http://www.weeklyindependent.com/opinion7.htm
Fanaticism in Perspective
SHAFIQ KHAN, CANADA
While I condemn all kinds of human murders, I also feel sorry for those being killed everyday in Iraq and Afghanistan in multiple suicidal attacks. The Western world has taken for granted those killings as casual and routine phenomenon and no grief or anger is being demonstrated by the West over those brutal killings as in the cases of London, Madrid and 9/11 was shown. Is this because those are not Americans and English citizens? Just today when this report is being filed, 76 innocent people were killed in Iraq in five separate suicidal attacks. Multiply 40-50 everyday over 30 days of the month and then to three years, since the war against terrorism started and find out how many people have been killed so far in Iraq and Afghanistan? Have these thousands of innocent human lives no importance to the so-called civilised world as compared to 55 killed in London, 190 in Madrid and 5000 in the US? I am not talking of hundreds and thousands of innocent people killed in Kashmir, Palestine, Bosnia, Somalia, Vietnam and other parts of the world.
Every Western leader and journalist is condemning all those terrorist attacks and blaming Muslims directly and indirectly but no one is trying to understand as to why people are blowing themselves up? What are the reasons and causes that an 18-year-old youth blew himself up by fastening bombs all over his body?
I know fanatics are smaller in number but the entire Muslim population of the world is feeling guilty because of these unfortunate happenings and every single Muslim out of 1.2 billion is a target of the West one way or the other, their anger, indignation, bigotry and hatred.
But for the West there is only one solution to every problem, use of force, force and force only.
The modern history is witness that no human race smaller or greater could ever be eliminated by power and guns. Does the West think, they would eliminate 1.2 billion Muslims from the earth or push them to wall?
The statistics and events after 9/11 have proved that these blasts were not carried out by those who were trained by Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar or the followers of those ruthless snakeheads but by the suicidal bombers. Just imagine one of those London suicidal bombers was just 18 years old. It means during the September 11 attack, this youth was just 15 and would have never been in the training camp of Osama or Mullah Omar. Further investigations would prove that he was a normal youth who was born, raised, educated and lived in England. This is not possible either even if he went to Pakistan last year and lived there for a month and also visited any Madrassah, he could not simply be brain-washed within a few weeks to kill himself and go to paradise. It is very difficult to convince a young mind about paradise and martyrdom as he has other things to do in the growing age.
I understand that a greater percentage of Pakistani and Muslim world’s population is moderate but the West has no guarantee when and where anyone could change his mind and engineer mass killings?
Not only Muslims but people from any belief or religion could throw themselves on the railways tracks or jump into a river in order to commit suicide. Suicide is a suicide, whether taking one’s own life or blowing oneself up in the public to take another 50-100 with him.
Didn’t a criminal in Canada shot five policemen on the crime scene and at the end shot himself dead? Are hundreds of people not committing suicides every day in America, England, France and Germany because of stress, enmity, hatred, anger, workplace disputes, financial reasons, shame and other personal reasons?
Believe me, fanatics and religious extremists do not belong to a particular Muslim race, community or territory. Anyone at any time could lose his temper and turn to be a maniac and blow oneself up.
If that is not the case, the West has to produce 1.2 billion soldiers to guard every Muslim in 220 countries.
In 1978 a cult leader Jim Jones forced almost 1,000 followers of the ‘People’s Temple’ to commit suicide, by drinking a mixture of Kool-Aid, Valium and cyanide.
In March 1995, the Tokyo subway was contaminated by Sarin, a deadly nerve gas. Twelve people died and 5,000 were affected by the gas.
In 1994, 53 mysterious deaths were discovered in the burnt-out ruins of buildings in Switzerland and Canada. All the dead belonged to an obscure cult called the Order of the Solar Temple.
In the last 20 years alone, dozens of murders throughout the United States have been linked to authoritarian self-styled prophets who broke from the Mormon Church and quoted Brigham Young and Joseph Smith as the source of their doctrine.
In Uganda, members of the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God had been instructed to sell all their belongings before their deaths, and had paid off all their debts. Police say 66 people were found in the grave at the home of one of the cult leaders, Dominic Kataribabo. The dead included 26 children and a pregnant woman. It brings to over 700 the number of followers who had died or murdered by the group.
A 13-year-old Nigerian girl in police detention has confessed to have ritual killing of at least 45 people, including her father.
All these examples show that human brain is influenced by outside environmental conditions or sometimes individuals themselves fall prey to their own inner instinctive emotional reactions and do things unknown to themselves either. Now you can give different names to such behaviours as cult, sect, extremism, fanaticism etc but one fact is established that innocent people without discrimination of children, women and older are killed because of these mentally derailed people.
Once again, while I totally agree that extremists and fanatics should be dealt with an iron hand, on the same time, I do believe that Tony Blair and Bush should also sit along with their allies and try to find out the real causes of those fanatic murders. I am sure that if it does not happen, a time will come when world will be divided into two groups: the Muslim world and the West. Western countries would have to extradite every Muslim from their soil and cut off relations with the Muslims countries. The future historians would blame today’s leaders who apparently had pushed the world into a hell.