Genocide is extreme ethnic cleansing, a holocaust…remembering the Armenian genocide perpetrated by the Ottoman Empire!

Egypt’s persecution of Christians, once controlled by a brutal dictatorship, is now sanctioned by an equally brutal military junta.  ISIS’ persecution, at best forced conversions of Christians to Islam, and at worst their bloody beheadings, are in the news, the stories often accompanied by gruesome YouTube videos.   A recent CBS Sixty Minutes’ segment portrayed the plight of Christians in Iraq, ironically more protected under Saddam Hussein, once persecuted by al Qaeda in Iraq, and now threatened by ISIS.  Iran’s persecution of Christians has only diminished because the Ayatollahs want to remove the West’s sanctions.  Recently, Christians in Kenya (most of the 147 victims) were separated from Muslims and shot exection-style by Somalian al Qaeda members.  Where Christians and Muslims once coexisted, Christians are now in the crosshairs of radical Islam.

Religious intolerance isn’t new, of course.  It’s inherited from the ancients who followed the doctrine “My tribe…good; your tribe…bad!”  It’s inherited from that long evolutionary development of ape men and women mimicking their gorilla and chimp cousins (ever see one group of chimps wage war on another?—geez, they seem almost human!).  In the Age of Enlightenment philosophers tried to argue against ALL discrimination, but religious discrimination was so ingrained that our Founding Fathers made religious freedom #1 in the Bill of Rights.  (Never mind that it’s now being used to discriminate in Indiana and elsewhere—until we modify the Bill of Rights to bring it up to date and prohibit discrimination for sexual orientation, this will continue.  One right being used to attack another is ironic, at best, and dangerous—we consider freedom of speech a right, but you still can’t yell “Fire!” in a theater, because that tramples on other rights.)

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How do you detect and thwart a deranged killer?  Except for close family and friends, I have no problem when someone, desperate, anguished, and out of his or her mind, commits suicide.  Yes, it’s sad they couldn’t get some help (maybe they tried).  In the new Chen and Castilblanco mystery, Family Affairs (going well, by the way), Sgt. C takes time from his niece’s case, where he’s moonlighting, to work on the detective duo’s caseload.  He proves a man who was allegedly pushed in front of a subway train actually committed suicide.  Turns out the man had pancreatic cancer.  The big cop comments that he might have done the same.

Solo suicides, while sad and perhaps evidence for negligent care in our medical system, fundamentally affect only one person, by definition.  Sure, family and friends might wonder if they or the system could have done better by that mentally ill person, but the successful suicide in this case isn’t killing other innocent victims.  How that terrible decision morphs into mass murder must be case dependent, but, when it does, thousands can suffer.

Such was the case of the German co-pilot who set the autopilot of that Germanwings commuter jet on a hundred foot altitude.  His suicide, if not motivated by terrorism (there’s no indication it was), has a similar effect on the friends and families of the passengers in that doomed flight.  It’s clear he hid his mental illness from Lufthansa, or so they claim—it’s debatable whether airlines do enough to prevent these six-sigma events (the lawyers are already comforting those friends and families, I bet).  His actions were deliberate too, tearing up notes from doctors and prescriptions.  Did he have paranoid schizophrenia?  Did his depression cause him to see all human beings as his enemy?  Did he hear voices telling him to go out in a blaze of media glory?  We might never know what was going through his mind.

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[I apologize to my friends on Facebook, where I usually share these posts.  Facebook has made it impossible to share.  You can follow me on Google+.  I recommend cancelling your Facebook accounts and creating Google+ accounts, if you haven’t already.]

While drone surveillance and attacks and Special Ops are a better military solution than “boots on the ground,” there’s no doubt that ISIS, al Qaeda, the Taliban, and other terrorist groups will only be defeated if the countries affected wage effective war against these militant Islamic groups.  The key word is “effective.”  Remember that ISIS received a big boost when poorly trained Iraqi forces ran for their lives, often in their underwear—equipment left behind, much of it American, is now in ISIS’ hands.  That has to stop.  Western presence is justified there for equipping and training local forces so that these fiascos aren’t repeated.

