It’s been a while now since I wrote anything on this blog.
I must confess that the reason for this pause has been the result of the shear volume of bad news going around. It has been hard to write anything at all without trivializing world events. In the first three months of 2015, Islamic terrorism has featured a lot; the first occurrence being the Charlie Hebdo attack on 7th
January. Yes we were all 'Je suis Charlie' for a while on that one. Now we are still trying to digest the most recent
attack by al-Shabab militants at Garissa University, Kenya, on
the 2nd April.
Since that last attack, which claimed the lives of 148 innocents,
I have been trying to once again comprehend how my world view, fueled on a
diet of western media, self-irony, bacon sandwiches and beer, will ever come to
accept and tolerate the fancies of extremist Muslims; and the simple truth is, it
won’t.
While reminding myself of the events surrounding the first three
months of 2015, I deliberately watched a video of a man burning to death. Do
you remember that one? This was no chance happening; a case of clicking on the
wrong link at the wrong time. I had
actively searched for it! I wanted to see the primeval barbarity of Islamist
extremists as they burnt a human being to death in the name of their God. It
took a while to find the right site; but I knew I had it when a warning popped
up stating that I would see disturbing images if I continued. I clicked the
mouse! And in doing so, I became one of several million viewers who have watched
the horrific execution of Jordanian pilot Muadh al-Kasasbeh. I will not watch
it again.
I had wanted to know why ISIS had chosen this barbaric form
of execution over their relatively civilised standard methods of beheadings or shootings.
Was it because Muadh al-Kasasbeh was a Muslim that he had been executed in this
particularly horrific manner? I know
that Islam has a special hell for the apostate. But then I realised that their
intension here was to mimic the effects of incendiary bombs dropped from the
air. First there was the burning, followed by the smashing of his body under
bulldozed concrete. An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth!
In this respect, the Jihadists make a fare point, even
though I personally lean more towards the wisdom of Mahatma Gandhi, who famously
said that an eye for an eye ends up making the whole world blind. Unfortunately,
in Gandhi’s case, such liberal thinking didn’t help him live to a ripe old age;
his brief dance on the world’s stage abruptly ended when he was hit by three
bullets fired from an assassin’s gun: a gun held by a non-Muslim incidentally.
I slowly began to realise that Muslims have been having a really
hard time of it this year. Not only have they been the main victims of
violence, they have been portrayed as the main perpetrators too.
Therefore, it is very important not to forget that on the 24th
March 2015, radical Islam took a day off. This was the day when a German co-pilot
called Andreas Lubitz decided to leave this world with a bang. He did this
by flying a passenger jet into a mountainside at more than 700 kilometres an hour,
extinguishing the lives of 149 innocent people in the process.
Interestingly, even the most speculative investigations by
the tabloid press failed to find any trace of a link between his actions and
the Muslim world. No Jihad inspired video has ever turned up. In fact, common
wisdom now accepts that this particular tragedy was actually due to the
co-pilot’s suicidal state of mind, which raises some rather awkward questions for
a white non-Muslim like myself.
For example, on a scale of depravity, could it actually be worse
to kill others in the name of depression rather than in the name of God? Unfortunately
I still haven’t got an answer to that one, but it certainly gets me thinking. What
I do know for certain, however, is that we’re
all going to have to start being much nicer to one another if 2015 is going to
be anything other than an awful year to remember.
