There is no form of depravity that is not steaming around us these days. When you think you have seen it all, you are roused from sleep by some news that makes you believe that the world has gone completely insane.
The news that a young Nigerian lady in college in Sokoto State was set on fire by her colleagues and burnt to death in 2022, is not just shocking but gives depravity an entirely new colour. I thought that the news of the gruesome murder of Deborah Samuel was fake news and I waited for a denial to come forth. There has been none. I have read somewhere that some religious leaders are even demanding more of such extra-judicial killings to 'defend' their religion.
I have written before that hatred has taken over the world. Whether it is in the Middle East, East Africa or Nigeria, the slaughtering of innocent people and denial of their right to life is no longer shocking. It is now an everyday thing. It has become normal. 'Unknown' gun men are running riot across Nigeria, killing and maiming at will. Nothing is sacred anymore and no one is off limits.
In the last two weeks, the perennial carnage between the Palestinians and the Israelis exploded again. 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 Palestinian men, women and children. Some Israelis and hundreds of innocent Palestinians, old women and mere children are slaughtered like cattle in a never-ending war in which they are neither participants nor do they quite understand the reason. In Ukraine, there is a live horror movie going on.
Meanwhile, the people responsible for this massacre and their friends justify this horrific killing field. They try to explain it with meaningless grammar. They believe that it is right once it is done in the name of religion or the 'defence' of their people. 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 religion or their people!
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 now live in a world in which madness is right.
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 religious or tribal 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 beliefs 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. 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 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.
All of these '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 it be holy to murder an innocent child of God in cold blood?
See you next week.
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