Reactions to Paris

Kashmir, New York, London and now Paris: the list of terrific places worth visiting made unsafe by that scourge called Islamic terrorism. As suspected, ISIS was indeed sneaking militants in the sea of refugees that Germany was forcing Europe to absorb. France can seal its borders all it likes; Angela Merkel will get them in anyway. ISIS should send Merkel a big Thank You.

Remember the photo of the washed up kid who had drowned trying to cross into Europe? Almost every newspaper in the world splashed that pic at the time. Wonder why they don’t show blood stained photos of corpses from Paris? So it’s ok to publish pics of Muslim victims but not those of others?

Some commentators on BBC and CNN ask if ISIS, being an ideology, can/should be fought with guns and bombs. I remember this awesome YouTube video where an American lady responded to just that question a year back by asking: Nazism too was an ideology, so was it wrong to have fought that with guns and weapons?

George Soros, the famous investor who suffered through both Nazism and communism in his youth in Hungary before he escaped to the West, once said:

“Ideologies which claim to be in possession of the ultimate truth are making a false claim; therefore, they can be imposed on society only by force. This applies to Communism, Fascism and National Socialism alike. All these ideologies lead to repression.”

If ISIS is indeed an ideology, shouldn’t we be adding it to Soros’ list?

Most of us non-Americans are always appalled by why the US doesn’t ban guns despite the periodic massacre by some gun wielding lunatic. The (in)famous line used by the gun lobby in the US goes:

“Guns don't kill people, people kill people.”

How ridiculous, we feel. And yet most of that same set of people will use a pretty much similar line to defend Islam!

Wouldn’t these lines on guns in US also apply to how most of the world reacts to every act of Islamic terrorism:

“The regularity of mass killings breeds familiarity. The rhythms of grief and outrage that accompany them become — for those not directly affected by tragedy — ritualised and then blend into the background noise.”

To those who consider it their duty to defend every act of Islamic terrorism just because that evil calls itself a religion, perhaps they should remember what Steven Weinberg said:

“With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.”