After another week of atrocities and cowardly barbarism straight out of the stone-age we are left with a lot of questions. The initial response of all civilised people is one of anger, shock and horror at the sheer callousness of their actions. But that is nothing new. Any group of people capable of burning people alive in cages, crucifying people or the innumerable other inhuman practices is capable of anything. They are subhuman and not privy to the same standards of behaviour as the civilised world. Their tactics are to induce shock and fear, create division and hatred, and then exploit it.
ISIS want to drag the world back to a society based on life in the time of Mohamed – 1300 years ago. They want a strict adherence to customs that the rest of the world has left behind in the aptly labeled – Dark Ages. They want to either wipe out the rest of the world or impose their ridiculous customs on everyone. The fact that it is impossible to do this even if the entire 1.2 billion Muslims all shared this insane ideology and joined in is beside the point. They have been indoctrinated to believe they are carrying out god’s law as laid down in their religious book. They are prepared to die for it and believe they will die martyrs and open their eyes in paradise. There are 6.8 billion people who do not believe their lies.
ISIS is presently being battered back and is losing ground on a daily basis. You might think that if god was on their side they might be doing a bit better. Today 120 of their ‘soldiers’ were killed in a single airstrike along with one of their leaders. You could say that it is not going well for ISIS and they will, in a year or two, meet a bloody end. The leadership will be rooted out and killed and the rest will be dead or dispersed in ignominy. In their death throes they are hitting out at the soft and easy targets using criminals, the disaffected poor and the mentally ill to pull the trigger.
So what is their aim?
- Firstly they want to generate as much fear and hatred as they can.
- They want to create division between countries, people, religions and anyone they can divide – whether that is Jew/Muslim, Christian/Muslim or Shia/Sunni.
- They want to foster hatred. If they can get people to react and attack immigrants they can garner a whole new bunch of recruits.
- They want to create racism and promote isolation and distrust of immigrant communities so that they can gain more radicalised support.
- They want a terrified population to put pressure on their governments to stop the attacks on ISIS.
- They want an all-out war between Islam and Christianity that they can exploit.
The knifing of the poor eighty six year old priest is typical of their actions. They filmed it and will use that on social media to cause more fear, hatred and division.
What should we do? How should we react?
- We should keep it in proportion so that the fear does not cripple us.
- We should continue to smash ISIS into oblivion in the battle-field and take back all the land they have sequestered.
- We should use our intelligence to root out all known sympathisers in our midst.
- We should starve them of funds.
- We should refuse to allow division and hatred to act as a recruitment bureau for terrorism and instead reach out to the immigrant communities and integrate them.
- We should use education as the biggest weapon against such ignorance.
- We should close down all religious schools immediately and start with a secular curriculum and the full integration of children.
Refuse to hate and fear! – fight terrorism in your community with love and a welcoming hand!
