Media and society treat religious conviction lightly at their peril
The atrocities in Paris can be expected to be replicated almost anywhere. Sooner or later, it will be nuclear.
These people actually welcome and thrive upon mayhem and suffering. Blowing 224 Russian holiday makers out the sky, shooting a fifteen- year-old girl five times in front of her parents, and shooting people in wheelchairs, are actions calculated to incite massive retaliation.
ISIS is doing its level best to poke the nose of the Western Military Lion. We must not play their game.
Look at what happened subsequent to the first Bloody Sunday in Croke Park in 1920. The civilian massacre was actually considered a great victory for the IRA.
While Collins’s operation had severely damaged British intelligence, the British Croke Park reprisals did no real damage to the guerrillas, but rather increased support for the IRA both at home and abroad.
Nothing would please ISIS more than if the West were convulsed in armed confrontations of one kind or another, even paradoxically against themselves.
They are, after all, looking forward to a worldwide purge of infidels, ideally but not necessarily, by themselves.
Death for them, as for the Japanese Kamikazes, is no deterrent.
What makes me uneasy is that your reporters, together with most others, seem to have a fatal blind spot.
They continue to treat religion, all religion, as a temporary weakness in human nature, susceptible to eventually being eradicated.
This is indeed a fatal mistake. While religious affiliation may be currently at a spring low tide ebb, there will always be substantial groups of individuals who take it seriously.
And as society becomes ever more integrated, the damage that even one opposing individual can wreak becomes ever greater.
It would, therefore, behove our Commentariat to study the analysis of the retired British Major General Shaw. He spoke just after the British PM on Saturday night on Sky News. He said, “We are not fighting an army, we are fighting an idea. That will take much longer.”
The battle, therefore, will not be won by either underestimating or misunderstanding the phenomenon of religion. How many more have to die before this sinks in?
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