That said, the West isn’t doing nearly enough to hurt these groups where it’s most effective—financially and personnel-wise.  I’m reminded of World War Two where indifference, peaceniks, and anti-Semitic sentiments conspired to give Hitler a free hand in Europe.  We don’t need another Vietnam, Iraq, or Afghanistan, but we shouldn’t bury our heads in the sand either and hope Islamic nations will destroy the extremists in their midst without our help.  The recent Twitter action, for example, while a good start, is a drop in the bucket.  The West needs a concerted effort to stop all finances flowing into the illegal insurgent groups.  Funds must be frozen and their propaganda machine must be dismantled.  We can be good at that, and it’s the least we can do.

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[Note 1.  Like all my blog posts, even my ones on writing, this is op-ed.  As such, I get first crack at expressing my opinions on things—I have lots of them, but you can only write so much!  But, because they are only my take on a current event or news item, you might not agree, so anyone can comment, even Mr. Putin!  Note 2.  I apologize to my friends on Facebook, where I usually share these posts.  Facebook has made it impossible to share.  You can follow me on Google+.  I recommend cancelling your Facebook accounts and creating Google+ accounts, if you haven’t already.]

How many of these conspiracy theories do you believe?  Apollo never landed on the moon.  Bill Clinton had Vince Foster murdered to cover-up an affair between Hillary and Foster.  LBJ arranged for the murders of the Kennedy brothers.  Communist sympathizers hired John Hinckley to kill Reagan.  Putin ordered the Russian SVR to poison ex-spy Alexander LItvinenko.  Argentine President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner ordered special prosecutor Alberto Nisman murdered.  Putin ordered the Russian FSR to hire someone to assassinate opposition leader Boris Nemtsov.

Some of these raise eyebrows, of course, because they trend toward UFOs and little green men.  The two that might cause some people to nod sagely are the Putin and De Kirchner references.  Why?  Because both Argentina and Russia have long-standing and violent fascist traditions associated with oppressive oligarchies.  No matter what leaders of these countries say, you’ll always have doubts.  While the U.S. isn’t necessarily beyond hanky-panky like this, we find it harder to believe, although fiction writers like me can make such things seem real (Clancy’s advice in the quote you see in the banner of this website).  Everyone loves a good conspiracy in mysteries and thrillers, but just maybe Argentina and Russia are a little too real?

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France has declared war on jihadist extremists.  The rest of Europe is at war with them too.  And we are at war with these radicals.  Indeed, the modern world should be at war with them.  There’s nothing “modern” about this fanatical thinking, this barbaric insult to true Islam and false ideology.  It’s old thinking, a fanatical vision of how much better it would be to return to the simpler days of the early Middle Ages, of Ayatollahs and warrior chieftans, feudal lords and lowly serfs, a social structure built on the primitive foundations of theologically justified despotism.  Never mind the ironies—terrorists using the internet and high-powered modern weapons to further their cause while spewing their retrograde ideologies eschewed by good people everywhere, including truly devout Muslims.  Terrorist minds are dark, evil minds, living in dark lives and thinking dark, fanatical thoughts.

But France and the rest of the world face a conundrum: how can we preserve the freedoms we enjoy and what many others yearn to enjoy when faced with these practitioners of evil?  What is the right balance between a civilized society and thugs who would tear it down?  Modern living also breeds frustration, especially among poor and exploited immigrants, and France has perhaps ignored that for too long.  Out of frustration and despair with one’s lot in life, some people are bound to lash out—it’s only human nature.  When they become violent, they can use any religion or ideology to justify their actions, a dangerous rationalization, a contagious mental virus that could destroy the rest of humanity.  How many of our freedoms do we surrender to prevent the spread of this contagion?

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Recent history, let’s say 1950s on, hasn’t been kind to our stupid foreign policy mantra that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend,” especially in the Middle East.  We created the Shah in Iran as a favor to the Brits, toppling a democratically elected regime there, and we’re still paying for it.  We armed al Qaeda to fight the Russians in Afghanistan, and we’re still paying for it.  We “saved” Iraq from Saddam Hussein, who, for all his faults, held all that country’s factions together.  Dubya, Cheney, and Rumsfeld, in their greedy little minds, only saw dollar signs from Iraqi oil.  They really did nothing to contribute to democracy or a stable government there.  And we’re still paying for it!

While my last post on this subject encouraged Obama to bomb the hell out of ISIS everywhere possible, including Syria, and a second beheading only underlines the need to stop these mad dogs, it’s high time we rethink our foreign policy mantra.  Its corollary seems to be “When you choose friends that way, watch out!”  Yes, air strikes are needed against ISIS now.  No doubt about it.  But there are other priorities to worry about.

