As I picked up my daughter from school today I decided to pay particular attention as to whether or not I could guess people’s religion by what they were wearing. Some cases were simpler than others.
Then I asked myself which one of these people believed their religion was license to commit murder. My decision was that there was little likelihood that any of them thought that way.
Then I asked myself whether or not in the history of mankind almost every group I had identified had not people within its group who used the justification of protecting their way of life for the use of violence. Every group I had identified had.
I don’t believe that the terrorists who attacked Charlie Hebdo had anything to do with Islam. However, Islam today has everything to do with terrorists. There is no coincidence that at this moment in time, most “terrorist” acts against defenceless civilians are committed across the world by so-called “muslim” extremists. Somehow, their leadership has sold the poorest of the poor, the most hopeless men and women, that defending their religion meant killing “infidel” innocent men, women and children. At some point in history, jewish and christian, sikh and other leaders all have done the same, somewhere on earth.
If the police are “following the money” to see who is at the core of the acts in France, I have no doubt they will stop at the middle east, at the doorstep of some terrorist organization. But wait a minute…that organization needs a flow of money to support it. Its money needs a bank. In fact, it needs many banks to make it flow. Its needs an organizational structure, hence it has overhead costs. It needs arms, hence it has a supplier or more likely, multiple suppliers.
The imams who are spewing the venom in their madrassahs, mosques or other gathering places need to eat. They need funding for their activities. Someone has to believe that they serve a purpose in order to send them the money. They offer no service to the public but for their sermons of hate of others.
The interconnectedness of it all makes me stop and wonder if we really see the whole picture when we watch the news or go online to CNN’s website. I think not.
The big picture comes back to power, money and control. Bill Clinton called ISIS “a bunch of hoodlums”. He was referring to the fact that they grabbed oil-producing areas to get money. And so I wonder..in who’s interest is their existence?
So here comes the controversial Sass at you…
Defence isn’t needed when there is no offence. When oil prices plummet who is hurt? We could say Canada, Russia, Venezuela, Iran in the past…but now we can add ISIS. If you want to squeeze a group which has built an entire infrastructure on the basis of oil revenues what better way than to let prices plummet to the bottom of the barrel? You would have the added benefit of squeezing Russia for its act against Ukraine, squeezing the newest american producers who used high levels of debt, to reduce the glut of supply. Isn’t the drop in oil looking more and more genius every second?
Are the people who seem to be on opposite sides actually somehow partners? The division of man was not something created by G-d. It was created by man. It was created by people who sought to emphasize our differences rather than our commonalities.
So let’s all stop throwing rocks at each other for just a minute and wonder who benefits from the promotion of belief that any group is better than the other. It is men of power who need the hate to justify their positions. It is men of greed who use conflict to fatten their bank accounts.
I may sound like a utopic child (and my mother has certainly been asking me to grow up for many decades now) yet I remain convinced that goodwill and love are the most powerful things we are born with and that if we fight our ways back to those principles, the world will automatically become a better place. I just think that we are reduced to simplistic analysis when we stop at the view of the media. Its easy to just say things out loud to be heard. Lord knows there have been times, even recently, when I wished I had engaged my brain before my mouth.
So when it came to the most prevalent topic on earth today in our media, I did not write JE SUIS CHARLIE anywhere. I refrained because I wanted to give some thought to what I’d really like to write. I do understand the rush to write all the different labels of all of the different groups of people that were affected by the terrible events in France, yet when I finally settled down with my thoughts, I came to the conclusion that what I will always be able to stand behind is…
JE SUIS HUMAIN.
I AM HUMAN.