You’ll Be HORRIFIED When You See What This Boy is Smiling About!…

 http://dcgazette.com/youll-horrified-see-boy-smiling/

Thomas Paine 02/21/2015

There is something about the joy of a child which is a universally uplifting thing.  It inspires in us a hopefulness: seeing that innocent, pure joy still exists in the world gives us a feeling that, no matter how bad things appear, the world is going to be okay after all.  Take the picture above of this smiling young Syrian boy.   A beautiful smile of pure joy that warms the heart.

A boy of about eight finds joy in many simple things.  Being reunited with loved ones after an absence, discussing his interests like comic books or action figures, or perhaps being surprised with a desired toy on his birthday.    For this young boy, the thing that is bringing such exuberance to the surface is something a bit more surprising.

This boy has just watched a man burned to death, live on the big screen provided by ISIS, surrounded by his entire community, which chanted “God is Great” while watching the man’s skin melt off to a soundtrack of swelling operatic background music covering the captured Jordanian Pilot’s tortured screams, before the subject of this communal celebration of God’s greatness was mercifully put out of his misery by a bullet to the head.  In the screen capture above, the boy is discussing his aspirations to burn people alive himself someday.

The very idea that this young child is so delighted by murder and torture is horrifying to us in the western world.   This is not something we can understand – the celebration of death and brutality is sickening, and smacks of an evil we like to pretend doesn’t exist, except in isolated cases which we personally are unlikely to encounter.   Building and maintaining a civilization such as ours requires a certain level of empathy and tolerance that allows us to respect our fellow man, and we require a certain level of security in person and property that allows us to engage in social and economic activities with a reasonable expectation that we will survive the day and be protected from untoward interference in the process of deciding our own fate and captaining our own ship.  Because our world is built on these qualities, which we largely succeed in committing to our own children from their earliest moments, the vast majority of us have qualities like empathy and compassion that make us want to assume the best about others and other cultures.   This single shocking picture should demonstrate exactly how wrong these assumptions are.

I don’t believe any reasonable, educated person would dispute the idea that different cultures influence the individuals that live inside them towards different social and emotional characteristics, and one born and raised steeped in a particular culture will unavoidably absorb these philosophies and social norms to which they are exposed from birth, and even if we desire to see cultures as neither good nor bad but different, we can probably agree that only through conscious decision and with some struggle later in life can one even begin to unwind exactly what those influences are and how deep they run, if they even care to at all – which most probably will not.

The question then becomes, what kind of culture produces eight year old boys that are delighted at the murder and torture of their fellow human beings, and aspire to engage in such torture and murder themselves?

Being compassionate and tolerant by nature is a fundamental characteristic of western civilization that has underpinned all our progress away from the brutal feudalism of the past towards the liberal representative forms of government most of us in the west enjoy today, and we desire to see every culture and religion as equal in benign or malignant properties.  We would like to believe that Muslims are no more likely to be violent than anyone else, and draw parallels between the excesses of other peoples in other times rather than believe that a large segment of earth’s population has been drawn into a malignant, retrograde belief system that extinguishes human potential everywhere it takes root.   But as painful as it is for us, we must confront the facts as they exist, not as we wish they were.  Every assumption we would like to make about Islam and Muslims is wrong.  This a culture we do not have the capacity to understand, and it is not limited to one slice, or one place.   The death worship and eagerness to use violence, the willingness to oppress fellow human beings, are all woven into the fundamental nature of the ideology.

One has only to do an image search for “child suicide bomber” to see thousands of pictures of children being groomed from birth to perform acts of violence even at the cost of their own lives.
Even the President of Egypt, a Muslim running a Muslim country, asks, “Perhaps the problem is the ideology?”  

And surely, there are “moderate” Muslims who view the Koran as a metaphor, and its commands to wage Jihad as a spiritual battle and not a physical one.  Perhaps they see the explicit commands to murder those that convert away from Islam, to stone adulterers and homosexuals, to conquer the infidels and make sex slaves of their women and children as anachronisms not meant for the modern age, even though this was the way Mohamed himself lived his life, and commanded his followers to do likewise.  One of his last acts was to behead approximately 600 Jews after their surrender, and his closest followers continued to spread Islam through war, murder, and enslavement right on up through the modern day, but perhaps there are some, even many, who can, through some mental transformations, actually turn Islam, which means submission, into a religion of peace apart from physical submitting of the entire earth to the brutal feudalism of Sharia law and the theocratic fascism of the Caliphate – which is, in the Koran, when there will finally be peace.

For the most part, these Muslims have been silent.  The majority either tacitly approve of what the “radicals” do, or the “moderates” by our standards are a small minority cowed into silence, and either way they are of no help or consequence in the growing conflict as the worst forms of this malignant ideology spread across the face of the earth.  Recently there seems to have been a growing internal movement to speak out and protest the more evil forms of Islamic Jihad, but one certainly wonders why it took this long for it to happen.

Then one sees that the norm in the Islamic world is in a different place than it is in the western world.  Example after example of the “radical” beliefs that are mainstream in Islam are easy to find, and our question of why this culture produces so many monsters must continue.