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I’m not reminiscing about Joe Cocker and his hard rock music.  If you remember those times, you know that music was several dBs above the pain threshold.  So is this post because I’m referring to ISIS and their spokesman who beheaded the American reporter.  (Always a spokesman and never spokeswoman—women are just property in the radical Muslim world, especially for members of ISIS, who simply see them as breeders that give birth and suckle little terrorists who grow up to join the cause.)  They’re the mad dogs (aka rabid dogs without any human qualities at all) and the knife-wielder spoke with a British accent.  Let me analyze these two points.

Ironic, isn’t it, that James Foley had been reporting on the atrocities of the Assad regime in its murderous campaign against Syrian rebels?  We can ask: are there any legitimate rebels left in Syria?  Maybe.  Another journalist was just released by an al Qaeda affiliate (poor al Qaeda: they’re #2 on the brutality list now).  No one seems radical enough for ISIS.  Was Assad prescient, knowing this was coming?  ISIS clearly wants to create a tyrannical, fundamentalist theocracy, the murderous violence of its leaders making Iran’s Ayatollahs look like Mother Teresas.  The only solution that works against these mad dogs is their own medicine—beheadings are medieval, though, so bullets to the head will do.  That’s the only thing that will work.  You put a rabid mad dog down…permanently.

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[Note from Steve: I hope you enjoyed the series of classic posts on writing.  It gave me a welcome respite from my own writing and some much needed R&R via casual reading—I read four novels, finishing the last yesterday (speed reading and touch typing were my most useful courses taken in high school).  So, it seems reasonable to return to my op-ed posts with a highly controversial topic, the Palestinian situation.  I’ve tried to be very fair here because neither side owns the moral high ground.  Moreover, it’s a freakin’ tragedy that it’s happening.  Read on….]

We’ve seen it in Northern Ireland.  We’ve seen it in Yugoslavia.  We’re seeing it in Iraq.  And it seems like we’ve seen it forever in Palestine.  Some pundits say that old hatreds will die when the old timers who do the hating die off.  Maybe…sometimes.  Other times, it’s best to separate the opposing groups (Iraq shows there can be more than two).  That seemed to work in Yugoslavia after much loss of life and bitterness that still remains.  The U.S. government tends to act cautiously in such circumstances (in Rwanda, it never did), even though many times it’s culpable of participating in their creation.

What’s clear is the following: while the parties doing the hating might migrate to certain fanatical ideologies (the adjective isn’t even necessary, of course, because all ideologies are fanatical—some more; some less; and some reducing to brainwashing) and might attract supporters from non-participating groups as a result, ideology isn’t really the issue.  The heat of the hate is, in fact, in direct proportion to how long that hatred has been around.  While ideologies come and go (they are often debunked by rational people who recognize their severe limitations), ethnic and racial hatred hangs around.

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There’s a lot of hype from multiple sources, each source putting its own spin on the problem.  From Moscow and Ukrainian separatists “Who?  Me?” to Ukraine’s “It’s them,” plus the Russian sympathizers limiting access to the crash site and carting off bodies to freeze them in railway cars (why? what are they hiding?), media outlets around the world echo the hype.  What do we know?  What are the facts?

Fact one: A passenger jet packed with 298 people was targeted by a missile; 298 innocents died.  That’s mass murder by anyone’s definition.  Fact two: In a briefing at the Pentagon two weeks earlier, a NATO commander informed publicly that Russians had placed vehicle-mounted SAMs in eastern Ukraine, the part controlled by separatists, most of them ethnic Russians.  Moreover, the Russians were training the separatists how to shoot the deadly weapons that can cover any altitude where jets can fly.

Fact three: On Monday, they shot down a Ukrainian troop transport flying at a “safe altitude,” one far above 10 kft, the altitude range of shoulder-carried missiles, proving effectively that Russian SAMs were in use by the rebels and that no altitude was safe.  Fact four: The Russian separatists in the Ukraine are hindering the investigations at the crash site and putting the victims on ice in boxcars.  Where are the boxcars going?  Probably Moscow.  Family and friends of the victims will never have closure, an obscene gesture by Putin and his thuggish sycophants.

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