Ashok Dhillon
May 25, 20173 min
This is targeted terror - A 22 year old young man targets even younger people in Manchester, England, to make his point that his life isn’t worth living but is only valuable in killing as many innocent others as possible, before he attains ‘martyrdom’. The disenchantment with life this young man must have felt, must have been severe, because it made him vulnerable to the most vile human instinct, to kill innocent people in order to gratify personal agendas, be it political, religious, or as in this case the combination of both in the form of Islamic State ideology (allegedly).
The brainwashing of young people to sacrifice their lives in the cause of killing others, in a national, political, or religious cause, is as old as time itself, and has been used, and is continued to be used by governments, religious groups and other groups, consistently now and throughout history.
This latest act of terror in Manchester is in the same vein. A young man is convinced that he is going to serve a higher cause by wantonly killing innocent young people that have nothing to do with any aspect of what is perceived by the two warring sides as an ideological battle of two civilizations. So it becomes not the mass murder of innocents (which is what it really is) in the mind of the young man, but a direct act of serving his God and community. The idea of killing innocent others in the name of service to your God are definitely not confined to radical Islam or to ISIS or whoever else is currently pushing that line. Every religion and its adherents have used it much too often, too many times and for too many purposes. They were terribly wrong then, and now the current batch of twisted ideological exploiters and their victims (those that buy into their lies and manipulations) are just as wrong and evil.
The West, particularly the USA, has in the past decades done enough damage in the Islamic countries to have generations of easily radicalized young Muslims trying to avenge the slaughter of innocent civilian lives in their communities, callously termed ‘collateral damage’ during the many devastating wars, but largely ignored in the West. That lack of similar concern for Muslim lives, and Western lives, is not lost on the Muslim World. That is why more aggrieved violence and retaliation is not going to bring an end or even the diminution of terrorist violence.
The stoppage of all wars in Islamic countries and an active rehabilitation of people wronged and displaced in Muslim countries will begin the healing process that will leave much less reason for young Muslims to radicalize and want to retaliate against civilian Western targets.
As stoppage of all war in the Middle Eastern countries is highly unlikely, as the West continues its bizarre position of siding with the Sunni Muslims against the Shia-led countries, Iraq, Syria, Yemen and against the Taliban in Afghanistan, even though the most prominent terrorist organizations, are Sunni and Saudi originated (Al-Qaeda and ISIS) every civilian or non-civilian death in those theatres of operations is a new cause for some related young and old relative or friend to take up arms against the West and carry on this endless and senseless, evil and most vile, cycle of violence that reached new depths of depravity with the bombing of children in Manchester.