Abounding Misery
The psychopaths are at it again. Not that we've had much of a reprieve. If things quieten down in some areas of the geography, they have the habit of popping up with ferocious invigoration elsewhere. What it is about the region that produces crop after crop of dedicated Islamist terrorists isn't that much of a mystery one supposes. The culture of grievance, revenge, victimization, and dedicated psychopathy are relics of another time; part and parcel of a hard-bitten and often hard-done-by tribal mentality, leavened with religious righteousness.Little time is expended on searching for logical solutions to often intractable-seeming problems. As though the cerebral cortex was genetically impaired from away back in the mists of time. Palaver is trumped by violence each and every time a catastrophe strikes. And if it doesn't present as a catastrophe initially, then it can be transformed into one quite handily. In the Middle East, if a country isn't ruled by an iron-fisted despot it's ripe pickings for an avaricious and more powerful neighbour.
Here's cultured, cultivated Lebanon, with its easy-going way of life, its oasis of a geography, its creatively artistic, entrepreneurial spirit and multifaceted population. They've made a feature of getting along, but events overtake them and they succumb to the same violent anger brought upon them by the same malignant forces who would, if they could, visit destruction in other, more guarded countries. The Islamist paramilitaries encouraged and armed by sources unfriendly to the country have free rein to inject as much uncertainty and confusion as they will.
Now, Fatah al-Islam, using a Palestinian refugee camp as civilian cover for their vicious lawlessness promises to fight to the death. Fearing the new munitions provided to the Lebanese army by the United States in this most recent, unbalanced conflict, they promise "If they use unconventional weapons against us, we will respond with unconventional attacks everywhere," according to their spokesman. What, is Syria/Iran ready to supply them with nuclear weapons, already?
They ensconce themselves in the midst of a densely-populated people somehow eking out a living, awaiting the impossible return to a land they fled. The Islamists, burning with the overwhelming need to fight "the Jews, the Americans and their loyalists". Yet, disconcertingly, it is the Jews, the Americans and their other loyalists - all of Western society - that has ensured their existence, by deferring to an enlightened frame of reference that confers equality upon all of nature's creatures and demurs against destroying those of her creatures that have succumbed to the fatal disease of incurable misanthropy that will be satisfied only by dealing in death.
The cycle repeats itself, time and again. The hostility, the rhetorical defiance, the deadly attacks, the incorrigibly determined insistence on serving death notices on any and all who defy the authority of this version of Islamic theocratic deterministic conquest. Where there is no solution, there is no end. While one side dehumanizes itself consummately, the other remains too humane to resort to the only solution that appears available in extinguishing this deadly disease of inspirational hatred.
This is not a game of chess. It is, however, yet another catastrophic event in a series of such seemingly unavoidable events.
Labels: Middle East, World Crises
posted by Pieface @ Sunday, May 27, 2007
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