The Roads to Peace

The roads to peace are paths of war,
  The gentle dove will leave her scar.

The moral men to say the least,
  Will kill us all to get their peace.

The roads that lead to victories gained,
  Are filled with people full of pain.

Only our Creator knew,
  We’d kill so many to save so few.
 

The ongoing slaughter of civilians on both sides of the so-called “War on Terror” is disheartening. Again and again nefarious forces see fit to totally disregard innocent human life in pursuit of a vile agenda that few of us know and even fewer could understand. The fact that misguided violence only begets more violence is perhaps more disheartening, as it promises more of the ill-conceived policies and wrongheaded “Fatwas” that have proven so ineffective in both prosecuting the war on terror and ushering in the victory of the “Jihad.” If current events are any indicator of future developments, innocent civilians will continue to die for absolutely nothing.

This is a war being guided on both sides by self-righteous murderers whose motives and proclamations mirror each other. Each side sees God as being exclusively with them. That being the case, the restraint and judiciousness urged by Christian and Islamic theology to guide the execution of war is cast aside with wanton impunity. Each side manipulates a vulnerable public to create a climate that allows for the perpetuation and the inevitable escalation of the ongoing slaughter. Each side reserves the right to use the spectacle of indiscriminate violence to “Shock and Awe” the opposition, yet will deny that its tactics can be described as terrorism. Each side sees their civilian population as hapless, innocent victims, while the suffering innocent civilians on the other side are acceptable collateral damage.

There will never be any real progress in ending this terror war, until we realize that we have all become collateral damage, unacceptable collateral damage. That being the case, there is no they or we in this affair. We are they and they are we. When a child in New York never sees his mother again because she was crushed in a collapsed tower at the World Trade Center, we all have suffered an irreplaceable loss. When an impoverished family in Afghanistan is bombed from the face of the Earth by a misguided missile, something of our collective humanity is destroyed by the blast. When a child in Iraq is born with gross birth defects due to his mother’s exposure to depleted uranium, we have all been deformed. When London commuters fear ever again entering the underground, because of the ill-advised actions of a handful of desperate fanatics, their insecurity touches us all.

We, the collaterally damaged, will continue to exit in a state of dehumanizing loss, deformity, and insecurity until we rise up, unite, and refuse to support at any level the policies of leaders who continually fail to heed one of the surest of all political lessons: killing innocent civilians will never lead to a positive outcome for the transgressing party. This realization is the first meaningful salvo anyone could fire in a real war on terror. However, as long as we are not as moved by the suffering of innocent civilians anywhere as we are by the suffering of those close to us, it will be a salvo that remains unfired.

Reprint from Scattered Pictures: Reflections of An American Muslim:   http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004TZP8IG/ref=cm_sw_r_tw_dp_n60Iob1FRXCFX