They call themselves the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. What they are is vultures tearing at the heart of modern Islam. They are brigands and murderers, thieves and cowards, fools and braggarts. They promise a new Caliphate but their membership is drawn from the scum of those who only profess to follow the teachings of the Prophet. And they encourage the West to treat them as the bogeymen of the next Crusade?
Our politicians have sent our planes to bomb anthills. They have been railing against atrocities that we cannot comprehend. We have been told tales of these cretins to frighten, appal, oppress and maybe return the price of crude oil to more than $100 per barrel.
Stop! The Crusades are long over. Westerners bring no new expertise to the sands of the Middle East? The Bedouin have traversed these lands for centuries. This is the home of the Semites. These are where there are the vast reserves of oil to provide a carbon economy for the West and opulence for a very few.
We have made the Saudi, the Emirate and the Kuwaiti leaders rich and their people oppressed. We have kept religious fanatics supplied with funds. We buy the opium of Afghanistan and the cotton goods of the sweat shops of Pakistan. And the monies we pay out come back at us in the pockets of fanatics.
In exchange for our condemnation these same fanatics continue to threaten us and since 9/11 we have believed them. Oil money buys destruction. Are we not satisfied with the slow death of the melting icecaps?
And why are we letting politicians use these tensions to subjugate us? Why let them pass unnecessary laws to ward off the supposed jihadists within? Are we fools to believe the propaganda of our own technology? Is the pervasiveness of the Internet that persuasive?
Why is the West spending money on solving the problems that the Prophet addressed more than a 1000 years ago. Islam is a way of life and it is the leadership of Islamic countries who have to realize that Islam either has to accommodate change or to seek isolation. Yet there is no hope for isolation in a global economy.
It is an increasingly smaller world and accommodation is the challenge to all.
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Copyright 2015 © Peter Lowry
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