Rabat - As long as killing contracts can be placed on random civilian targets at the very cost effective price of a promise in the afterlife, hit men will be hired to die as they kill.
Rabat – As long as killing contracts can be placed on random civilian targets at the very cost effective price of a promise in the afterlife, hit men will be hired to die as they kill.
They will travel with fronts in their luggage and feuds in their imaginations. Their deals exclude survival and require that they hit where that is least expected – in theaters, concerts, trains, airports, café terraces, market places, beaches, mosques, museums, schools, parks, sports’ events, bleaches, races, newsrooms, demonstrations and in the streets. They are neither asked to fight nor to face enemies as they are a match to none but to take unarmed civilians, children and women with their guard down. Their mission is to disrupt joy and happiness, to throw confusion where they see order and frighten where there is peace.
As long as blowing up oneself is sold as dematerializing life to elevate it above earthly pettiness, to buy out all sins and to transcend the pains of the finite into the felicity of eternity, and to barter reality for illusion, collective target driven conventions will find parties to ratify mass murder.
As long as there will be arguments to sell crime as the Devine path to salvation, there will be ways to convince and recruit for martyrdom.
As long as there will be pockets in which poverty, ignorance, humiliation, frustration, unlawful interference in people’s lives, slavery is reinvented, spoliation of the lands of others, exclusion, manipulation of minds and mind sets and such injustices are twined, there will be wombs in which the phantasy of happy wedlocks in the heavens will be deposited, matured, midwifed and seen to full expression in fierce fury, bestial brutality, psychopathic sadism and ruthless terminal violence.
As long as those who call for war do not have to make it themselves and those who make and sell weapons do not have to carry them and fire them themselves, there will be causes strong enough to justify the hatred of neighbors and incite killing human fellows.
Maybe should there be new laws to make anyone calling for a war to be in the front lines, anyone who promotes hatred to be exposed to its consequences first, anyone who promises a better life than ours down here to be sent ahead to enjoy it first, any one who sets up a firing squad to be also in the lines facing it up and anyone caught manipulating minds be deprived of the ability to use their own.
We are grown ups and will not need anyone to check the way or clear the path for us, we will fare well enough without pathfinders. Maybe should all our schools be closed down, our textbooks burnt and our history and heritage be forgotten so that new ones can be invented in which no memories of ancient belligerency survive, no records of aggression are kept, no feelings of hatred are nurtured. Only then would it, perhaps, become possible for us to focus on the arts, the science, the technologies, the knowledge and the wisdom that promote peace, tolerance and the celebration of difference and cultivate the cult of happiness for all and teach that unless freedoms, justice and wellbeing are for all, they will never be for anyone and peace will remain a chimera.
Pending our coming of age, we will keep judging people on what we see them doing and not on what they want us to hear them saying. Until then, we have two choices, not a single one more. Either we accept and we weep our casualties more and more often until it is our tun and depart satisfied that we will be wept, or we stand against it all. For that, we will have to understand what it is exactly that is threatening us because it is not sure everyone knows what their enemy is or how to resist and defeat it. It may even be that many having so much gotten used to darken are taking it for the sole light there is. It may also be that many have taken up arms against themselves and are driving so fast into hell that they will not feel the lethal heat eating them up.
Unless we know what is it exactly that the terrorists really want, Turkey, Tunisia, Mali, Burkina Fasso, France and Belgium will be but stop-overs just as Syria, Libya, Iraq, Sudan, Somalia and Yemen are but phases of a global transformation from one state to another which no one has a true idea of what it will really be like. If anyone thinks they have an idea of what Hell is, let’s only hope they are not wrong as they have not seen a bit of it yet.
All the flowers of the world will not appease the pains of mothers, fathers, grandparents, brothers, sisters, cousins, aunts, uncles, lovers, teachers, classmates, teammates, neighbors, friends and human fellows who lost a dear one in a terrorist act. No words will soothe their frustrations. No speeches will comfort them. There is simply no compensation to offer them. Not even their anger helps. Not even retaliation. Perhaps the hope that no one else will lose a loved one in similar circumstances could be a reason for them to survive and see it happen. It is everyone’s responsibility and obligation to them that their losses are not forgotten and that the conditions that made them possible are ended.
May all the victims of terrorism rest in peace and may their loved ones find solace and resignation in the conviction that their pains and losses are ours, too.
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