Sunday, February 22, 2015

Allow people to fight under UN supervision.

The videos of executions by Islamic State terrorists are very professional and circulate all over the middle east. Beheading and burning alive are gruesome but dead people cannot suffer any more. Perhaps, even worse is to sell women of different faiths as sex slaves, girls under the age of 10 years fetching the highest price. The perversion of this act is hard to comprehend and the suffering of the victims is unimaginable. This is what Boko Haram did to schoolgirls it kidnapped in Nigeria last year. There is evidence that the ISIS, Al Qaeda and Boko Haram are learning from each other while competing in depravity. Yesterday a girl, described by witnesses as around 8 years old, was used as a suicide bomber in Nigeria. Last month two 10 year old girls blew themselves up in the same area. Children have been used as soldiers in many conflicts in the world. Tamil Tiger Chief, Prabhakaran's son was killed at close range. He was only 12 years old. Western countries are quick to condemn the " medieval savagery " when one of their citizens is killed but do not describe their own savagery when they use a drone to assassinate a 16 year old boy along with his teenage cousin and 5 other civilians, having dinner in an open air restaurant. We may recoil in horror at the brutality in the world today but human beings have always been experts at inventing hideous ways of torturing their enemies. Even in the ' good old days ' when there were no computers or televisions or airplanes the implements of torture were ingenious in inflicting excruciating pain. All this we know and it is not surprising. What is surprising is that videos of torture and killing are so attractive that they are being used for recruiting others. Knowing how they treat women it is particularly shocking when 3 teenage schoolgirls fled their homes in Britain and are believed to be on their way to Syria to become jihadi brides of ISIS fighters. However, the attraction to kill is not one sided. Western men are joining Kurds to fight against the ISIS, as in any Hollywood movie where the white guys are the goodies and the colored fellows are baddies. Perhaps it is natural for human beings to fight. Animals fight for food or a mate but we seem to kill for pleasure. In the olden days you had to fight with a sword or a spear and so had to get close to your enemy, which gave him equal chance to kill you. Even a king could be killed in combat but today killers are controlling the weapons from thousands of miles away. We should accept that people will fight, so let them. An island should be set aside. All those who wish to kill will be allowed to go there without passports. Only swords and daggers maybe used. The UN will act as referee. As the fighting will be confined to one island the rest of us will be safe. The only way we can ensure peace.

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