Saturday, 14 November 2015

You can't spell Furious without 'us'

This blog, as you know, is called Let Thy Words Be Furious - which I adapted from a friend's blog called Let Thy Words Be Few, which in turn is from Ecclesiastes 5:2 in The Bible. Now I'm not a religious person but I understand the importance of religion. Gone are the days of studying in RE and from the very first lesson one or two people saying it was pointless to learn as they didn't want to become vicars. Regardless of whether or not you're religious, only the most ignorant of persons will dismiss all religions as irrelevant and unimportant. Wherever in the world you are, all civilisations possess some form of religion or another, and indeed religion is often one of the building blocks that helped to form modern life as we know it.
Nowadays in a lot of countries religion has been forced to take a back seat to money, business, technology and the like - a more physical and immediate reward system for our actions.
Anyway, what I'm trying to get to is basically, you all by now will have heard of the Paris attacks that occurred on the evening of Friday 13th, a couple of days ago. 127 people dead, more than twice that number wounded. A nation in mourning for three days. 1500 troops deployed within their capitol city. A curfew in place for the first time since 1944.
Luckily the international community were quick to the rescue and barely had the first bombs gone off nearby the Stade de France than the Facebook design team were hard at work designing a nice Tricolore for concerned users to put over their profile pictures so they could appropriately express their horror at the atrocities.
As IS militants stormed into a packed Bataclan concert hall and gunned down more than eighty music-lovers with their AK-47s, Twitter users the world over dusted off #prayfor and bolted Paris to the end of it and hey presto! The perfect instrument for connecting the grieving masses across the world.
Before the dust had even settled from the last suicide vest, message boards from one end of the internet to the other were lighting up with condolences, theories and blame.
Now I'm going to skip past the bit where I have to explain to you that not all Muslims are terrorists, since I flatter myself that all my readership are intelligent enough to work that out for themselves. And not all terrorists are Muslim, either, obviously. A week or so ago we celebrated Bonfire Night in the UK, and Guy Fawkes is probably the most famous terrorist in British history. Although fictional, The Joker from The Dark Knight is another example of a terrorist who wasn't a Muslim (that we know of).
But lo and behold every time a monstrous act of mass murder such as this happens the ignoramus' of the country rise up like a bad dog trying to steal food from the kitchen table and in turn by smacked on the nose by the more reasonable members of society with a metaphorical rolled up newspaper.