On Terrorism

As much as I would hate to admit it, the world is not at peace. It hasn’t been for a while, and it won’t be in a long time. There is so much transparent violence in the world today that we seem to forget about everything else that is good about it, but it is still hard to overlook the fact that there is a group of people that is actively trying to kill everyone else. It is incredibly difficult to justify the actions of any terrorist group out there simply because they are murdering innocent people for a cause that they see just. To benefit their own extremist society, they must eliminate everyone else that doesn’t follow it. This is a little hard to understand and very unsettling, but there is no doubt in my mind that something must be done about this situation. Considering that they are violating fundamental human morals that seems pretty universal, they need to be punished for what they have done. Individually. Not as a subgroup and all of the overlying groups that are associated with them. The problem with a terrorist group like ISIS is that they give a bad reputation to every other Muslim out there, and that is never going away any time soon. There are already people out there who think that Muslims are inherently bad people because they have a “false god”, and adding ISIS to that just makes things worse. It’s just hard to see someone as a human being when people have no interaction with them besides from what they hear from the news, and that in itself already has its own biases. It has to be apparent that these are other human beings that we are talking about, and treating them the same way as you would treat anyone else must be a constant. It’s a little hard to consider the members of ISIS as humans, too, but they are as human as anyone of us. And as humans, they have committed a crime that must be punished. Sending troops over to countries that support these terrorist organizations already sounds like a bad idea, but it’s the only option we have. There is no other way to fight an invisible threat besides looking for it. The only other thing that I wanted to say was that their terrorism was the product of religion, and if we don’t watch what we’re doing, we might fall under the same category towards other groups of people.

For all of the people who have suffered and died because of terrorism, I pray for all of you.

Keep reading: Envisioning A World Of Pacifism