Killers

                        The greatest killers in the history of this earth have been: 1. Natural disasters (tsunamis, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and giant meteors like the one that wiped out the dinosaurs 60 million years ago); 2. Pestilence (the 14^th century Black Death that killed up to half of some European countries’ populations, and the 1918-1919 influenza pandemic that claimed 50 million victims; 3. Disease (cancer, heart disease, malaria, tuberculosis, cholera, and the small pox that decimated Native-American peoples); 4. Famine (many examples, but the tens of millions starved by Stalin and Mao probably the most extreme); 5. War.

            Of these killers, war is the worst because war is a conscious and deliberate act. From the beginning of recorded history, men have warred on each other for any number of reasons: conquest, power, subjugation, revenge, independence, self-defense, etc. Yet, the most irrational cause of many of history’s wars has been religion and its inherent bias.

            Would there have been an invasion of Canaan had the Hebrews not felt entitled to the land as God’s Chosen People? Would there have been multiple Christian Crusades if the Holy Land had not been occupied by Muslims? Would Catholics and Protestants have fought each other in the Hundred Years War without claims and counterclaims to divine approbation? Would there have been genocide in Armenia or holocaust in World War II absent bias against Christians and Jews? Would we be having massacres today in the name of Allah?

            The jihadist murders in London on June 3^rd remind us that religious fervor and malevolence have coexisted hand in hand for millennia. These two contradictions have given us persecution, torture, Inquisitions, beheadings, and exterminations on a ghastly scale. But none of the world’s religious wars have been as tenacious and unrelenting as Islam’s war of conquest of the Infidel.

            The civilized world is in a quandary. What are we to do about a religion whose large majority of adherents are people who only wish to worship in peace guided by Quranic precepts handed down by a loving God, while a minority find justification for terror in the same scriptures? How can we effectively excise this cancer from our midst while political correctness and accusations of Islamophobia prevent us from condemning the carnage as radical Islamic extremism and taking the measures necessary to end it?

            That is the defining question of our age.