Unfortunately, God, the Ultimate Being, Zarny Whoop, Osiris, Shiva, Allah, Zeus or pick a deity of your choice is NOT going to help us. WE are the only ones who can help us and guess what, the majority of people who aspire to peace and harmony and the sanity of order are outweighed by the minority who aspire to power and control and, unfortunately, are in it.
I don’t know how many of the folk on this web site have lived and worked in the Middle East but I’ve had over twelve years in three different countries to draw conclusions from.
Trouble is, you can’t kill a brain washed, indoctrinated mind set without committing genocide. See Afghanistan as just one example. Brits were there, the Russians, Americans and when all’s said and done, and we’ve pulled out, it will be as it has always been. You either eradicate it completely or it may hopefully change over time with education and the ability to have freedom of thought. Allegedly, the guy was told he had orders from Al Queda to go ahead with the killings.
When you have a disparity of ‘educated’ over the non educated, especially in ‘third world’ countries, those people can be subtly manipulated into being made to believe that if they don’t obey a particular thing they will ‘burn in hellfire’ or some such or on the other hand promised all sorts of heavenly delights. Who were/are the educated? Over the millennia it has pretty much been priests, clerics, the men who espouse an ‘afterlife’ for the good and damnation if you’re not. Commune with the big man upstairs on a one to one. Ever noticed how the religious top nobs, Ayatollahs, Popes etc have aligned themselves with the leaders of the land and/or surpassing their power? That’s what it’s been about for centuries, Power and Control.
It has, to all intents and purposes kept the population in ‘check’. A suicide bomber is told that if he commits suicide in the name of Allah he will be received by 72 virgins and have a glorious afterlife. My questions is . . . how do ‘they’ know? I also like to think that they were omitted to be told as to 72 virgin what? Goats, camels, sheep? Be a bit of a disappointment n’est pas? The ‘head’ executioner in Saudi says he is doing ‘God’s work’ when they roll the criminals out after prayers on a Friday for a bit of bloodletting. People run, yes, run to get a place for good viewing. Sick!! The last public beheading in the UK was Lord Lovat in 1747. When you consider that the Hegira calendar is currently, today, 1433AH think about what we in our own 1433AD, six centuries ago, were doing at the time, the mind set was fairly similar.
Having ‘blind faith’??!! To question it means you can’t enter the kingdom of God. What a brilliant concept of holding people in your grip. Who says so? I did question my faith (brought up a catholic) and found it riddled with contradictions and things that should rather reside in the home of the Brothers Grimm.
The central core tenets and precepts of most religions go along the line of being good to your neighbour and generally being nice to your fellow man/woman. It’s all we really want, isn’t it?
It is really only within the last fifty years in the west that, we, hoi polloi, have questioned what the frocked ones in the pulpit are saying, which is why there’s fewer and fewer people going to church. For the same thing to happen in the Muslim world may take a lot longer as the strength of belief is so deep. What scared me was, the pride the parents had of sending their young sons into battle knowing if they died they would have all the things promised to them by the men who, have you noticed, don’t actually blow themselves up or go into battle.
Once upon a time, in the not too distant past, our lives were pretty much strictured by religion and for many we have broken the bonds. In the Islamic world everything is governed by the fact that it IS God’s will. The first words uttered all the time that you hear from the reports coming from Syria or any of the other conflicts that have happened recently out there is "Allahu Akbar" God is Great. Any determination from an accident, loss of paperwork, general lassitude/indolence, the car wouldn’t start . . . it was the Will of God. The favourite saying was, when I was out there trying to get something operational “Buhkra Inshallah”, tomorrow by the Will of God. One of the greatest ‘get out’ clauses of all time. A quick slope shoulders, nothing to do with me, squire, see the bloke upstairs!!
So what has all that to do with the Toulouse murders? The guy may well have been mental/fanatical/deranged or he may simply have been one of the initiated, brain washed and indoctrinated or are they similar in some way? During the first Gulf war I was shocked to see how many Omanis, non ‘fanatics’, one of the nicest peoples amongst the Arabs, sided with Saddam purely because he was a Muslim, not taking into account his committed crimes against humanity or any of his other nefarious deeds. They may not be active as the zealots are but there is a sympathy that runs throughout the mind-set, which is scary. When these terrible things happen the voices of the Islamic world (especially the clerics) seem to remain very quiet in denouncing the perpetrators. Why???? Because it was done in ‘God’s/Allah’s’ name and you cannot be seen to denounce God or you, yourself, could be denounced as a heretic, an infidel and summarily executed. Shades of the Spanish Inquisition? “Confess and yours will be a painless death”
Apologies for seemingly ‘going off on one’ but the threat to our world that gives twenty first century technology and all the trapping of modernity to a culture and mind-set that is predominantly fifteenth century either way you look at it, is frightening to say the least. Many of you have not lived in the Middle East and have not experienced the very controlled and restricted way that is ‘their way’. That, is the threat to our society if we allow it to rise up without ‘firing a shot’ as it were. When they come knocking on your door to convert you to Islam and you say ‘no thanks’ there will be no ‘no thanks’ about it.