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WORLD CITIZEN LETTER: 558
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WCL 558 June 2007
The jihadists
To strap explosives to one's body with the deliberate intention of causing damage, destruction and death is an inhuman and grossly immoral act. To surrender the decision to explode that bomb to another compounds the immorality. And then to seek out opportunities to wreak the greatest harm is an act so gross than not even the excuse of desperation can excuse it. Nor should anyone seek to excuse it. Those who do so are making themselves complicit in behaviour so destitute of human compassion and civilization as to be worthy of the greatest condemnation.
Today's jihadists are the antithesis of all the good that Islam has created in 1,400 years, for what they are doing is prolonging and extending divisions that cause Muslims to kill each other and destroy the civilization that their ancestors created. The mindless acceptance of directions to take explosives to a place where innocent civilians congregate and there blow up oneself and all around is a barren action leading to nowhere but failure.
If the jihadists were directing their possibly righteous anger against the authors of injuries to Islam they might be able to justify what they do. But neither the Americans nor the British, culpable as they be, are the chief targets. Nor, when these are nationals included amongst the sufferers, is it the prime movers who are in the firing-line. It is the little people, the usually deluded followers who stand there. The directors, the rulers, are safely ensconced thousands of miles away, nursing their often pathetic delusions about plans and successes.
But the other deluded souls who see themselves as martyrs for a great and good cause of freeing Islamic land from infidels, will earn nothing from their sacrifices. What they are doing and will continue to do, is to divide still further the mass of Muslims who divide themselves into Shia and Sunni fanatics and into the puritans who seek to cleanse the holy places of Islam from the taint of foreign domination.
Since Omar Khayam, the medieval Persian poet, wrote with scorn of what translated as 'the two and seventy jarring sects' of Islam, the bigoted faithful have tried diligently to keep to that fratricidal pattern. Before his time, Islam in Spain and elsewhere achieved success in arts and sciences which was dispelled by Christian reconquest but even more by Muslim in-fighting. Now, with the recent American imperialism, the pattern is reasserting itself. Islam is being destroyed from inside by jihadists striving to convert their co-religionists to suicide and warfare.
Suicide, martyrdom, heroism - call it what you will - recourse to terrorist tactics involving volunteers blowing themselves up is no policy for human beings, let alone those priding themselves on a superior religious code of morality. The intention to exert military and political pressure on tyrannical enemies may be excused but the means employed cannot be; and the consequences, immediate and long-term, will be disastrous. One can discount those consequences for the western invaders. Their people will long suffer from this policy but far, far longer will be the suffering of the unfortunate Muslims who are supposed to benefit from this murderous defeatism.
John Roberts
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