I wanted to have a nice celebration blog about the SCOTUS legalizing marriage for all citizens, but world events have put a kibosh on that. Monsters and madmen acting on behalf of Daesh have indulged in three terrorist attacks, including two mass murders, in the last 24 hours and I feel compelled to talk about it, if only to offer my sincere condolences to the people whose lives or loved ones were lost during one of these nightmares.
Daesh is usually referred to as ISIS in Western countries, but I agree with France and will be calling the terrorist group Daesh from now on. As Zeba Khan pointed out:
“The term “Daesh” is strategically a better choice because it is still accurate in that it spells out the acronym of the group’s full Arabic name, al-Dawla al-Islamiya fi al-Iraq wa al-Sham. Yet, at the same time, “Daesh” can also be understood as a play on words — and an insult. Depending on how it is conjugated in Arabic, it can mean anything from “to trample down and crush” to “a bigot who imposes his view on others.” Already, the group has reportedly threatened to cut out the tongues of anyone who uses the term … [furthermore] by reframing how we talk and think about these violent extremists, we can support the chorus of Muslim scholars who are intellectually pushing back on Daesh’s religious claims, the scores of Muslims around the world who have publicly rejected the group, and, ultimately, the silent majority of more than 1 billion Muslims who are as likely to reject the heinous actions of Daesh as we are.”
There was a recent demand by Daesh leaders that their brainwashed little psychos increase terrorist murderous attacks “for God” during Ramadan, which is quite like the KKK calling for the deaths of more little girls in churches over Christmas “for God”. It is abhorrent to any decent person, and it is particularly vile to someone who is seeing a familiar religious ideology perverted and twisted beyond recognition. In response, the brain washed little psychos have blown up a Mosque in Kuwait during prayer service (killing eight people), attacked a factory in France (killing one person), and now have opened fire on a beach resort in Sousse Tunisia, killing at least thirty six people – including Tunisians, Britons, Germans, and Belgians.
Tunisia is not a particular hotbed of radicals, but the small number of Daesh and Daesh-like groups have been fomenting violence since democratic elections after 2011 supported “moderate Islamist Ennahda party take power and the secularist Nidaa Tounes government won a parliamentary poll in October”. How dare moderate Muslims got to the polls and vote for moderates! Nothing to do but murder innocent tourists and tourism workers who have nothing whatsoever to do with the elections in Tunisia!
As a result of the monstrosity perpetrated by Daesh, profoundly Islamophobic statements and opinions have been popping up in social and popular media. These statements, which conflate the handful of terrorist bottom-feeders with the one billion Muslims who are harming no one, scare me almost as much as the terror attacks. This kind of sweeping hatred for a cultural group based on a religion, as though that cultural group was an inferior “race”, was popularly used against the Jews before WWII. I would prefer that another attempted genocide not happen and conceptualizing a billion individuals as ‘animals’ is a genocide waiting to happen.
Meanwhile, in America the right-wing antigovernment fanatics who are at least culturally ‘Christian’ are killing twice as many of their fellow citizens in terrorist attacks than are Muslim jihadists, but their actions not being conflated with Christianity as a whole. Nor should they be, since their actions are completely counter to the tenets of Christianity. I would like to see Muslims given the same courtesy in this matter regarding their far-right radical terrorists.