It is time to wake up or we would all be killed while we are sleeping, as was the fate of innocent students in Kenya
JUBAIL, SAUDI ARABIA: Is the attack on the Garissa University campus hostel in Kenya near the border of Somalia , on April 2, which left around 150 students dead and countless injured and seriously traumatised, going to be remembered in the same vein as the December 16, 2014 attack on the Army Public School in Peshawar? Maybe not, as I see no real sense of crisis and cohesiveness among the people of Kenya to get tough on eliminating terrorism from their country.
It appears that the response in Kenya will be the usual one: cordoning off important venues, issuing condemnation press releases, giving vows to crush terrorists with an iron fist, etc. Then everything will go back to normal till the next attack. The Westgate shopping mall attack has still not been erased from memory, and now this attack on a university tells the same story.
There are countless brainwashed people around us, who believe in ideologies that permit the killing of people of different faiths or those who do not share their sect/school of thought. Whether it is the Boko Haram in Nigeria, the Al-Shebab in Somalia, Kenya and other neighbouring countries, the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, the Taliban in Pakistan and Afghanistan, al Qaeda in the Arabian peninsula and North Africa — they all share the same ideology and the same religious/sectarian opponents.
The whole world, especially the Muslim world, needs to liberate itself from such destructive philosophies. There is nothing wrong with this approach; in fact, this would only be a repeat of what Christianity went through during the Middle Ages and afterwards. However, half-hearted efforts by individual governments and scholars are not going to do any long-term good — we have to strike at the root cause of the issue. Otherwise the mere killing of foot soldiers is of no use as new zombies are always ready to take the place of those who are killed. In fact, that is clearly evident from the large-scale recruitment the IS is doing in the West.
It is time to wake up. Otherwise, we would all be killed while we are sleeping ,as was the fate of the poor, innocent students in Kenya.
Masood Khan
Published in The Express Tribune, April 6th, 2015.
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