of ISIS to spare him—to teach the Islamic lesson: convert or die. Why the hell say that if one converts and dies anyway!
This must be having a chilling effect on those considering “humanitarian” work in the Middle East.