It hard for us as comfortable middle class people in a
stable, relatively peaceful first world nation to come to grips with the
unreasoning depths of religious hatred that are driving the Sunni-Shia war
currently going on across the Middle East.
But of course we too lived through this in the centuries of European Catholic-Protestant
purges and civil wars that spilled all the way into the last century in places
like Northern Ireland.
For all the desperate pleas from the Iraqi government, there
is little effective we can really do. A
few drone strikes and a few bombing runs by US planes are not going to make
much difference in the long run. This is
a whirlwind that has been sown for years, not only by sectarian government in
Iraq but by wealthy backers of the Sunni
and Shia causes in other nations, from Iran to Saudi Arabia, and by well-funded passionate
preachers on both sides who have raised a generation of hate-filled fighters. And now the devil has turned, and these nations are right to fear the hatreds they have unleashed.
Frankly, I think about all we can really do is try to keep
these religious thugs from spilling their terror into European and American
cities. And thugs they are, whatever religious banner they fight under. We too
have our religious bigots and thugs in this country, though thankfully not as
many. But it ought to be a lesson to us:
religions that are sure they are right and everyone else is wrong are always a potential
danger to national unity in the long run.
Posts
