World must stop ISIS and its vision
I got this maybe two or three years ago. While I go along with the message it contained, I did not give it the importance that I now realize it truly deserves. At the time, I simply regarded it as just one of those funny slices of an inconvenient truth (with apologies to Al Gore for the term describing an entirely different subject) that the world must learn to live with. In light of recent developments, I feel it is worthwhile to now share it.
The piece is entitled "How Bloody Silly!" and it goes this way: "The Muslims are not happy! They're not happy in Gaza. They're not happy in Egypt. They're not happy in Libya. They're not happy in Morocco. They're not happy in Iran. They're not happy in Iraq. They're not happy in Yemen. They're not happy in Afghanistan. They're not happy in Pakistan. They're not happy in Syria. They're not happy in Lebanon.
"So, where are they happy? They're happy in Australia. They're happy in Canada. They're happy in England. They're happy in France. They're happy in Italy. They're happy in Germany. They're happy in Sweden. They're happy in the USA. They're happy in Norway. They're happy in Holland. They're happy in Denmark. Basically, they're happy in every country that is not Muslim and unhappy in every country that is!
"And who do they blame? Not Islam. Not their leadership. Not themselves. They blame the countries they are happy in for the unhappiness they felt in their own countries. And so they want to change these countries where they are happy in to be like the countries they came from where they were unhappy. How bloody silly can anyone get?"
I felt I had to share this because I find what is happening right now in the Middle East to be very disturbingly unhappy. Large areas of the region are up in flames. Violence the kind of which I thought only belonged to the Dark Ages is surfacing and spreading. I thought beheadings only belonged to an era when rules were only slightly removed from the jungle.
And what I cannot truly understand is why the civilized world has not taken significant and urgent steps to intervene. It is as if the whole world has chosen to prefer non-involvement than step in and try to stop the madness that has already killed many innocent people. It is as if all the verbal condemnations can put a stop to all the atrocities being committed.
To be sure, the United States has started getting involved in a limited way, through aerial bombings of rampaging forces belonging to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria or ISIS, who have stepped into the void created by the crumbling and/or non-existent governments in Syria and Iraq and have in fact established a de facto caliphate from where they expect to launch the final push for global domination.
But the United States cannot be expected to fight alone. The United States has grown weary from years of fighting largely unproductive wars. The United States can no longer wage a war on too many fronts. This is no longer the era of the United States. If the way of life to which it has grown accustomed to is to survive, it needs to count on the active help of others similarly situated.
Unfortunately, not much help in the real sense is coming other that the usual lip-service its supposed friends and allies often pay. Of course many of these other friends and allies have their own serious problems to deal with. And maybe they just do not seem to see the problem with the same sense of urgency that the United States does, but with increasing inability to respond to in a substantive and meaningful way.
The world has advanced too far into the future that nobody really expects in this day and age to still see beheadings, especially beheading for religious and political reasons. If the world can no longer be moved into righteous action by beheadings, then nothing else will be able to move it for any reason. And sad though it may be to admit it, but we could not be moving into the final chapters of mankind's story.
Nobody wishes for war. The world has grown and flowered to such an extent that never has the fruits of man's genius and creativity been made available for the benefit and enjoyment of so many than now. Everybody should be able to share in this pie even if the sharing cannot always be fair and equitable. Destroying all these in war should be farthest from anyone's mind.
Unfortunately, there are simply some whose understanding of life is seen from the eyes of death and destruction. They must not be allowed to inflict that kind of understanding on the far greater number who view life as life and living. These few must be contained by the many. But the only way to do this is to shed all kinds of divisions that have always differentiated people from one another, be it by color, race, creed or whatever.
All peoples must share only in the understanding that life is worth living, that life is the only way that the world and all its riches can be shared. All peoples must intervene to stop the bloodshed, all the senseless killings in the Middle East. It is time to stop viewing the matter as a matter of East and West, or of Muslims, Christians and Jews.
There are many Muslims in and out of the Middle East who do not share the vision of ISIS, who instead have a better understanding of what living in harmony with others means and how unity in diversity can work for the benefit of all. They should take an active role in intervening in the raging conflict. Such an active role will send the clearest signal yet that if the world has to be saved, it can be saved with common sense now. Not tomorrow but now.
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