It’s time to take serious action and destroy Isis
THE Manchester suicide bombing is yet another tragic terrorist act as a result of our weak democracies. This appalling, barbaric attack, for which Isis has claimed responsibility, makes us reflect on a few points.
It is pretty clear by now that Isis is the enemy of the democratic world, a kind of festering cancer which seems to concentrate in some regions of the Middle East, right now primarily in Iraq and Syria. A proper concerted campaign to destroy it once and for all is absolutely overdue. Why isn’t proper action taken against this plague that has poisoned and radicalised so many individuals, and is capable of claiming at will so many innocent lives on the four corners of this planet?
If Isis is the root of the most heinous evil the world has ever known, why haven’t all democratic nations of the world united in forming a super military power to invade the areas in Iraq and Syria where there are Isis concentrations, whether Assad, the Russians and other local splinter groups like it or not, on a massive, boots-on-the-ground, door-todoor operation to smoke these monsters out of existence?
Only in this way would radicalisation suffer a major setback and possibly become obsolete. CONCETTO LA MALFA,
Dublin 4.
It could happen here
WHILE scrolling through Facebook following the terror attack in Manchester, I came across a status which, as well as commiserating with those who lost loved ones, asked: ‘When will this end?’ And the answer is: never.
Not while Western governments engage in interventionist policies which leave power vacuums and arm militants. Not when we continue to ignore the rising potential of radicalisation with each passing generation of young Muslims, and the untold numbers arriving on European shores, for fear of being labelled as bigoted.
Not in an environment where we label anyone who does speak up, or questions the multiculturalism-at-all-costs mentality, as a ‘fascist’.
Not in societies which accept Sadiq Khan’s premise that the threat of terror attacks is ‘part and parcel of living in a large city’. Not when people with a highly selective view of European history continue to talk about colonialism and the Crusades, and forget the Ottoman empire, and Islamic and invasions of Europe going back to the Umayyad invasion of Hispania in 711.
This aggression, regardless of the disastrous foreign policy of major Western nations in the modern era, is nothing new.
It will never stop until we address those issues, and we realise that self preservation, and a sense of in-group loyalty, are not, in and of themselves, a great evil that must be resisted.
With a typical display of apathy and arrogance we will act as if it couldn’t happen here. But it will. Maybe not today, but in the coming years, just as it has across mainland Europe and in Britain.
And when it does, then all of the moral relativism and politically correct Orwellian newspeak in the world won’t offer any comfort, or any solution.
MYLES A MULLALLY, by email.
Condemn this horror
IT WOULD seem that religion has always offered those of a certain mindset an easy excuse to abuse, harass, maim and kill other people, and to do it – in their distorted thinking – for some higher purpose.
The reward for such evil will be theirs, they believe, in various versions of an afterlife.
Since all religions profess to be peace-loving and inherently good, it is hard to understand how hatred, barbarity and mass murder could possibly become part of any religious creed. And yet history informs us that these atrocities have happened again and again, and always in the name of a perceived deity.
It is worth remembering that ‘all that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing’. And most people, with or without a belief in a God, are inherently good and courageous enough to act.
In this present plague of religious fanaticism, it is imperative that leading Muslim clerics across the globe condemn this violence as anti-Muslim and against all the teachings of Islam, loudly, clearly and repetitively.
The rest of us would defend to the end the freedom of religious belief for Muslims, and any other religious group.
We would also accept that most Muslims are law-abiding, good people. But for those misguided fanatics who kill our children in the name of Allah, there can only be one response and one outcome.
G MADIGAN, Kilkenny.
Let’s honour Savita
THE new National Maternity Hospital should be called after Savita Halappanavar (with the approval of her family).
It will serve as a reminder to all who enter of their responsibilities for the lives of women – to protect and to give priority to the living person firstly rather than the potential life. Religious beliefs should be parked at the door.
This is the very least we owe to Savita, her husband and family, and the generations of expectant mothers who will be referred to this hospital for years to come.
HARRY MULHERN, Dublin.