Man cannot worship God and despise innocent human beings

The so called fight against terror now appears to be going overboard and the irony is that the more violence continues to be fought with violence, the higher is the probability of increasing terrorism around the world.

For years civil, secular or religious wars have being fought and as the years have rolled by the pendulum of fortunes has swung to and fro in favour of one country or another. Enemies have buried the hatchet after years of extensively exhausting their military resources or through the influence of some third country or regional association. When peace comes after a war it is humanity that would have retrospectively suffered because by then many innocent civilians are killed with a massive drain on the world’s material resources coupled with a very detrimental affect on the environment through incessant bombing.

Today many of the world’s peaceful citizens are already too tired about this issue of fighting terrorism when each day the newspaper or media headlines roll out fresh headlines of one killing after another sometimes by groups or individuals. This “you hit me”, “I hit you back” attitude has made the world a more dangerous place to live in. We still have many today who would think twice before considering to take a flight because there is that subconscious fear of the plane being hijacked.

Lets face it, there is a lot else happening in our beautiful lives, exciting stuff we need to be involved with day in and day out. This fight against terrorism is justified as long as it remains focused to a problem but not when it becomes ambiguously pitched against more and more countries thereby causing rifts. Anyone perusing world politics today will see crystal clear signs of double standards. Some countries are being over-estimated for their potential to cause danger and with world opinion being divided this allows room for potentially larger conflicts. Sanctions, threatening rhetorics, one-off attacks and terrorist strikes only breed more violence and if one is to go by past history and human psychology, inflamed passions have proved to increase rather than decrease violence. The Church killings in Pakistan last week is a case in point and so is the Israel and Palestine crisis where violence has ruled the roost despite many efforts to mediate simply because the problem of land occupation has not been addressed to directly. This despite a UN Security Council resolution no. 242 that dates back to 1967 which called for Israel’s withdrawal from territories occupied in the Six Day War.

In this fight against terrorism it may be easy to assume that in some countries there reside crazy politicians with itchy fingers on a button to engage nukes. It may be easy to classify some countries as deserving to be attacked but just a little bit of extra scrutiny will show that what is attributed in the classified countries as being a crime is similarly done, sometimes to a larger extent, by other countries. Where does one then draw the line?

History has it on record that many wars have been fought for reasons of displaying might as a result of which millions of civilians have been killed. Subsequently warring countries have buried the hatchet but the vacuum left in the lives of those who have lost loved ones can never be filled.  If the fight against terrorism blows out of proportion due to careless generalisations and untenable double standards and if terrorism is attacked in one country and condoned in another, there will be fury. Similarly if terrorists belonging to one race or religion are attacked while others are left there could be a war between religions. A better option would be to exercise financial, political and diplomatic pressure while the search and arrests of individual terrorists continues.

Man cannot worship God and at the same time despise his innocent fellow-beings. The two are irreconcilable. Terrorism is a symptom not the disease and in the current war a civilised approach is likely to curb the disease rather than violently fighting the symptom that will never end as long as the disease is allowed to enhance.