CNN posted Stopping ISIS today, containing some horrifying imagery: basically, ISIS filmed a man being forcibly converted from Christianity to Islam, and then beheaded him.
I suppose that somewhere the god of irony is weeping tears of stone.
God knows I’m weeping real tears. Is this really what we’ve come to? A religious movement, ostensibly of a “religion of peace,” reinvents one of the more horrifying episodes of humanity’s recent past; haven’t we learned enough about all this?
Haven’t the Muslims learned enough about all this, from being on the receiving end of this kind of stupidity?
Sometimes I wish that the Western world (by which I mean “the civilized world,” including countries in the East that aren’t retarded) had the wherewithal to really commit to fighting. The extremists – and I hope they’re only extremists, and not part of an Islamic core – win because they’re willing to destroy everything in order to get what they want.
What the angry, hurt, childish part of me wants to see is a declaration that it all stops, now — and the price of not complying is severe. Like, really severe. Like, imagine what the Taliban did to a Buddhist temple, fifteen hundred years old, dynamiting it… except inverted, and applied to some site like… the Qabah. Or Mecca.
Imagine irradiating these holy sites, once and for all, converting one of them to a smoking crater. “You see? That is the force you’ve been trying to war against.” And it would totally screw over Islam, too, because Islam doesn’t really have a structure by which it could reformulate itself like Judaism did when the Temple was destroyed; how can one pursue a Hajj when the journey ends up at a site that’s strongly poisonous?
Of course, I don’t think this should be done. I’d fear even making the threat, because of what it would say about me.
And if you made that kind of threat, you’d have to be willing to follow through, because you know the extremists don’t believe the West has the guts to actually do something permanent… but they’re playing with a dragon, and they don’t seem to care.
Darwin would say that either their time is up, or the dragon’s not actually so tough after all.