SATURDAY BREAKFAST with TONY OKOROJI
Everywhere you look, hatred seems to have taken over the world. Whether it is in Ukraine, Sudan, Palestine or across the border in Lebanon, the slaughtering of thousands of innocent people is no longer shocking. It is an everyday thing. It has become normal. ‘Unknown’ gun men are running riot across Nigeria, killing and maiming at will. Even in America, lone young men with machine guns enter schools and shoot and kill innocent children. Human life is not sacred anymore. It can be snuffed out without any thought.
Two and half years ago, two hundred thousand Russian soldiers supported by thousands of tanks marched into Russia’s smaller western neighbour of Ukraine. Russia wants to take over Ukraine. It was initially thought that the Russian operation would end in days or weeks. The reality is that thousands have perished and continue to perish in a war with no end in sight.
Eight months ago, the perennial carnage between the Palestinians and the Israelis exploded again, this time, on a scale unknown in human history. On television, we are visited by the gory images of the mayhem caused by the massive Israeli military machine that appears ever ready to rip to shreds the women and children of Gaza and their brothers and husbands wherever they are found. Some Israelis and hundreds of innocent Palestinians, old women and mere children have been slaughtered like cattle in a never-ending war in which they are neither participants nor do they quite understand the reason. Massive buildings have come crashing down like a pack of cards as the structures that support human life are wasted. You see as the people are chased away from their homes like rodents and even on the road as they travel to nowhere in particular, they are bombed and bombed relentlessly. And this is happening in 2024?!
Meanwhile, the people responsible for this massacre and their friends justify this horrific killing field. They explain it with a lot of grammar on CNN and at the United Nations. Those who have the big guns also own the big loudspeakers and the sophisticated PR specialists. So, they activate their propaganda machinery to dominate the narrative. Nothing is true or false anymore. It is all a matter of how you coin it and spread it. So, they justify the carnage by announcing that they are defending their people! Of course, they have ready support from their friends with the veto power.
It does not matter that the innocent women and children so brazenly murdered are some other person’s ‘people’ and also children of God. We live in a world in which might is right and so the children of the slaughtered old women and the brothers of the murdered children, who probably will never have access to any significant military machine, will eventually turn themselves into suicide bombers and explode themselves on innocent civilians. And the cycle of blood continues.
Every crazy group in the world unleashing death on everyone around them can justify the killing. It is usually based on an ‘us against them’ mind set of some spiritual, tribal or political leader hungry for control who drums up the immense bitterness fuelled by some ancient bigotry or hatred that eventually turn the young, frustrated and restless into destructive machines.
Talk to any members of the vicious Boko Haram group or ISWAP that have unleashed fear and death across Nigeria or the other ethnic separatists that are emerging everywhere in Nigeria and they all have tribal or religious justification for their senseless killing of innocent men and women. Members of the Al Shabab gang who have gunned down many innocent people in East Africa are sure that they are doing God’s work. Whether it is Al Qaeda, ISIS, Boko Haram or even the IRA that kept Northern Ireland in commotion for a long time, they all beat their chests and assert justification for the innocent lives they have taken. Check out their justification and it is based on some skewed religious belief or some real or perceived injustice done to their ‘people’ today or in times gone by.
Nothing frightens me these days more than the seemingly unstoppable spread of fundamentalist religion or tribal indoctrination. Contrary to popular notion, this terrifying development is not limited to the Islamic faith. All over the world, there are self-styled prophets in religious garments or political warriors indoctrinating masses of people who they will unleash on the world and who would become cannon fodder in their war to rid the world of those who do not agree with them.
The ‘men of God’ preach love but the love they preach is not love for all children of God but love only for the people who think like them, pray like them or love like them. If you think differently, you are vermin which must be exterminated to create their pure world. They have convinced themselves that they are holy warriors fighting God’s battle and that they have the right to kill in the name of God.
But who are these people supposedly fighting in the name of God and killing the children of God? Who told them that God needs their help? Who informed them that they are more effective than God, the maker and giver of life, who if he chooses, can wipe out whole nations in a twinkle of an eye? How can a war be holy in which innocent children of God are killed?
Please, who gave these people the right to kill the children of God?
See you next week.
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