Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf? We Are!

OPED

The world has obviously become a scarier place to live in and enjoy than it once was – scarier than during World Wars One and Two, or in the chilling times of the most destructive earthquakes Man has ever known. With international terrorism out of control – alarmingly rampant and spreading fast – human life on Earth in general and our attitudes in particular are starting to alter noticeably, forfeiting one set of values and acquiring another.

It is so much easier to go to war and defend yourself when things are clear and open between the warring parties: you know who the enemy is, you plan your strategy and you defy violence as classic war logic dictates. Incidentally, wars have always contained their part of parity and honesty, so to speak. This is no longer the case in our bizarre times of ambushed animosity when the enemy is invisible and armed to the teeth to kill you and your loved ones.

I have an educated sense of justice and ample evaluation acumen to know that it is politically incorrect to say there is something wrong going on between the Islamic and Judeo-Christian cultural routines presently – just as it was in the past – but as the famous adage has it, facts are sacred. Only the comments are not very free now! Terror has overwhelmed the planet, leaving it trembling in fear. Innocent civilians are losing their lives in this weird war just because somebody wants to murder them for some uncertain reason full of exacerbated odium and an unconscionable sense of revenge. And they are doing this with an old but renovated unconventional weapon called suicide.

Suicide bombing has nothing to do with Christianity or Judaism. As a matter of fact, suicidal termination of life is reckoned as one of the heaviest sins in our faith. Christians and Jews, or any other believers, except the Muhammadan – putting this respectfully – do not usually wire their bodies and load themselves with killing gear aiming to eventually explode themselves in the most densely populated public areas of what we call the Western World.

It is a purely Muslim invention and tool for defeating the adversary, even though the adversary is not really an adversary. Adversary in the case of the suicide bombing is only a deliberately targeted symbol in order to send a message. But this cruel message has a savage proclivity of taking hundreds of innocent lives at a time, thousands in actual aggregate and millions as possibility.

I am verbally and philosophically sweating over this strange phenomenon of terror-mongering in an attempt to somehow make head or tail of it, and the conclusion I arrive at is that it cannot be helped even if the West achieves a certain amount of temporary success in subduing the infuriated monster. The monster has countless growing heads, arms and feet, and an indomitable soul into the bargain, which claims immortality. There is no stopping the powerful blood-thirsty giant, named terrorism, unless some counter-power ends its rage with some calculated determination and practically usable sophistication.

And even if this is achievable, it will not be the best solution to the dilemma. There may be no win-win situation here. It is a double-edged sword of a kind, because there are tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions, of wonderful, hard-working, peace-loving, kind-hearted, honest and intelligent Muslims in the world who hate the fact of terrorism. They often find themselves alongside other innocents in the crowd of good victims of a suicide bomber attack.

Some bright authors might qualify the dreadful cul-de-sac as a clash of civilizations, and interpret masterfully its reasons and consequences, but this is no help. The only way out has to be traced somewhere else, in an absolutely unknown place called reconciliation, which can materialize only if we take entire Mankind’s wealth and every single source of human happiness and redistribute it so that all of the six plus billion people around the globe feel blessed and satisfied.

Is this at all possible? Most of us would say no. In which case we can forget about quenching terrorism and relaxing a little. On a totally different count, it is us- the terror fighters -who call them terrorists. They think differently of themselves – the heroes struggling for justice and freedom. Meanwhile, the big bad wolves are right here in our backyards, and no matter how courageously we try to defy the onslaught, we are still scared to death – not because we are natural cowards, but because we are just humans and want to live rather than die.

Nugzar B. Ruhadze