'Winning Heads and Minds'

Mark Steyn notes that “Colleen Hufford was born in 1960. Life is full of grim twists and cruel vicissitudes, but in mid-20th century America it would not have occurred to anyone that one needed to worry about going to work and being beheaded by a colleague:”

Yet that’s what happened to Ms Hufford on Thursday: She turned up for her job at at the Vaughan Foods food processing plant in Moore, and Alton Alexander Nolen decapitated her.

Why would he do that? Well, as the initial reports were at pains to assure us, it’s nothing to do with terrorism. That’s true, in the sense that Mr Nolen is not a card-carrying member of an officially credentialed state-recognized terrorism-provider such as ISIS or al-Qaeda. It’s true in the sense that he’s not on any official US Department of Homeland Security terror watch list, because, under the geniuses running American national security, that honor is reserved for my fellow Hillsdale cruiser Steve Hayes. And, of course, it’s also true in the sense that Mr Nolen is a recent convert to Islam and, as David Cameron and Barack Obama and many others are ever more eager to emphasize, terrorism is nothing to do with Islam. Mr Nolen had the Muslim greeting “As-salamu Alaikum” – “Peace be upon you” – tattooed upon his abdomen. And he’d tried, without success, to persuade his co-workers at Vaughan Foods to convert to Islam. So he wasn’t just mildly Islamic in the nothing-to-do-with-terrorism sense, he was super-Islamic in the really-totally-no-terrorism-to-see-here sense.

So Colleen Hufford’s death was, as Jim Hoft put it, just “a random workplace beheading“. Indeed, many commenters at KOCO-TV seem more outraged by the mentioning of Mr Nolen’s religion than by the beheading:

Read on for KOCO-TV commenters doing an excellent impersonation of a cross between an ostrich and Basil Fawlty in full “Just don’t mention the ~~jihad~~ war” mode. Or as Mark grimly quips, “It seems many western heads have too little up there to be worth chopping off.”

So what triggered Nolen’s firing? According to a local newspaper report, just your average everyday workplace argument over stoning women. Which apparently, Nolen thought was pretty darn cool and groovy.

At Truth Revolt, Caleb Howe writes that “Beheading Suspect Fired After Argument Over Stoning Women,” according to Nolen’s local newspaper, the McCurtain Gazette:

McCurtain Gazette reports (no online edition is available):

A classmate of Nolen’s, who didn’t wish to be identified, told this newspaper that he spoke to a close family member of Nolen’s today.

He told this newspaper that according to the family member, Nolen was telling coworkers Thursday of an Islamic teaching that said women should be stoned for an offense, and that an argument followed the mark, Nolen was later fired and returned later Thursday, when he beheaded Colleen Hufford, the family member said.

One former resident recalls exclusively for Truth Revolt that only one Muslim family was living in Idabel at the time. The source says the family “owned and operated a pizza shop and started the local soccer league.”

“They spent every Christmas at our home,” she says of the family. “To my knowledge they never interacted with Alton.”

The Gazette reports that Nolen has a long history with the local police department. He has been arrested at least 10 times by Idabel police between 2004 and 2009, on “allegations ranging from assault, burglary, obstructing an officer, resisting arrest, drug possession, and larceny,” among other unlisted charges.

Nolan’s classmates state that he converted to Islam while in prison in 2011. Records indicate he was incarcerated for, among other things, assaulting a police officer.

Last night, Roger L. Simon, our beneficent Maximum Pajamahadeen Emeritus asked a question that most KOCO TV commenters also would prefer to not to broach: “Have Our Prisons Become Jihad Factories?”

Note this exchange on Twitter at the end of Roger’s post: